There have been times after a whole day’s work-shopping I have looked around the room and seen amidst a sea of butcher’s paper my exhausted colleagues sitting crossed-legged on the floor, blankly rocking back and forth or cradling heads in hands – collectively shattered that all we have show on the whiteboard are half-a-dozen stilted sentences that feel like a mash-up of the corporate examples our enthusiastic facilitator provided on handouts earlier in the day.

But somehow after a decade and a half of this gruelling journey two sentences have emerged diamond-like describe who we are and what we do that they unite and energise us

The first sentence emerged tentatively from the lips of our CEO Cinnamon Evans– the words went, “CERES is a place that helps people fall in love with the earth again.”

The second sentence follows the first and came from our Schools Education Team….“We do this by engaging people’s heads, hearts and hands.”

This coming month at CERES there are three events that sum up the way of the head, heart and hands.

First for the hands  are tomatoes. Olivia Caputo from CERES Propagation has produced an online guide to home tomato growing. Olivia says that from this Grand Final weekend it is the perfect time to plant your tomato seeds in a tray on a sunny window sill.  Which will line things up nicely with Cup Weekend – the traditional public holiday to plant out your tomato seedlings.

And if you miss out on getting your seeds in Olivia and the Propagation team (which is so popular it’s the hardest part of CERES to get a volunteer spot) are planting thirty-three heirloom tomato varieties including hard-to-find treasures such as Banana Legs, Nebraska Wedding and Riesentraube.

Oh and if you want to learn how to grow awesome tomatoes – there’s also a one day courseon the 13th of October.

Second for the heart – Felicity Dinah will be hosting a Gardening Meditation session down at Joe’s Market Garden – one of the most tranquil spots in inner-city Melbourne.

To help calm busy minds we’ll be silently gardening beside the Merri creek, with the birds in the trees, the morning sun and breeze on your face.  You will need no gardening or meditation experience – just an open mind and pants you don’t mind getting dirty.

Happening Sunday 27th of October and then on the 4th Saturday of every month

Finally for the head we’re spreading the word about a talk by Eric Holt-Giménez – Food Justice campaigner and executive director of Food First,  an advocacy organisation founded by Frances Moore-Lappe author of “Diet For a Small Planet”.

Holt-Giménez (that’s him with the megaphone), who seeks to transform capitalism by transforming our food system, spent almost 30 years working with peasant farmer movements like Campesino a Campesino in Mexico, Central America and South Africa. Veteran environmentalist and academic, Walden Bello, describes Holt-Giménez as one of the world’s most “prominent critics of the global food system“.

Eric Holt-Giménez Transforming Food Systems: Beyond Sustainability.  CERES, Brunswick East, Mon. 22 October 2018 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm.

It’s that time again when we ask you to help us cut down on one of Fair Food’s biggest energy users – cardboard boxes (it’s true). We get around half of our boxes back so to there’s huge upside to save more of the trees and water and kilowatts of energy that go into the tens of thousands of Fair Food cardboard boxes sends out each year.

You can get involved by simply flat-packing your cardboard boxes and leaving them out at your food host or your house for our drivers to pick up (the same goes for all the eskys and frozen water bottles, just don’t flat-pack them ok).

When we get your boxes, eskies and bottles back we’ll reuse and then recycle every last one of them.

Have a great week

Chris