Xmas comes in with a song at Randwick community garden

CHRISTMAS TIME is celebration time at Randwick Organic Community Garden.

Ecopella provided a harmonious performance.

Thanks to the efforts of the Arts in the Gardens team’s Mary O’Connell, this year’s celebrations featured Ecopella, an accapella group that took the audience through songs amusing, political and frivolous.

Phillip and this community gardener refused to be intimidated by the durian's smell.

The performance was followed by celebratory food that the gardeners had made themselves, fruit juices or wine, but appetites were exhausted well before the supply of food. There was, of course, the traditional BBQ of sausages for those seeking to sustain this fine Australian tradition.Some, however, were less certain about the durian that Phillip Booth brought to the celebrations. The spiky-skinned, tropical fruit has a bad reputation for its odour, however that did not deter a number of community gardeners from trying the sticky, stretchy, rubbery, chewy flesh, which most found quite palatable, even nice-tasting.

The Randwick Organic Community Garden has become popular and there is now a waiting list for allotments. New gardeners, however, participate in the shared gardening areas, building their skills while awaiting an allotment.

Good news is that the community garden’s egg supply may soon be reinstated. Following the devastation of their chicken flock by a rampaging, nocturnal fox, a reinforced and greatly enlarged chicken run has been built in preparation for a new flock.

Since it restarted at its present location in Payne Reserve, Randwick, a little over three years ago, the community garden has gone from strength to strength.

Phillip Booth carefully opens a durian. Phillip, now a professional evaluator of sustainability education and other programs, once managed the Permaculture Epicente in Sydney.