Just can’t get enough

The CERES annual appeal has put out the urgent call for your help this year. Necessarily a financial crisis tends to take a lot of attention and it’s easy to forget there are still amazing things happening at CERES every week.

Up the Merri Creek at Joe’s Market Garden on Thursday the weeding crew (that’s them above) were hard at work helping CERES’ farmers clean row after row of bok choi, lettuce and coriander. 

There’s an obvious pay-off volunteering at Joe’s of free produce and learning organic market gardening skills from seriously talented farmers but more than that, there are the social and nature connections that people, many who are new Melbourne, take home each week from this unique garden on the Creek.

Now, some good mushroom news for a change.  Down at the Terra Wonder Playspace the Fungi Express (AKA the old red train) which is now housed in a giant sculptural rotting log, has sprouted some beautiful mushrooms of its own. In keeping with Terra Wonder’s celebration of soil life the fungi are helping the log symbolically decompose back to the Earth.

Spawning all this was sculptor and scrounger extraordinaire, Nick Curmi, and his team who rescued old satellite dishes, BBQ lids, pool sand filters and lengths of steel pipe, artfully forming them into several species of towering fungi.

Over at the CERES School of Nature and Climate, as well as the thousand or so school children learning hands-on biodiversity, recycling, energy and cultural lesson this week, a Permaculture Design Course class graduated after 100+ hours of learning, hands-on design work and transformative thinking.

For more two decades a dynamic group of CERES trainers have been helping rewire people’s minds with this incredible set of thinking tools that leaves you never seeing the world in the same way again.

Now that it’s bloody freezing all of a sudden the Fair Wood team are delivering cages of Wood4Good’s sustainably harvested fire wood as fast as it arrives.

This week the truck went back up to the Bindi Wines plantation to get another load of sugar gum and iron bark tree thinnings, which are traditionally piled up and burned as a forestry waste product, but have become incredibly popular as a firewood alternative to red gum. 

And finally at Fair Food we’re getting the warehouse ready to welcome around 1500 people next Sunday.  They’re coming to pick their freshly pressed olive oil that’s just been delivered from Barfold Olives.

The figures from year’s Olives to Oil Festival are also back – 3036 people (helped by 200+ volunteers) harvested a record 28.5 tons of olives from backyard and street trees around Melbourne which was pressed into more than 3000 litres of oil!!

Yes, things may be tough at CERES right now but there’s an indefatigable spirit that just can’t get enough of helping people fall in love with Earth again…. and again and again.

Happy microbiome, happy life

Here’s a workshop after my own heart/microbiome.  Chef Melanie Leeson (that’s Mel above) from Mettle and Grace shares her knowledge of foods that can help build your gut microbiome and clear your brain fog.

Melanie, a severe IBS sufferer since she was 14, shares everything she’s learned and developed to address her illness, as well as her experience in cooking with gut and mind friendly ingredients for her clients in Melbourne, Canada, Italy, Ireland and Argentina. 

You’ll go home full and happy knowing how to incorporate delicious, nourishing belly and brain powering foods into your daily diet. 

Melanie’s Food for Gut and Mind workshop’s on June 22nd, 10am to 2.30pm.

And if it helps you get there, here’s a discount code – MINDGUT$10OFF

Have a great week

Chris