Slow Food

Today we were host to  Slow Food Hunter Valley _:
SLOW Food Hunter Valley is a convivium of Slow Food, an international not-for-profit organisation founded in 1989 to counteract fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions, people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choices affect the rest of the world – people, communities, animals, plants and the environment.

We talked about our CSA and that we now have 20 subscribers, who receive a box of fresh organic food every week.We told them we grow seasonal produce and stick to everyday sort of food ie. the basic sort of food that families design their meals around. The group could see that the housing development was getting closer and closer. We were able to explain how important it was to have places like ours growing food so close to the city, and that we need many more Gardens similar to ours.
We took the group on a tour of the garden.

Here we're looking at the garlic beds and how the guinea pigs in cages keep the grass down between the rows

The group were amazed at the work the chickens do in preparing our garden beds, the number of fruit trees within the area, the amount of food growing in each bed, the central beds which we set aside to attract beneficials to the garden, and the interactions of the various elements and much more.They really enjoyed looking around , nearly as much as we like showing them around.
Over a cuppa we talked some more on other things we are involved in such as our courses in sustainable living which are coming up such as ;composting, wormfarms, propagation and pruning, and our Permaculture Design courses.

We were able to talk about Transition Towns and the citrus drive and share some of the citrus we picked on Thursday from the backyard of an elderly lady. She was grateful that we were able to make use of the fruit of 5 trees she has growing. Some of the fruit went to our local community centre to be distributed to those less fortunate than us.There is so much more fruit out there to be collected. I hate to see it go to waste!
It was a lovely morning spent with lovely people who have a similar philosophy to our own Care for the Earth, Care for people and Fair Share.