The Beginnings of Community Abundance

We've lived in this rural country town about an hour and a half from Melbourne for a good few years now. When we moved here, I was so excited about having a property on which I could produce my own food to supplement the table, and now, I look upon it it wonder. The tubestock gum trees now tower over head, and the vegetable garden is producing well, albeit a little smaller than I'd like. It is hard to do things on a large scale when you also work a 'real' job for a living to pay for the land you subsist on and the roof over your head. I worry that by the time I quit work I'll be too old to work the land to produce for us in the way I'd really like to, but for now, it's immensely satisfying.

For most of this time, I've run a Facebook gardeners page for the local community. There's 300 members now and more come in every week, as the area is marked for population growth and a large estate is growing on the other side of the town - big 1000 metre blocks too, which is rare in an area they're cramming them in to 300 square metres. My husband is part of a committee that fights for the town to retain it's country feel and not go the way of the coastal towns that are busting at the seams and are becoming more city than the sleepy paradises they once were.

I started the gardeners group in the hope of connecting to like minded people who were also interested in sustainable gardening and food production. The aim was to connect community and to inspire people to grow a garden to produce their own food. And they did - there was many a story of people who were just starting out or had the desire to grow their own and were so inspired by the group they did plant. One of my favourite things to do was to give away excess seedlings and have newcomers to gardening come walk around my garden and see what was possible, often walking away with marigold seeds and comfrey which I insisted every garden should have. And I'd offer it, regularly, on our Facebook page. Excess beans. Oregano plants. Spare garlic. Despite being offered payment, I'd decline - because food can be free, especially if we have the means to grow and provide for others, like I do, with my decent income and a bit of land.

And then there were the gardeners far better at it than me - Brian in particular, a retiree from Norfolk, UK, who grows the most incredible leeks I have ever seen. We had meet-ups a couple of times a year, where we swapped plants and seeds and chatted about gardening. I still felt there was a lot more to be done, though. Where were the permaculturists? Where were the people raising ethical meat? Where with the biodynamic farmers? Everything I was seeing seemed so - I don't know, vanilla. Buy a seedling tray from the local hardware store, whack it in the ground, hope for the best.

But as the town is growing, there's more happening. There's more people coming into the group and dropping a link, say, to the dangers of Round-UP, or using ash in your compost. It's getting a bit more interactive and there's a lot more people who seem to be really keen on sustainability and the intersection between food production and community. Dare I be hopeful? Is the tide turning? Are more and more people turning to the possibilities of sustainable lifestyles and communities as the general tide turns globally? As we shift our consciousness away from governments who fail to provide for us, we turn it towards ourselves. We are the only ones who can change things. We are the ones that can build communities that help each other survive.

So this week I've been incredibly buoyed by two conversations I had with no less than three members of the group. One woman dropped over with her two kids to pick up some berries I gave to her. She was homeschooling them and 'google farming' - learning how to raise meat and grow food on her 3.5 acres with her husband with the help of internet instruction. I gave her comfrey, of course. You can't do that without comfrey. She shared a group in the next town over that had a community produce stall - a shared stall where people would just drop off their extra produce, take a photo of it and send it the group to say it was there. You can check it out here. Coincidentally, that afternoon someone posted asking if anyone was interested in a Food for Free Project in our town. The two woman had never talked - but there it was. The seed of an idea.

The 'Food is Free' Cart in a town about ten miles from us. It's happening people!! Abundance has arrived!

And then there was another guy who was giving some borage away last week. I had to run in to grab them as hubby had the car running, but we chatted ten to the dozen for ten minutes about permaculture, crypto and community gardens. He texted me that night to catch up for a cuppa, wanting to figure out how to start some kind of abundance project in town. So that's three now. Four, including myself. Is this the beginning of a project? A possibility? Can we do this?

Because from little things, big things grow.

We are yet to arrange a time to all meet up. We want to start a 'Food is Free' stall and believe that it starts there, and will spread. Once people see it's appeal, I believe they'll start planting to share. They'll start dropping off excess silverbeet, posies of lavender, half dozen eggs, bags of broadbeans or jars of dried herbs. The beginnings of local abundance. The shift is happening, and I couldn't be more excited.

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