Community Garden

Cooroy Community Gardens

The New Cooroy Community Gardens;

Mission: To develop and manage Community Gardens that offer a place for local people to meet together to learn and share skills in growing and enjoying plants; to create demonstration sites for living and consuming in a sustainable manner, following the principles of earth care, people care and fair share.

volunteer gardening

Community Garden

People are starting to catch on to volunteering a few hours of their time at the community gardens in Yandina. It’s a really lovely experience for these people as gardening and propagating has never been so much fun. Working together in a group is such a social occasion as well as a learning experience. Permaculture gardening is quite different from conventional gardening and these folk are experiencing this new concept by doing it hands on. Chopping and dropping, feeding the chooks with garden waste and collecting seed and propagating material is all part of the day as well as sharing a cooked lunch from the garden. We have experienced many dry summers but this has not deterred the growth in a Permaculture garden. We don’t water our gardens, yet the growth is phenomenal! It’s hard to keep up with all this rampant growth! This is the secret of successful gardening with very limited water. Grow your mulch where you need it is one of Permaculture’s catch cries. Volunteers will discover how Permaculture principles work simply by being there and by being involved. It isn’t difficult to grow your own food with restricted water use, and marginal soil can also be built up to become productive living soil. Permaculture really does have a lot of the solutions you might be looking for. Why not come around and try this garden for size and see what you might gain from the volunteering experience? 41 Farrell St, Yandina Sunshine Coast, QLD. Open on Tuesday from 8 am- 2pm for volunteer gardening.

Growing people

Community Garden

A community garden does more than just grow food. Whenever a group of people get together to garden, there is some great relationship building going on as well. As I’m the one to oversee the projects and activities, I can see some marvelous opportunities for growing people as well as growing food in the gardens. Take Tuesday a couple of weeks ago for instance. A group by the name of ‘Spiral’ introduced some of their people and their carers along for a tour of the gardens. The people in their care ranged in various degrees of being mentally challenged. On their arrival we all sat around the picnic table having some morning tea. It was a wonderful opportunity to involve some of our regular volunteers to join in with these special visitors. A couple of the ladies joined us at the picnic table to chat with the people and what I observed really moved me. These two ladies showed me qualities of themselves that I had not noticed before. The way they interacted with these folk was one of great compassion and assertiveness. There was some real positive banter and relationship building going on. We all enjoyed ourselves! We look forward to their next visit to the gardens where they will interact more with the volunteers and involve themselves with the garden activities. Another observation I made was that of the attitudes of our younger people that work in the gardens. There was some demonstrative protesting amongst them at first but after their visit there was a change of attitude. The conversation certainly reflected it and we all realized how vulnerable we really are. Another conclusion that I can make from this experience is that we need to be our brothers’ keeper after all! If we can learn to truly care for others in the community, we can all help ourselves and the environment in the process.

Cooking with a solar oven

Community Garden

If you are seriously concerned about the long dry spells we are experiencing, then there is no better way to make it rain than by ordering your new solar oven! After months of relentless hot and sunny days; perfect conditions for cooking in a solar oven, the rains finally arrived. Not that we are complaining mind you, as this nifty little box has even proven itself in slightly overcast weather. At the community gardens at Yandina, we are always looking forward to our lunches where most of the ingredients are picked fresh from the garden. There are more and more people joining us from the community and all look forward to a bit of a natter, eating and drinking cups of tea. Lunch is usually accompanied by some cake or other baked delectables brought along by some of the ladies. Not to be outdone however, we’ve even had some beautiful banana cakes baked in our new solar oven from bananas grown at the gardens. How good is that? So far we’ve had success at cooking rice and pasta in the solar oven plus an assortment of greens and eggplants. It’s truly amazing what a solar oven is capable of. The limitations are quite evident when operating under less than ideal conditions as with the overcast weather we are experiencing now. Forward planning is essential otherwise the volunteers will become exhausted with starvation if the lunches are overtime! This adjustment to a new way of cooking is a reflection of how we need to be flexible with the climate change issues we are facing. If we can adapt to new ways of going about our daily business by taking on changes with a sense of challenge and anticipation, then we can survive our way into the 21st century.