Jar swap, time swap

Due to the Daylesford Highland Gathering street parade at 9.30am this Saturday, we are now starting Culture Club at 10.30am instead.
How lovely: kilts, bagpipes, long socks + thriving gut bacteria.

See you then!

End of year jar swap

Hello microbial hosts,

Pls join us for the final Culture Club of the year.

Pls bring a plate to share for morning tea and a jar or bottle of something fermented to swap with someone else. If you don't have anything to swap, pls come along anyway. We have so much to celebrate in this wonderful and encouraging community of ours.

Hope you can make it!

NOvember Culture Club

Hello microbial hosts,

Culture Club is taking a hiatus this month and will be back in December for our last hurrah for the year.

See you all on December 2.

Whey hey hey!!

So you love to make cheese but can't think of what to do with all that whey?

Please join us at this very fun, informative and whey cool (sorry to be so cheesy!) workshop.

This is an opportunity to learn but also to share. 

Please feel free to bring along your samples, experiments, failure stories, innovations and ideas. 

Cheesemaking workshop wrap up

A HUGE cheesy thank you to Kirsten, Nikki + Rosie for so generously sharing their knowledge, time + cheese with us. Thank you to Alison for the scrumptious bread, to Alex and Mara for welcoming everyone who came along on the day, and again to Mara, for taking these photos that so beautifully preserve the nourishing spirit of the day.

Beeswax wrap workshop

Wrap sandwiches, half an avo, fresh bread, fruit, veggies or cheese.

Cover a bowl, or pack a snack for your kids' lunch boxes.

Beeswax wraps are easy to make, washable, reusable and even compostable.

Plastic? No thanks!

Whether you'd like to use wax wraps or you do already, please join us for this very exciting workshop presented by HRN in conjunction with Plastic Bag Free Daylesford.

Plastic Bag Free Daylesford's raison d'etre is to end the distribution of single use plastic bags in Daylesford. They are a large community of contributors who quietly go about sewing bags, building Boomerang Bag boxes, and strategising ways to help make our town a better place to live.

The ever talented Dora Berenyi will be teaching us how to make the beeswax wraps. Please bring your own 100% cotton fabric to use on the day and everything else will be provided.

Dora is presenting the same workshop twice on September 30th - yes, grand final day!

The first is from 10am - 11am and the second from 11am - 12pm.

Places are limited and bookings are essential. When you email to book your place please write in the subject line whether you'd like to come along to the first or second workshop.

Need some convincing as to why we should be using less plastic? Take it away, Charlie!!
(If you are reading this in your email, you will need to click through to the blog to watch the video.)

Natural cheesemaking workshop

For the last few months we have been planning to run a cheesemaking workshop. Finally the weather has improved and the local cows are happily producing again.

Pls join us for this very exciting learning and tasting opportunity. We have three very talented cheesemakers joining us to share a little of their knowledge: Kirsten Bradley, Nikki Marshall + Rosie Laszlo.

A note about the $5 entry free:
As you know, HRN is a volunteer run, non-membership, non-meeting, not for monetary profit, everybody welcome community group. We are lucky enough to be auspised by the kind folk at SHARE, which means we are able to run events and have our insurance taken care of. But this insurance costs money.

So to ensure we are able to continue to run our events for free or gold coin donation, we are charging a $5 fee for this event to cover our half of the yearly insurance fee. Thank you for your understanding.

See you next month! No need to book, just rock along.

Slide Night Dinner + Working Bee

We are so looking forward to this community dinner + slide show event! Some of you may have seen Brenna around these last few months. She is currently living and volunteering at Melliodora, studying permaculture, and working as an illustrator on David Holmgren's forthcoming book, RetroSuburbia.

As a 23-year-old, Brenna began to question the worth of her university degrees and the consumerist good-job-and-double-garage-and-2.4-children society that she felt pressured to commit to. So she bought a one-way ticket to India in the hopes of discovering a more meaningful life direction.

She spent the next six years hiking, hitching, riding, cycling, driving and canoeing her way towards a more sustainable life. She cycled 12,000 kilometres from Canada to the Panama Canal on a second-hand bike, and in the process learnt to appreciate the pleasures of voluntary simplicity. 

Over the next three years’ travel, she didn’t once pay for accommodation, preferring to rely on the kindness of others and on the non-monetary gift economy. As a volunteer, she realised the beauty and challenges of off-grid living, and the different reasons that drive people to live this way. She began to learn about permaculture, and that there were other people out there who thought the same way as she did. In Argentina, she fell in with a group of like-minded locos from all over Latin America, and they named themselves Rucache (‘the house of everyone’). Together they began growing their own food, building their own space, and facilitating permaculture events in Brazil, Chile and Argentina. This fascinating chapter of her travels will be explored during Brenna’s presentation for HRN. 

Brenna came home late last year, now aged 30, to be with her family and to further her permaculture journey. 

Entry is by gold coin donation. Please RSVP by Tuesday August 2.

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We had another successful working bee out at Rod May's farm on Friday. A big thank you to Su Dennett for organising it, Ian Clarke for taking the pruning workshop, for everybody's enthusiasm and elbow grease, and for Kirsten Bradley for taking these photos:

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Also, sorry fermies but Culture Club is having a break in August to make time for more literary pleasures over the Words in Winter weekend. We are already busy planning the September Culture Club which will be a natural cheesemaking workshop. Watch this space for more info!

Fermented beverages

Hi everyone, this month's Culture Club is focused on a wide variety of delicious probiotic-rich drinks including alcoholic root beers, bubbly vegetable tonics and wild food drinks.

Pls bring along your loveliest homemade fermented drinks and favourite second ferments for people to try and be inspired by.

This Friday 30 June at 9.30am there will be a pruning workshop with biodynamic orchardist Ian Clarke at Rod May's Captains Creek Organics farm. Please bring:

• secateurs
• a saw
• loppers
• water-based paint (in any colour!)
• a small knife
• a paintbrush or two
• an orchard ladder (or step ladder) if you have one
• a dish to share for lunch
• warm clothes!

Here are another couple of workshops we thought might take your fancy.

More details here

So many wonderful events to keep us busy and warm. x

Community hibernal for we wintering diurnal

Hepburn Relocalisation Network organised another winter solstice gathering, which took place on Thursday night at the Senior Citizen's room at the Town Hall. Many of us put our hands and hearts together to decorate the room and make warming food and drink to share. It was another community event open to all, and as the 80 of us arrived we were greeted by the strumming mandolin of Tony Soccio and the brightness of the community bunting.

Michel and Linda led the opening ceremony, honouring the mother, Pandora, Ge, the flowering earth, the goddess, the fermentor of culture, as well as the moon and sun and the more than human.

We were all ages coming together, to grieve and praise life,

to say goodbye to Steven and Maureen,

Maureen in her speech of farewell describes the bare Hepburn plot they transformed into forest over two decades,

and Anthony Petrucci performed Patrick Jones' elegy for Rod May.

The Daylesford Madrigal Singers performed old songs to connect us to our old stories, and Fay White led a sing-a-long along similar lines.

Music, warmth, origin-known food and the love-filled room marked this moment of community immunity, sharing and honouring friends present and past.

Thank you everyone for coming along, and making the solstice such a merry occasion.