Impact measurement
For many people when they get the urge to grow a veg patch, plant a fruit tree, keep bees, spawn mushrooms, propagate seedlings, graft trees, sprout microgreens or build a compost the first place they turn is CERES Organic Farm.
Each year although a significant amount of fruit and veg comes out of the Farm its main product is actually people – or as Lorna Pettifer, Director of the School of Nature and Climate, would say people’s heads, hearts and hands.
From firing synapses and forming neural pathways in newborns pushing past garden beds to inspiring school kids to plant their first tomato and basil bed to the passionate propagation volunteers to the students taking their first steps on a Permaculture design journey.
This farm has been stoking imaginations and ambitions of countless school & community gardeners and city farmers – it’s helped pioneer kitchen gardens, urban farms, backyard beekeeping, mushroom growing, aquaponics, microgreens and produce swaps right across the country.
And although it covers just a tiny piece of ground CERES Organic Farm has nurtured dozens of farmers – people like Aidan Quick who left CERES twenty years ago to grow ginger and honey a state and a half away in the Tweed Valley all the way to Jess Holland who went from an organic growing workshop to a CERES propagation volunteer to being newly appointed as microgreens farm manager last February.
These days with people wanting impact measurement this and outcome that – sometimes I wish I could just get them to hold onto something like the big avocado at the top of Honey Lane and tap into all the intersecting ripples of inspiration and skill radiating out over Australia that have seeded in heads, hearts and hands, in backyards, schools, empty lots and run down farms.
I wish that they could see the layers of knowledge, the connections between people and the change in the way we see food that has been created over forty years of CERES’ Organic Farm being the first place we go to when we want to get our hands in the Earth.
More than ever we are waking up and wanting to learn about our food and how to grow it and more than ever we are going to CERES Organic Farm to do it.
This year CERES is raising $80,000 to build new outdoor teaching spaces, new classes and new volunteer opportunities for kids and adults of all abilities who want to come and learn on the Farm.
You can find the Farm Renewal appeal here.
Last call for olives
Harvesting olives and making oil is pretty bloody exciting!
Check out the video from the CERES olive collection day
There’s one more Olives to Oil harvest date to go.
Bring your olives to Corner Store Network, Oakleigh, next weekend and we’ll bring you your own freshly pressed extra virgin olive oil in a couple of weeks.
You can book in here.
Chris
