[DIEGO]

So, here it is, Tending day September 2.
But first a few more things about August 28..
The Open day was a nice rumbling day of teas and chats (as Lucas wrote below) with all sorts of individuals, most of whom were looking for the Ceramic Department of the campus (one courtyard along from Tending).
Many found it amusing and interesting that with Tending there is de facto the possibility of having gardening as an art subject (well, kind of, nothing official as a subject there), and support was eagerly collected 🙂
On the day we also met with the Friends of Callan Park group, a local advocacy group set-up as far back as 1998, when the then government unveiled the plans to redevelop the extensive grounds.
Sydney College of the Arts is within Callan Park, so it is very important to start communication with this group about the fate of the environment around the campus.
I myself had already participated at a couple of meetings of the groups in the past years, and therefore I’m marginally familiar with the issues.
There is going to be a number of activities organized by the lobbing group this coming Sunday, 12 September, in conjunction with History Week, you can look at the flier here. So come along to learn about Callan Park in the past, present and auspicable future.

But lets take it in steps, and go back to Thursday the 2nd of September, which was marked by the very welcome rain, indeed it rained for 4 days!
The garden beds are doing quite well, with the potatoes already sprouting in Baruchello’s, Marty Jay’s, Cesare and Anthony’s beds..
you see, me n Lucas jokingly decided to give names to the various elements, and being art-inclined kind-of-people we gave ‘arty’ names to them, so the 4 existing potatoes experiments (two in wire, two in tyre) are Baruchello, after Gianfranco Baruchello, Italian artist, wire; Marty jay, Sydney artist, wire; Cesare, after Cesare Pietroiusti, another Italian artist, tyre; and Anthony, after Anthony Gormley, English artist (which we don’t really like that much).
Plenty of elements still to be named, we’re very open for suggestions, so come down, have a look at it and tell us what makes you think of 🙂

Anyway, for the day we wanted to set up a second compost bin, so that we can turn the left-overs from Betty’s cafe’ and aerate them, speeding up the process of composting.

Above we can see Lucas adding cardboard (carbon reach material) to the compost bin, already filled with food scraps (nitrogen rich material).
We also fitted the tap with a split, so that we could water the gardens without unplugging Liz Day’s watering system for the grass farm, and got a bunch of more mulch, so that we wouldn’t need to water that much anyway.

One last addition to the day , and the garden, was a donation from Jack, a refugee agave, a beautiful plant that we all agreed looked very much at home in its new.. home.

So, that takes us to next Tending day, which as I mentioned before, will be on this coming Sunday 12, rather than Thursday, as we will be meeting more locals during History Week’s events.
🙂