By Anne Rutherford
2022 has been a year of change and refocus for the orto team. In the first half of the year we supplied weekly veggies to a new charity, Our Big Kitchen, that provides over 120,000 meals a people in need of food support, including asylum seekers, Indigenous people and the homeless. Over winter we let the garden lie fallow while our members made the annual pilgrimage to Italy and we took advantage of the break to rebuild our soil with green manure topped up with compost. We are reaping the benefit of our replenished soil with newly productive garden beds and in 2023 we will be going back to our previous charity, Jarjum College, a primary school for Indigenous kids in Redfern, that makes lunches for the kids. We have a new supplier of quality organic seedlings, QPS, who donated 50 seedlings to us when they learnt of the charity work we do. Thanks Jye!
In 2022, a number of long-term members of our group moved away or had other commitments, leaving a nucleus of four committed workers. This change led us to restructure the garden so that we can bring in more people from outside. We’ve divided the garden into four beds for a communal garden and the other five for the charity garden. This has proved a great success so far, as the communal garden has been providing a fabulous harvest for our willing workers and we have now welcomed Zorana, the treasurer of the association, as a new member.
We all sorely miss our dear friend Rosi, who has moved back to Italy to live close to her sister. Rosi has been a committed member of our group since the beginning of the garden and we wish her well. We also thank Jill, Mimi, Pia, Marisa and Ann for the years of work they put into building up our orto.
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