We’ve had a great week here at Project Sunshine headquarters and have been busy planting and posting lots of sunflower seeds. Check out what we’ve been up to below:
This week we’ve been really excited to send ‘seed mail’ to some of our supporters. We’ve posted seeds to the Food Forest in Waiheke Island; Waipu Primary School up north; to Sam the giant pumpkin grower in Hamilton; friends in Featherston, Waipukurau and Blenheim; locally in Wellington to friends in Khandallah; to an apartment dweller who maintains his apartment community garden in the central city; and the Brooklyn Community Orchard.
It’s great to see our sunflower seeds travelling so far, and we’ve added many of these locations to our distribution map.
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We also visited the Brooklyn Community Orchard on the weekend, to have a look at their amazing garden and orchard. We gave orchard gardeners Kelda and Mel two packets of seeds – and as well as sharing them with other people locally in the Brooklyn area, Sunday’s working bee saw Mel, Kelda and other garden volunteers working hard to prepare a special garden bed for the sunflower seeds to be sown into directly.
The orchard is springing into life at this time of year. Self-seeded borage, calendula and alyssum flowers wander prettily down the stairs, providing food for the bees, which are vital to the pollination of many of the trees in the orchard. The espaliered pear trees are covered in white blossoms and Kelda pointed out the almond tree that is already bearing fruit. We hope that our sunflowers thrive in this beautiful garden space and are keen to report back on their progress at a later date.
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On Tuesday morning, the Project Sunshine Team and an awesome band of volunteers met up in Epuni in Lower Hutt. Our focus was on a particular street, which is having a hard time because of its many boarded-up Housing NZ homes. Because we know that beautiful environments can increase our sense of well-being and create abundance in our communities, we thought we’d do a mass planting of seeds and seedlings in the area, with our volunteers and many of the local children.
We planted in the front gardens of residents, as well as in the gardens of the empty and sad houses. It was a warm, sunny day and we spent a gorgeous morning planting sunflowers, talking to our happy volunteers and hanging out with our little farmers.
You can check out more photos from the morning here. And a huge *thank you* to everyone who turned up to help on Tuesday.
We look forward to the next planting day in a few weeks, where we will add veges to these new plantings as well as more sunflowers around the neighbourhood. Keep an eye on our blog or Facebook page for more details.
Please get in touch with us if you would like to get involved in our special little project, or if you would like some of our seeds sent to you!
Project Sunshine Aotearoa 