Grab a pencil and your calendars!

Hello cherry lovers!

This coming Sunday December 16 from 9am - 12pm we have been invited to pick cherries at Captains Creek Organic Farm. 89 Kangaroo Hills Road, Blampied. The deal is that we get to take home half the amount of all the cherries we pick. You can either meet us there, or meet at the community garden beside the library at 8.30am for car pooling. No need to RSVP. Just rock up. BYO containers.

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Hello bee lovers!

Also this coming Sunday from 1pm - 5pm there is an exciting free event happening at the Hepburn Primary School and Melliodora: Why listen to bees? Presenters include Annie Stewart, Khadija Carroll, Kirsten Bradley, Nick Ritar, Shohn Murnane and Nathan Curnow.

How do we, with our human ears and human brains, make sense of these sounds? Can we learn to listen to bees through the prism of their own experience, instead of ours? How might it be possible to become more 'bee-centric' or even ‘bee-like’ in our listening?

More details and registration details here.

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Also this coming Sunday the 16th from 1pm - 4pm is the monthly Daylesford Repair Café in the pavilion at Victoria Park. Volunteer helpers and fixers will be onsite and ready to help mend your items. There will be tea, coffee and cakes to be enjoyed too. 

UPDATE: Please note, there is no December repair café. They will be back again on Saturday January 19.

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This coming Monday 17th at 10am, Keiran Foley from Steam Weeds will be at the skate park community garden giving us a demonstration of how his steam weeders work. The equipment creates saturated steam and is not a harmful chemical weed management process.

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The Daylesford Community Food Gardners have extended a warm welcome to all HRNers to join them in the NYE parade again this year. Here's a short joyous video from last year's parade:

We made miso

Thank you Rick Tanaka for coming to teach us how to make miso. We all learnt so much and thoroughly enjoyed your Culture Club workshop. Thank you Mara Ripani for once again taking beautiful photos so we have a record of the event. Thanks everyone who came along!

Miso Making

Hello microbial hosts,

There is no December Culture Club this coming Saturday but instead it will be this coming Tuesday December 4 from 6pm - 9pm at the Senior Citizen's room behind the Daylesford Town Hall.

We have special guest Rick Tanaka who's only in the country for one month coming to teach us miso making. Some of you might remember when Rick taught miso making back in 2013:

Rick will be showing us the traditional method of Japanese miso making.

This is a watch and learn demonstration not a hands on workshop. If you are keen to go home and make your own miso, we have seven take-home packs (biodynamic soy beans, koji (starter culture) and pink lake salt). The koji is locally made in Hepburn. The take-home packs are $50 and include the event entry fee.

If you would like one of the seven take-home packs, please email us to secure your spot and so we can send you the payment details. Payment must be received prior to the workshop.

Entry is $10 cash at the door and includes a bowl of miso soup. No need to book, just come along.

This will be the final Culture Club for 2018. What a wonderful year of microbial mingling it's been. Thank you everyone!! We will be taking a break in January and will be back on Saturday February 2 with more gut goodness.

Culture Club: microbial sharing

We were a small but potent group who gathered in the kitchen of the Senior Citizen's Hall last Saturday to share ideas, recipes, experiments, successes, failures, stories, microbes and our love for the alchemy of life. Thank you Mara Ripani for coming along to share your knowledge and take these beautiful photos.