Introducing Apis: natural beekeeping group

Introducing Apis, the newest member of the HRN family - a free informal community group whose aim is to encourage people to learn more about European honey bees and how to care for them.

Natural beekeeping is a bee-first approach that prioritises the health of bees, allowing them to build natural honey comb. The result is happy, immune-robust bees and delicious raw honey that is harvested only when sufficient honey is available.

Rather than focussing on taking from the bees, natural beekeeping is equally about giving back, where bees are given the freedom to:

• construct natural comb,
• determine their own cell size, population mix, colony size, 
• rear their own queens and drones, and
• swarm

Are you as excited about this as we are?! To kick things off Apis is hosting a potluck dinner and short film night where we will decide where and how often we will meet, and what natural beekeeping methods we'd like to focus on.

The details of the dinner are:

Friday February 7

6.30pm – 9pm

6 Tierneys Lane, Daylesford

No need to RSVP, just come along

BYO dish to share for dinner (with as many local ingredients as possible) plus a plate & cutlery. Please note this is a waste free event so no single use plastic please.

You do not need to have any prior bee-keeping experience or knowledge. If you are thinking about keeping bees, or are simply fascinated by these magical, mythical creatures please come along.

Hope you can bee there!

Introducing Wild Fennel: Hepburn Herbal Group

Rosie Cooper is mad about plants. She forages them, she grows them, she drinks them, she eats them, she infuses them and she decocts them.

As of this coming spring, Rosie Cooper, practicing herbalist from Rare Beauty Botanicals in Guildford, will be facilitating a free monthly herbal group where participants will be taught to make their own tinctures, teas, oils, balms, infusions, love potions, herbal first aid kits, flower essences and herbal honey remedies.

Are you as excited about this as we are?! To kick things off Wild Fennel is hosting a potluck dinner where we will decide where and when to meet on a regular basis, and what we'd like to learn from Rosie during the first gathering, come springtime.

The details of the dinner are:
Friday August 23
6.30pm - 8.30pm
6 Tierneys Lane, Daylesford
BYO dish to share for dinner (with as many local ingredients as possible) plus a plate & cutlery.
No need to RSVP, just come along.
Please note this is a waste free event so no single use plastic please.

Hope to see you there!

October Culture Club (plus a whole heap more)

Culture Club has another special guest coming to share knowledges. Introducing Monique Miller. Monique will be discussing her ideas on fermentation and presenting a workshop:

Saturday 6th of October, 9.30am - 12.30pm 

Senior Citizen's Room (behind the Daylesford Town Hall).

This is a FREE event open to all community members.

Monique is a generalist. She divides her time between bush land management, teaching edible weed & fermentation workshops and facilitating the permaculture design course at CERES in Brunswick East.

She has been teaching fermentation for more than four years, teaching from Confest to Bairnsdale.
On her days off she enjoys cleaning her house (no, really) and drinking a gratuitous amount of tea while gardening.

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Thank you to everyone who came along to September's Culture Club, especially Nicole Azzopardi, who so very generously shared her story, recipes and ferments with us. If you would like to order Nicole's book, The Alchemy Cookbook, please let us know as we are putting in a bulk order.

Have a look at these beautiful photos taken by the ever-wondrous Mara Ripani at the September Culture Club:

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This is a reminder that you need to book your place out the upcoming Equinox dinner by this coming Thursday!!

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On Sunday October 21, we are organising a special event called Land for Life at the Daylesford Town Hall. A conversation with permaculture co-originator David Holmgren (author of RetroSuburbia) and US food movement scholar-activist Eric Holt-Gimenez (author of A Foodie's Guide to Capitalism) as they offer insights into how to develop a deep engagement and long-term commitment to regenerative and just economies. More details to come...

Annual community spring equinox dinner

Did you know that the word "equinox" is derived from the Latin aequus (equal) and nox (night), because around the equinox, night and day are about equal length?

Come and help celebrate the coming spring equinox with a community dinner as we rejoice the blossom and buds and warmer weather, and are reminded that this is the time of the year when Rod May and Su Dennett would dream up the vegetable season ahead.

Thursday September 20 at 7pm

The Woodshed, 21a Raglan Street, Daylesford

Tickets are $20 (plus booking fee) for a main meal and dessert. Kids under 10 are free.
Food lovingly prepared by Spade to Blade.

Sorry for the late notice but bookings for the dinner close Thursday September 13.

The entertainment for the evening will be provided by the Mosquito Story Slam.

Storyteller Anne E Stewart is looking for contestants: storytellers have 5 minutes to win over the audience with a story. No notes, no props just you and the audience! Annie is looking for contestants with a personal story to tell, connected to the Hepburn Shire…and the theme Marking the Seasons.

If this sounds like you please get in touch with Annie: anne@anneestewart.com.au or mobile: 0408 550 945.

All stories will be recorded for a podcast and inclusion on Hepburn Community radio.

Solstice dinner wrap up

Thank you to the 50 or so people who gathered at the Masonic Hall on Friday night to help celebrate the winter solstice, great company, wonderful music, scrumptious local fare, thought + emotion provoking poetry, and a deep sense of community spirit.

THANK YOU to Mara Ripani for taking these photographs.

Community Winter Solstice Dinner

Hello rugged-up wintry friends,

We are hosting our annual community solstice dinner this coming Friday night and we hope you can make it:

7pm Friday June 22 

Daylesford Masonic Hall 

16 Vincent St

PLEASE NOTE we are not gathering in the Senior Citizen's Hall but in the Masonic Hall.

Please bring a dish of your homegrown produce, or made with as many local ingredients as possible, and a candle, a song to sing or a poem to read. As with all HRN events, this dinner is a single-use plastic free event.

RSVP by Wednesday June 20
Email bookings hrn@internode.on.net Or via Facebook: Hepburn Relocalisation Network

Entry by gold coin donation.

Hope to see you there!

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!

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.

Working Bee + Community Dinner

Hi everyone,

We have two reminders to share with you. The first is that there will be another working bee at Rod May's this Friday June 16 from 9.30am. Pls bring a plate of food to share, and warm clothes. The last working bees out on his farm were a joyous reminder of Rod's hard work - to fill the bellies of his community and beyond with organic food. Rod really was ahead of his time, having his farm certified organic 30 years ago. Only this week, a report has been released warning that pesticides on foods are far more dangerous than was originally thought, causing damage to the human brain.

The second reminder is to please book your places for the solstice community dinner next Thursday. We have two musical guests lined up, so we can sing Stephen + Maureen off into the sunset...

We hope you are keeping warm as the colder months set in, and are taking this time to seek much needed rest. It's so easy to get caught up in our busy lives, isn't it? Sometimes finding time for quiet and reflection is harder to find. Be kind to yourselves. x

Winter Solstice Dinner + a happy-sad farewell

Please join us in a month's time for our yearly winter solstice dinner, and to farewell community elders Maureen Corbett + Stephen Oram as they begin the next chapter of their adventure in Tassie.

As we press publish on this blog post and send it out into the world, we also send much love and support to the May family as they hold the space of healing for Rod, who was involved in a motorcycle accident last night. We wish him a steady recovery. xxx

Almost autumn community dinner

Very late notice we know but we are hoping you can come along.
Take a night off cooking! Let us feast together on delicious local food and share stories while we welcome the autumnal months.

Pls note RSVP booking date and carpooling info.
See you next week, if not before!
Oh, and happy International Women's Day to all you fabulous feminists.

Community dinner + women's panel

Please join us for an exciting community dinner. 

Delicious food to share + stimulating discussion. 

Hope you can make it. 

Bookings essential.