Fabulous things are happening at this joint collaboration between Fisher Road SSP/One Meal Northern Beaches and the team at Kimbriki Eco House & Garden, along with a group of students from ‘Up and Over,’ empowering people with disabilities.
The setup has now expanded to 30 compost bins, 2 worm farms, 6 chickens (soon to be 25), and a large Worm Mod (Singular Worm Mod – Worms Downunder). All of this is helping One Meal Northern Beaches manage food waste created from providing 18,000 meal equivalents per week to the Northern Beaches community. One Meal Northern Beaches is fortunate to have 2,000 volunteers who help them deliver this service. A team of One Meal Volunteers visits Fisher RD SSP every weekday with food scraps from their HQ in Brookvale, led by their Compost Supervisor, Dave Lye. A Kimbriki EHG staff member (Rachel) pops in twice a term to check all is going well and helps organise ANL Forest Fines and Super 6 Manure deliveries to support the composting system. We are so grateful to the Compost Volunteers who manage the system on a weekly basis and reach out to us when needed. Most, if not all, of the Compost Volunteers have completed our 3-hour Compost & Worm workshop free of charge to help upskill them in all things composting. Every Wednesday, Erin from Up and Over brings a team of young people to help manage the system with watering and turning of all composts, feeding the chickens, collecting eggs, and using the mature compost in the school’s gardens to grow food with the students of Fisher Road. They are planting broccoli, cherry tomatoes, capsicum, and zucchini – all things that they love to eat!
The beautiful and mature compost created over the last 10 months is now used across several Northern Beaches venues, including:
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- One Meal HQ to grow a variety of new herbs and vegetables in their planters and pots.
- Fisher Road School at Dee Why for their vegetable gardens.
- Dee Why Public School, who are establishing some new vegetable gardens.
- One Meal volunteers, used for their extended community garden networks.
There are hopes to establish more gardens at Fisher Road School, especially to grow some of the larger, more sprawling varieties like watermelon, pumpkin, and zucchini using the mature compost created from food waste diverted from landfill. Coupled with the abundance of eggs that the 25 chickens will hopefully be laying, this is a wonderfully circular method of creating food for all. When the time comes, they will be looking for more volunteers to help mentor the garden program, we would like to support them with a garden workshop, and there might even be a spot to have a break and a cuppa with the expanding chicken flock.
Students from Fisher Road help make up snack packs and breakfast bags with a team delivering down to One Meal HQ each week in their school minibus. A few Fisher Road alumni are also engaged in work with One Meal, and there are plans for more offerings with the installation of a commercial kitchen and barista area to train Fisher Road students and students from other schools in catering and barista skills and serving to visiting groups. With the installation of 92 solar panels down at One Meal HQ and a freezer and cool room funded from 3 years of grant applications, the organisation is going from strength to strength to collaborate and create a web of connections in our community that support so many. We feel very fortunate to be a small part of this wonderful collaboration and look forward to further opportunities to link our Kimbriki connections with them.