By Mikayla van Loon
The Mooroolbark Community Garden (MCG) has officially opened, with an event drawing in new members and a crowd to help kick off the first round of produce planting.
On Saturday 2 September the MCG committee, alongside Yarra Ranges Council, hosted the launch, gathering together stall holders, musicians and garden enthusiasts.
MCG president Helen Vander-Heyden said it was an incredible day, basking in the sunshine with lots of wonderful people coming to learn, inquire and enjoy the sense of community.
A highlight for Ms Vander-Heyden was seeing the engagement and eagerness from local people.
“I’ve got a lot of people making inquiries about how to volunteer there as well, so not only are we getting membership, but our volunteer basis has increased,” she said.
That community connectedness was something the committee set out to achieve right from the start when they proposed a community garden concept for the township.
“Making those community connections is really important now more than ever. The community has become so disconnected from Covid and people working five days a week and only having two days off,” Ms Vander-Heyden said.
“A lot of people can’t maintain a garden for themselves so being able to share in that, do their little bit but still get produce and sharing that way, I think is going to help people as well.”
It’s that element Ms Vander-Heyden put down as the reason why individuals and groups have been so keen to be involved with the project, from helping with the working bees to suggesting ideas for the future growth of MCG.
“It’s not individual plots, everybody is working together as a community to feed the community.
“It’s not going to work if people don’t come in and join us on it and be a part of it. So it’s not individual people having their vegetable garden with their produce only, it’s all of us working together.
“I think that is appealing to a lot of people because there are people out there who don’t know how to garden but want to learn or don’t know where to start and we’re perfect for that because we can teach them all of these different ways of gardening and seed raising and take it right back to the very basics and doing it step by step.”
Yarra Ranges councillor Sophie Todorov said she is looking forward to seeing what comes next for the community garden.
“The community garden will not just provide healthy, locally-grown food, but plenty of education for locals on sustainable food production and gardening. It will be a place to share skills, knowledge and ideas while connecting socially,” she said.
Ms Vander-Heyden said there were lots of things in the pipeline for the group, including finishing the polytunnel and installing the fruit trees in the IBC tanks.
“When the polytunnel is up and running, we’ll have our seedlings ready and we’ll do our major plant out.
“There’ll be more working bees because we want to get the compost bins in, we want to get the worm farms in and there’s a lot of different things that will be happening in different stages as we progress.”
Using the opening to plant 130 bok choy plants, Ms Vander-Heyden said by early October the rest of the garden beds should be able to be planted with seedlings.
Looking ahead MCG hopes to engage with other local groups like the Scouts and retirement villages but Ms Vander-Heyden said the committee wants to ensure everything is in order before that happens.
“It started off as a very small, one man band, so to speak, there were only four of us at the beginning and each month it gets bigger and bigger. The more people that know, the more people want to help.
“So our database and our volunteers is increasing tenfold. There’s lots of great ideas coming through and different sections of the community want to do different things. So we are getting there but it’s still early days.
“We’ve had so much positive feedback that we can’t help but be bolstered to keep going and keep working on all the plans that we’ve got and making sure we get a great garden going.”
If people do want to get involved, contact mooroolbarkocg@gmail.com or attend the monthly meeting on the first Wednesday of the month at the Mooroolbark Baptist Church at 7.30pm.
