We’ve just wrapped up our third Home Harvest. It was so good that I’m sharing it with you here. But first, what even is it??

Funded by the City of Hobart and supported by Eat Well Tasmania and Sustainable Living Tasmania, Home Harvest is a one day self guided edible garden tour around the nipaluna/Hobart region. The key objective is to help inspire people to use the land they have to grow some of the food they need – all towards building home and community resilience. But why? Growing food has such a large range of benefits related to health and wellbeing – physically and mentally, plus an established veggie patch can also help save some money.

Jess and George in their stunning urban garden

But what I’m very interested in is helping people to strengthen their communities to be robust in the face of disruption. We’re living through the climate emergency and climate scientists are repeatedly telling us to expect increasing shocks. Spending time *now* building resilience is critical in helping to try and make these upcoming shocks less shocking. Increasing our food security by growing some food in our gardens, community spaces and on our balconies can be part of this.

Visitors wondering through Outside The Box garden

The delightful and multi-talented Dusty and Chris who I was lucky to work with on Gardening Australia – you can watch and learn more about their story here. 

Home Harvest is a joyful exploration of what’s possible in urban spaces and reminds people that cityscapes are still landscapes. It shows people what’s possible from the smallest patch to steep slopes, rental properties, community spaces and expansive backyards. This year we increased the number of gardens participating to 18 and had over 1300 people move through them in one day. We also managed to do some live stream tours through four of them which you can watch them below.

• Our place – Good Life Permaculture headquarters
• Jess and George’s garden
• Sulyn’s urban market garden
• Outside The Box Collective garden

Darling Belinda in her spectacular garden

My hope is that some of you reading this will have a crack at organising a similar event in your own community. It can be wonderfully simple and be as small or as big as big as you have the energy for. It might just be you and two mates opening your gardens, or you can look for funding to make it a grand affair. The main thing I’m trying to help people realise is that doing something (anything) towards growing a better world is far better than doing nothing. I look forward to hearing about what you create in your own neighbourhoods!