Yesterday our group met at the beautiful Fern Avenue community garden to chat about our gardens, ask each other questions, share seeds, seedlings, excess produce, ideas, laughs, stories and a snack.
Our gatherings are very informal. We set a date, someone sends an email reminder and then we just turn up on the day with our seeds or whatever else we want to share.
Somehow we seem to arrive with a box of our give-aways and go home with 2 boxes of goodies to go in our kitchens and gardens.
We bought home lots of pumpkin plants from Kath's. They are self sown and all have been from seedsavers pumpkin seeds of Queensland blue and butternut she grew last year.
Deb bought some wonderful Tangelos from her farm, Cath made a delicious chutney which we enjoyed with crackers, Ting made steamed Taiwanese beetroot rice cakes, Erica bought fresh curry leaves from her tree, we took some lemongrass, lime balm and buttercrunch lettuce seedlings, Viv bought different tomato plants, there were lots of seeds to share and stories of pruning, garden bugs, watering and gardening in pots.
Chook arrived with dear little Peter and her soon to arrive bub seedsaver.
Richard from Diana's last gardening course arrived and told us all about how he is using newspaper to stop water evaporation in foam boxes, he is planting in, to make a roof garden.
Just as we plant seeds we have saved and wait to see what pops up, so our group just appears from their own gardens and all sorts of ideas and experiences just pop up.
It was a lovely spring day, if you want to visit Adelaide, spring is the season to see all the bright rainbow colours of our gardens.
Sometimes people are not interested in our crimson okra, or what's happened to our lemon tree, or why we do not use pesticides, or our discovery of Ting's stinging nettle cakes or saving water in barrels, or Patties foraging, or the 100 varieties of garlic Patrick grew this year, or how to graft fruit trees, or Veggie gnomes new chickens.
But when we seedsavers gather, everyone is interested what is going on in our gardens and what we are growing and harvesting. Suddenly there is so much we want to say and do and share with each other before we head off home with new ideas and new things to grow.
In our world, where many people are not interested or too busy to grow their own food, it is a lovely experience to gather with organic gardeners who want to, stay in tune with the earth and the seasons, prepare GOOD SOIL, grow GOOD FOOD, save GOOD SEEDS, eat ORGANIC FOOD, and live the GOOD LIFE!
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4 comments:
Sounds like a lovely gathering! Thanks for the write-up, Maggie!
I am drooling over Deb's tangelos!
We shall have to have some lazy Sunday afternoon gatherings for all you folks who work during the week.
Yep! Deb grows the best fruit ever.
Well I have had my tea break, back to the garden now.
I am so proud to be a member of our great seedsavers group....it is the envy of everyone I have met all over the world and I look forward to seeing you all again before too long. Save some stuff for me!!
Did little chook arrive?
Anybody knows?
^^
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