Get warm with some community events

While we continue with our regular gardening, winter is marked with community events for Southbankers who want to take control of their environmental impact, while enjoying some neighbourly community time.

It’s time to get out, warm up with a short walk to Boyd and meet more neighbours while learning a fun solution or two that will help improve your environmental impact in Southbank!

On Saturday, June 11, 9.30am to 11.30am, we are honoured to be co-hosting the educational event “Southbank Apartment Gardening 101 plus Bee Hotel Making”, along with Gardens for Wildlife and Bili Nursery & Landcare, who will be donating indigenous plants best suited for Southbank’s ecosystem.

Gardens for Wildlife have very graciously and generously offered to host for free this event tailor-made for Southbankers, with a goal to improve our city’s biodiversity and support our vulnerable local ecosystems by giving the bee and insect population some much needed help through spaces to feed, rest, and stay safe, across our city’s balconies and urban spaces.

While the event is free, we have limited seats available and are almost sold out already. We highly recommend getting on Eventbrite or Facebook soon (search for Southbank Sustainability Group) and register or join the waitlist to help secure your spot.

During this event, participants will learn how to grow plants in their apartment and create a balcony mini-bee hotel to take home, so they can help native bees suffering the bio-consequences of urbanisation. Participants will also learn how to overcome some of the common balcony gardening challenges and use local indigenous plants to attract native pollinators to their Southbank balcony. We are honoured to have two amazing guest speakers during this workshop. Julian, a pollination ecologist with the University of Melbourne, will be talking about Australian native bees, with a focus on Melbourne species and bee hotels. He will also walk us through creating a bee hotel, best suited for our local bees. Mars, our second speaker from Bili Nursery & Landcare, will bring along examples of locally indigenous plants, well suited for pots and other challenging balcony conditions common in Southbank.

Other community events

This past month, we were honoured to participate in bespoke climate resilience workshops, along with other key and well-respected community organisations from across the City of Melbourne. These workshops are designed to help our council and ourselves better prepare in how to best protect and provide for community organisations and our most vulnerable people and infrastructures from anticipated weather-related crises arising in the future due to climate change’s impact. We hope that our participation and input will help inner city suburbs better prepare and face extreme weather events, while maintaining food security systems, like community gardens, and caring for our most vulnerable people in each community.

Another upcoming event we are very excited to participate in, is Boyd’s 10th Birthday Party! It takes place on Thursday, July 7 at Boyd, from 4pm to 6pm. Boyd is a very important space for us, both as our group’s home and playground, and the space where our group was founded by 11 residents wanting to do better for our suburb’s environmental footprint, six years ago. We are honoured to be included in celebrating our beloved local community centre, as a key Southbank community building organisation and we can’t wait to see as many of you there as possible!

As a reminder, we meet every fortnight on Saturdays at 10am to 12pm. Our next two meetups are on Saturdays June 18 and July 2 at Boyd’s front garden. As always, we invite everyone to join regardless of gardening or climate action interest or experience.

About the group

A solutions-focused group of Southbankers working to bring positive change in sustainability practices and education to our neighbourhood, while building a wonderful community. Free to join. 2019 Environment Melbourne Award and KVB 2020 Sustainable Cities Environment Award winner. Reach us at [email protected] or facebook.com/SouthbankSustainabilityGroup. •