Grow the Future Bega

Our transition towards becoming an independent, not-for-profit organisation has involved us recruiting a board of directors, to work alongside Callum Champagne, Vanessa Spinelli, Ben Deighan, and our amazing team of young people, to help lead Grow the Future as we move forwards. We are stoked to have put together an incredible team of directors who are value aligned, community oriented, and between them possess a diverse range of high level skills and extensive experience to help us flourish into the future Come meet them!! Sharon Wellard, Nick Graham-Higgs, Dixie Fitzclarence, Jayson Bricknell, Abbee Hausfeld -Suffer, Alan Clarke, Poppy Collins

🌱We are so excited to be piloting the new training program next week in partnership with Kiama Community College Ltd It’s set to be a really fun program, with what’s shaping up to be an awesome group of young people taking part. There’s still spots up for grabs, so if you are, or know a young person who would be keen, then get onto us!!

🌱We are so excited to be piloting the new training program next week in partnership with Kiama Community College Ltd It’s set to be a really fun program, with what’s shaping up to be an awesome group of young people taking part. There’s still spots up for grabs, so if you are, or know a young person who would be keen, then get onto us!!

Really looking forward to pitching at this event alongside Bandu Organisation and Australian Refugee Volunteers Inc. If you’re in Sydney, and want to support organisations creating impact for young people, then come along and get involved!

Creating space for young people to grow🌱

We were stoked to welcome Dr Michael Holland to the Grow the Future farm earlier this week! 🌱It was a great opportunity for us to share our work, and discuss our vision to create a thriving and sustainable regional social enterprise focused on creating space for young people to grow. Dr. Holland took the time to learn about our programs, meet our team, and discuss potential future opportunities for us to raise awareness of the need for these types of projects at a state level. Thanks for visiting, and you’re welcome back anytime!

🍁🍂WELCOM TO AUTUMN🍂🍁 Summer’s fun. But summer’s tough. Hot, humid days. The crops grow well, but so do the weeds. And if you get a bit of rain (which we’ve had a lot of this season) the pests breed and the fungal diseases spread even faster. 🍄🟫It’s our busiest time on the farm, and it can be hard to balance that with all the busyness that summer brings for our crew off the farm. Summer’s fun, but chaotic fun. 🍂🍁But autumn really knows how to do it. With the days getting shorter, the air temperature drops to something that doesnt leave you sweating throughout the day, but the soil temp stays up, creating conditions for really good growth.🍁🍂 We’ve got a great crew of young people with us this autumn, and now that the pressure has eased on some of the site maintenance, we’ve got some really fun projects to sink our teeth into. ✉️And if you want to stay in touch with all the happenings at GTF this season, then jump onto our newsletter subscriber list (link in comments) to be front an centre to get the autumn drop 🍂🍁🍂🍁🍂🍁🍂🍁

Term 2 is well and truly in full swing, with a big crew of Bega High School students joining our HANDS-ON program to hook in along side our regular farm crew, and we had a real day of it! Together we: 🥦Planted our first cool season crop of brassicas - getting a jump on autumn 🥬Pulled off our biggest ever (and by a long way) harvest, including veggies for our Eden veg boxes, and our 2 new commercial customers: Stony-creek organics and Pambula Fresh Food Markets 🍳Cooked up a shared BBQ lunch, with a stack of farm fresh veg as part of it 🌿Gave some love to our native, nature strip shelter-belt, which is really starting to take off! 🐙Cooked an octopus (no, we’re not going to provide any further context on this) 💦Weeded, fertilised and irrigated some of our maturing crops 🐝Dodged a small flying army of wasps we’d disturbed 🌾Slashed and mowed to try to get on top of the growth that’s come after the rain and get ready for some chicken moves. Best place to spend a Monday!

♻️It was great to show Roland Jones-Whittem Olivia Hughes and Blake Bonser from Bega Group around the farm last week! 🔧As part of their ASPIRE program, these guys organised a ‘tool drive’ to source a bunch of second hand and donated gardening tools for us from Bega Group staff! A perfect alignment with their vision to transition the Bega Valley towards a circular economy. We’ve been collaborating with Bega Group, and the Bega Circular Valley Co-operative over the past couple of years around Circularity conversation, and we’ve got a VERY big collaboration in the pipeline, so watch this space! 🙏Thanks for the tools team! With term two in full swing, they’re getting put to good use already!

We are super excited to have been selected to pitch at this event. Really looking forward to it!