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9 March 2011*Fund raising Concert*Heritage Harvest Festival*Volunteers neededCows with Guns! Chooks in choppers!If you don’t know the song, you’d better take a look on YouTube so that you know what to expect at the Dana Lyons concert, next week, here in Riverton. Tuesday 15th March 7pm. Cows with Guns was a chart-topping song that propelled Dana to fame in the USA and one that he followed up with more amusing and catchy tunes that describe his particular environmental view of the world. Dana is touring New Zealand and has chosen to come to Riverton on the recommendation of an American friend who spent a week here and loved our town so much that he’s been encouraging his (high profile) friends to visit also. Dana’s a character, by all accounts and his music will have wide appeal and like Radar’s show we are expecting strong demand for tickets and a big crowd. Be in quick! His concert promises to be a lot of fun! Could members please bring a plate of supper food for the intermission. Tickets will be pre sold and we will have door sales at Aparima College Hall as well. 17th March Changemakers film evening7pm start come along and see three mini NZ made movies that will inspire you. Donation/koha entry (South Coast Environment Centre) These are presented buy the Regeneration Road Trip crew. Heritage Harvest Festival 26th 27th MarchIt’s only 2 weeks ‘til the festival and there is much to do! Luckily, there are many people helping with the 2011 Harvest Festival and it promises to be very good. The festival is to be centralized this year, using the Aparima College Hall as the hub and a couple of classrooms nearby as workshops on harvest skills. This will make it easier to manage and simpler for people to make their way from one activity to another. Displays and stalls 10 am to 4pm Saturday and Sunday This morning, Uli dropped off her old traditional European cider press that we'll be using for demonstrations on how it was done in the days when muscle-power was king while Malcolm McKenzie has just imported a modern American apple press which is reputed to produce 400 litres of juice a day with much less effort. Bring along some apples to press. We've all sorts of folk offering to bring along the special equipment and knowledge they use to process their particular harvest, be it bee keeping and it's associated produce, cereal growing and the crafts that utilize the straw, vegetable growing and preserving and so on. There is still room for more just let us know A.S.A.P. Workshops We have 20 workshops over the weekend to choose from: $6 session or 4 for $20
(Five will run both days) Workshop programmes/registrations available from the 12th March, on line or from the Centre. There will be childcare available Competitions: Bring along your most interesting, best or wackiest fruit and veges. You name the category you think you would win and if our judges agree you will be in to win some great prizes. Kids dress up as a fruit or vegetable Adults and children make a creature out of vegetables only 175 year Harvest feast Champion of the Harvest in Flecks hall on the Saturday night. Dress up ‘old style’ and bring a 19th Century style platter of food to share. $5 adults, children free. Snacks and punch provided. Part of the evening will be the judging of the Champion of the Harvest See our website www.sces.org.nz for more information Volunteers night Friday 8th April 7pm onFun night, giveaways, quiz, dessert and drinks. Come and celebrate the Food Co-ops 20th birthday. All welcome- bring a friend who might like to start volunteering and a plate of dessert food to share. OPEN ORCHARD NEWSThe apple harvest this season has been a whopper! The trees are groaning under the weight of a very successful pollination and favourable fruiting conditions. We've been thinning like crazy to save the branches of the trees from collapsing under the weight of fruit. There will be plenty of apples for cider making and dehydrating and as many apple pies and as much compote as you could wish for! The trees we've planted at the Otautau arboretum are thriving, following a set-back at the teeth of a couple of hares, but wire netting has convinced them to nibble elsewhere. Those trees, which are selected from the broader Otautau area, will serve as a sort of living museum/orchard that scion wood can be taken from in the future to keep the local varieties where they belong. The larger 'museum' of apple trees at Marshwood Gardens in West Plains is similarly booming and the growth of the trees there surprising even us optimists! Must have been the excellent preparation that went into the planting. We've been continuing to care for the young trees, with regular grass-clearance working bees and some not-much-fun thistle whacking and we expect the orchard there to be a great success and a real