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Page TwoWATCH THE WINDOWS Debbie’s wonderful windows! Wow! They are so good everyone admires them, including readers of the Southland Times, where a photo showed Debbie Warrender at work, trimming her driftwood Christmas tree, our festive seasonal feature. Debbie is a whiz building beautiful window displays worthy of Harrods, Tiffany’s or Marks and Spencer’s, but we’ve got her and we bask in her glory. Come and see them. Her beach scene is awesome and the flowering rata is a classic. This month’s display is a cornucopia over-flowing with the harvest of organic gardens and orchards. Unified Environmental Force Current Southland Enviroment Centres and potential Environment Centres met on the 31st of January. We had a great meeting in Lumsden with twelve representatives coming from the four corners of Southland to share ideas, resources and put faces to names. Riverton has been going for 12 years, Invercargill 8, TeAnau began the process to set one up last year and Gore is very keen to join in. It is great to be a united force and it was very inspiring and energising to spend time together. The first joint project we are all promoting is: ‘Earth Hour’: Many towns and cities in NZ are turning all non-essential electrical appliances and lights off for 1 hour 8-9pm on the 29th of March. We hope Southlanders will join in spreading the word in the communities you live in so you can not only save one hour of energy use, you can experience a calm time on our frail earth without the glitz and noise of modern energy consumpt-ion. Go for a walk, go to bed early, sit around a neighbours fire place and talk…make it special. Make it a new habit to have more ‘low energy’ times in your life and beat the rising costs of power by using less! Other Otago / Southland networking In November: we had a lovely day with our visitors from Otago (Tree Crops + Permaculture group) First we enjoyed a talk about the Centre and then Guytons permaculture forest for lunch and a tour. Next we went to visit Granma’s Growers and then Robbie Wilson’s place to see his rare breed hens. We finished with a pot luck tea at Jacqui and Tim's. Great time sharing and talking- building supportive links between the two regions like minded groups. In February seven Southlanders joined Otago Tree Crops members to learn how to take buds from fruit trees in mid summer and graft them immediately onto root stock. It was quite tricky to do well but a useful skill to have if a tree is threatened and may not be around in mid winter to get grafting wood from. This is the preferred method by nurserymen because it produces one long straight ‘cane’ when it grows the following spring and is therefore good for transporting. It was great to learn this useful technique for our project saving of our Southland fruit tree varieties. It was nice also to network once again with the Otago like minded folk. We especially appreciated meeting up again with Jim Dunkley from Palmerston. Jim is teaching us how to identify the old varieties. Protected Fruit Tree Collection At the end of the workshop we walked around their “scion wood” orchard. 150 root stock with three varieties of heritage fruit trees grafted on each. These 450 varieties have been gathered from Otago over many years and are now on trust land to provide grafting wood for years to come. We are very keen to set up a similar orchard here in Southland so that we can guarantee that Southland orchard varieties can be sustained for many decades. Any suggestions as to where? Re-Localisatiom Networks In Spring Robyn and Robert traveled to Hampden (North Otago) to speak at the AGM of their Relocalisation Group about the history and development of our groups in Riverton. Relocalisation groups are now spread all over the world where communities learn to live 'locally' becoming more self reliant while becoming less dependent on expensive resources from far away. Our Centre has been educating along those lines well before the need was seen to do it, so we have a lot to share. NZ Networks Jodi from the Raglan Environment Centre called in and it was great to share our Centre and projects with her. Her centre was the other one likely to close due to being only part funded by the Ministry for the Environment, but luckily they have other funding in the pipeline. Trans Tasman Connection An Australian Journalist and author came in to the Centre in January to find out about our Open Orchard project as she is researching what is being done in Australia to save their heritage fruit trees. She found our project on our web site and detoured especially to Riverton during her holiday to talk with us. We will keep in touch…. |