Our most recent Busy Bee and BBQ

Thanks to all those who attended our last Busy Bee. It was great to see people working and having fun. These pictures speak for themselves!

Lana is a dancer, a teacher, an interior designer with a love of patterns

in nature, in fabrics and in design; especially gardens! She has lived in Ocean Shores for 4 years with her partner Max and two daughters Jayalily and Ines. Motherhood over the past 5 years has really highlighted the importance of community and relationships and is the reason she navigated away from a previous corporate lifestyle. “I LOVE that I can walk to more than two hands full of close friends who would drop anything to help out with the kids or offer a cuppa, or a friendly smile, a hug or a bunch of parsley for tonight’s dinner!” Lana uses the principles Feng Shui and Sacred Geometry as ways to create spaces inside and out and runs Dakini Space Alchemy.
To find out more, go to www.dakinispacealchemy.com

Meet Ivonne Rother - a Shara Gardens volunteer

Ivonne is a ‘passionate graphic designer from Berlin’. Having lived in Ocean Shores for four years, Ivonne has donated many hours designing Shara’s beautiful logo and giving a professional look to our flyers, posters, email newsletters and visual displays.

“I love supporting my neighbourhood and our beautiful community in Ocean Shores,” she says. ”So when the Shara team asked me to help them with the design work, I immediately said yes. Coming from a big city — with no garden – there are a lot of things I still want to learn about a gardening, weeds, composting, so it’s perfect for me having a community garden so close by. “I hope everybody will enjoy the garden as much as I do.”

And, thanks to Ivonne, we can enjoy Shara’s graphic design elements as well. Visitwww.i-rother.com

Meet Marc - a Shara Gardens volunteer

Marc Baudouin is our volunteer builder. Born in Morocco but growing up in France, Marc loves playing soccer and dancing salsa. A Gestalt therapist (equally talented with his head, heart and hands, Marc is), he enjoys spending time at the beach near his house in South Golden. Marc moved to this area because, in his words, “I was travelling around the world, and I met a beautiful woman and we started having children together. Here was a good place to raise a family.”

Rotunda

A sunny February Friday saw Shara Community Gardens resemble some kind of Byronian Eurovision Song Contest, with Les Bleus - Marc Baudouin and his team Xavier Lambert, John Rann, Terry Fitten, Azzendine Belayel- backed by the Germanic duo of Elmar and Dagmar, constructing a rotunda for the use of the community.

As at the time of sending this out, the frame is up and we are waiting for a roof and a floor – soon to be ready for our first Busy Bee BBQ.

“I was inspired by the berugak structures in Bali. I just love to see everyone working together and helping out to build this so that everyone can enjoy it,” said Marc. Amazing volunteer effort everyone!

Jewel and her 11 yo daughter Taimana live in Pottsville in Koala beach Estate on a 680m2 suburban block. In 4 years we have transformed a bladey grass paddock into a full production permaculture indonesian style food forest. We are harvesting bananas (when they were $15/ kg), paw paws, mangoes, pineapples, citrus, vegies, and eggs from our efforts ( just to name a few ). We are now selling and hope to set up the same again in an even shorter plant to harvest timeframe. Yes, we can do it !!

Jewel loves to cook from her harvests and grow vegies for the produce that go into making sauces for Santos in Byron shire. Assisting the Shara gardens lift off has been great, working with an amazing team of volunteers who inject such great energy into a community space for all to share. Great team building skills here and will miss it when we move on.

Elmar has been living in Ocean Shores for over 10 years witnessing a tremendous transformation of greater O.S. into a very desirable place to live. He believes that the time has come for residents of this part of the Shire to step out of their beautiful homes and get to know their neighbours and discover the joys of community and connection by looking after each other, our local environment, our wild places and beaches as well as creating community gardens of various shapes and sizes all over Ocean shores, skate parks, bicycle paths, walk ways, benches under shady trees, fruit trees along our streets for all to pick … and lots of other great ideas. If it takes a whole village to raise a child, lets make it a good one.

Elmar believes that there is a fresh wind of enthusiasm blowing through O.S. and locals are starting to feel a sense of pride of place and want to get involved in some way. The Shara Community Gardens is a testament of just that. Councils are coming to have a look what’s going on here to get some ideas and inspiration and see how things can be done in partnership with local residents. The buzz terminology of this sort of thing is ‘generating social capital’. What a good idea at a time of global uncertainties and turmoil! Local healthy communities are the way to go and the place to be. Greater Ocean Shores is showing the way.Whether you are a long term resident or a new arrival, feel welcome to come along and be part of the local r-evolution. Looking forward to meeting at the Shara C. Gardens.

Our Fruit Orchard

We have the first trees of our orchard planted !!
Amongst the long term plantings species we have included a variety of citrus for picking and eating in a 3-4 years, early and late season. We have also planted an avocado, black mulberry, dwarf bananas, olive, paw paws and a selection of natives.

All were chosen on the basis of being able to dwarf prune due to the small space and on the viability for this sub tropical region in terms of disease resistance and production success.
Personal successes in my Pottsville food forest were a deciding factor in the selection process. You’ll also see understorey and groundcover plantings of taro, lemongrass and sweet potato to act as weed suppresents and insitu mulch crops, not to mention food crops.

Hope you’ll enjoy our 1st stage plantings delivered by an amazing team winning grants to fund our/your community garden…

We’ve been Permablitzed!

Earlier this month the Permaculture Challenge team of 20-odd young permaculture students from Mullumbimby High School and Shearwater the Mullumbimby Steiner School did some tremendous work planting the fruit orchard and creating a terrific garden entrance from Clifford Street. Older folk who helped were impressed by the focus of the students and their capacity for hard yakka. Their efforts also had some lovely coverage in the Echo and Byron Shire News. As David Hall, founder of the Shara community Gardens, said: “fabulous, inspiring work by the kids, and the adults who organised it. I feel so inspired!”
To see a video of the changes that happened during the Permablitz, clickhttp://www.vimeo.com/33817820 Video by Jasmine Whyte.

A big thank you to all the students and everyone who made this Permablitz possible!

I feel the Earth move…

As you will have seen if you have had a sticky-beak at the site in the last few weeks, earthworks by Kelvin Daly created swales for the orchard, a bund on the lower ground and a pad for the rotunda near Shara Boulevard. Dagmar has uploaded a 1 minute time lapse video of the recent earthworks which marked a big step in this ongoing transformation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ_MIGtA3wA

• If you are interested in helping out hands on in the Shara Gardens, contact us.
• Our steering group has currently 9 members with a diversity of skills. We are looking for people who are interested in becoming part of the steering group and help move this community venture forward. We are also looking for people with project managing skills to take on single projects. If you would like to get active in the Shara Gardens, don’t hesitate to get in touch!

For any questions, thoughts or suggestions re Shara Gardens, please contact us atinfo@sharacommunitygardens.org