A slow to fruit, gentle summer (January working bee)

At another productive Albert Street working bee, Ian meets Mara while ridding the apple trees of wooly aphids.

Mara and Nick offload Mara's gift of horse manure.

Woody catches up with Alison, weeding the front perennial patch.

After pulling out the old broadbean shoots, Koen and Ruby address the errant grape vine.

Kirsten and Zero work in the seedling patch.

Sylvain thins the down-the-back bed while Nick attends to the materials for the compost.

Earlier in the week mysterious cockerels turned up in the garden (we think painted by Cat).

Woody heads towards the compost, an adventure unto itself.

Tim and Sylvain weed, thin and manure the down-the-back bed.

Zeph and Woody play rumble between spurts of helpful production.

Ruby, Ivan, Fiona and Rose clean up the east facing wall ready to replant.

Others who came to the working bee (but were not captured in a pic) include: Fe, Luna, Fab, Tom, Patrick and Ashar. We need a working bee photographer! Get in touch if that role interests you.

23 community participants contributed to this month's working bee. Thank you to all who help keep the gifts flowing in the community. See you next bee on Saturday February 11.

Pruning maintenance plan for Rea Lands park

Local pruning maestro, Gael Shannon, has been working on an orchard maintenance plan for Rea Lands Park over the past few years and today Patrick met Gael to go over the plan and ask her questions about how best to look after the many various fruiting trees including peaches, quince, almonds, figs, cherries, apricots, feijoa, plums, hazelnuts, citrus, berries and nectarines. Stay tuned for the maintenance plan drawing, which we'll publish here shortly.

Gael Shannon and Patrick Jones discuss fruit tree maintenance at Rea Lands Park today.

It is because of the generous contributions of local folk like Gael that our community food network can grow and prosper. We have much local knowledge in our area and many generous folk to pass this knowledge on. Tap into this knowledge, learn, give and get involved with one of the community gardens. If you want to be kept up to date with our regular working bees, workshops and other food related business, email us and ask to go on the mail out list, otherwise check in with our facebook page or keep an eye out for the chalk board at the Albert St garden (beside the library).

How does your garden grow?

Today a group of year 8 students from Daylesford Secondary College had an excursion to Rea Lands Park. As a DCFG rep, Patrick met the students on site and gave them a rundown of the park's history and a plant-by-plant tour of what's currently growing there and what a political act it is to take responsibility for one's own food.

It was a perfect spring day and the park was buzzing with colour,

love,

flute playing canines,

and chubby cherubs.

From Rea Lands Park the tour continued on to the Albert Street garden

where the students tried and tasted everything in sight.

They were particularly enamoured by the chocolate mint growing in the bath at the front. It's perfect steeped in boiling water and then drunk chilled on a warm arvo.

Have you tried it yet?

Some dates for your diaries

DCFG is conducting a productive gardens tour by foot next Saturday, 2 June as part of the Good Life Festival. We leave from the Albert Street community garden. It is a free event, all welcome; a 2-3 hour walk visiting three productive backyard gardens.

The beautiful persimmon fruits behind the library are turning colour and nearly ready for picking. Persimmons are best eaten almost bletted, in other words very, very over ripe.

Peter O'Mara's buzzy sign has attracted many bags of leaves since the last working bee. We'll be able to conduct another compost workshop on Saturday June 9, the next working bee.

Speaking of which we need to attend to some weeding and composting at the Rea Lands Park community garden. So keep an ear/eye out, next working bee (June 9) might be held at Rea Lands, which is where we'll conduct the composting workshop.