Meet one of my favourite local grassroots groups and check a new project that keep my hands on the soil!.
These photos are from the start of winter, when we launched Garden Wisdom Garden.
Bayside Food Swap is a group of local gardeners, they get together once a month, to have a tea and share tips, knowledge, what they are doing in their gardening spaces. Each meeting is in a different garden, this way they create community and neighbours can see what each household is growing. I think it's an excellent way of grassroots organisation, opening the backyards to the community and share interests, stories, passion and knowledge.
The session was hosted by Karen Pohlner at her garden. One of the stories from that day was an "aerial" pumpkin, the vine crawl all the way to the lemon tree and decided to grow in left side of the tree where is shaded, cool and well supported by a strong branch. This one, was one of the last pumpkin we harvested early winter, and was 6.5 kilos!. Yesterday we cooked this pumpkin, check the next post the result. Of course I am keeping those special seeds for next season.
A bit of history, personally, I met this group through a local gardener: Karen Pohlner, she was very active in the community in Brighton East when I was developing the RAW Urban Farm, she was always supporting us with materials, seedling she sow, with ideas and referring her community to our project. By then, she invited us to participate in this meetings.
One year later, after that experience here I am with Karen, hosting the Bayside Food Swap, as a team collaboration. I always loved the space and I use to called "an edible oasis".
During the session we show how we continue to maintain the straw garden and how we re-installed the greenhouse, we talked about the baby brassica's we grew in punnets and how we grew the asian greens and leafy green in poly boxes and then moved them to the garden. We also talked about our peas walls.
In the picture we can see the gorgeous homegrown produce was shared during the meeting.
During our session at Bayside Food Swap, the amazing network of Transition Town Bayside brought the amazing seed library, initiative is keeping our local seeds in our community, you also can collaborate donating your own little packages.
That day, we got plenty of green leafs, jerusalem artichoke, lemons, limes, seedlings.
From the shared produce we found funky veggies,. I got a lemon that want to be a bird, and Dany found a jerusalem artichocke that want to be an echidna.
"Garde Wisdom"
Since I have been gardening with Karen, spending lots of time with our gardneing gloves on, deep conversations emerged and a concept was calling us: "Garden Wisdom", every time we garden, we learn. Every time we work with the soil, we feel deeply connected with the space and get life lessons that make us, reflect about nature and life, principles we apply to our personal life and dreams.
Garden Wisdom is the name of this great garden located in the southern suburbs and you can visit us the next time we host the Food Swap Bayside.
Welcome to garden wisdom, a permaculture space, where spirituality is our foundation, where nature leads and we listen. Welcome to Garden Wisdom a space that keep us inspired and grounded!
In the picture Karen Pohlner, amazing Jozie, and me.
Keep gardening to change the world!
-Ninna Mar
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