treasure for the whole region. One of our most recent wwoofers, Estelle, from France, has been spilling the beans on our activities here in Riverton, posting regular voice-recordings made every evening, on the going's on of the Guyton household and the Environment Centre where she spent some time as a volunteer. Those messages are being broadcast across the region of France she hails from and might be very interesting – we're not sure as they were in French. If you are going to have a French spy in your midst, it might as well be Estelle, as she was lovely and pure of heart, so far as we could tell. She even let me photograph her chest and it's here on my blog (http://robertguyton.blogspot.com/2011/03/regarder.html) if you'd like to take a look :-) Her partner, Alex, is an IT whizz-kid and installed Linux's Ubuntu operating system on our laptops and if you don't recognise any of those names, you'll not care a jot, but take it from me, it's been a quantum leap forward for this computer user! In 3 hours he created a web programme for Robyn’s apple data base using a mix of PHP, CSS and HTML which means that Robyn can easily present photos and relevant data on our website for world wide experts to view and help her name our Southland Heritage apples. Her excel spread sheet data was instantly sent to the named tables and they just need the photos attached. He even did a screen video to show her how to make changes, add photos etc in case she didn’t take it all in or forgets how to do it. Robyn met Katherine from Owaka in Gore early in the February to swap information and scions. Katherine taught Robyn how to do summer T grafting and gave her 14 scions from the last of the Catlins collection. It was a lovely afternoon sitting in the shade in the park by the big fish sharing their enthusiasm for the project. Robyn and two French wwoofers Estelle and Alex grafted them the next day- it is a much fiddlier process and we won’t know until spring if the budding is successful. Allenton Nursery has successfully grafted and therefore saved the most interesting or endangered Southland pear trees for us last summer and this week we sent in a selection of plums. The summer bud grafting is a suits pears and plums best- where apples can easily be grafted in spring. Al Brown at our Farmers MarketAl Brown, celebrity chef and television personality was here in Riverton recently, spending 5 days along with his film crew, shooting for the new ‘Get fresh’ series that he will appear in later this year, meeting with local food producers: fishermen, farmers and market gardeners, and the honey and dairy producers that supply our farmers’ market. Al and his team were hugely impressed by our small market, by its range of good fruit and vegetables and high-end produce and by the enthusiasm of the suppliers and customers alike. We had a great turn-out of both, even attracting a young lad with a pottle of Bertoletti beans he’d grown himself – beans that Al bought and used in his celebrity cook-up that marked the end of his time here in our town. We know he went out on a fishing boat and came back happy and we also know he spent time in the food forest garden at the Guyton’s picking apples and Worsterberries for the special dessert he was planning. He was a great bloke to talk to and the exposure Riverton will receive across the country is sure to do us good. Funding Application for the Ministry for the Environments Community Education Fund The application was a time consuming and a difficult challenge taking well over 100 hours work. Everything else was put on hold for the three weeks leading up to the 14th of February. A very big thank you to Robyn and Chris who persevered on our behalf and also to Anna from Venture Southland who was a great support. We will know in April if we are selected to go into round two where more work will be needed before the application is finally considered in June. Let’s hope we are successful in one or both our applications. One was for the Centre itself and the other for our Southland wide projects. We are really wanting to build capacity as so many of our projects and activities are restricted by lack of paid hours. Our centre is open to the public 45 hours a week, our office is staffed 40 hours a week and we manage 6 Southland wide projects all with only 25 paid staffing and all the rest is done by volunteers! We either need more funding or more volunteers to achieve our important goals. We apologise for the lack of events and Coastline in February - this funding application dominated all our energies! A New BabyCongratulations to Jolene and Chris McGuire on the birth of their new baby girl Niamh 6 lbs 15oz. We wish them all the best. Chris will be taking over her roles while she is on maternity leave. A weddingNick Kiddey and Trish are getting married in Nelson this Saturday We are proudly supported by: |