Building your local food community

Join us for a celebration of stories, 10 years of Happy Patch Community garden and local inspiration from local community leaders building a resilient local food system.

The pandemic and climate change is showing how important a localised food system is - this workshop will explore this further and inspire us all to action  as we hear the powerful stories of 2 local women : 

Beck - Happy Patch Community Garden and  Food Co-op Coordinator

Amanda - Magic Harvest Co-ordinator

and 12 year old Stella :  a budding future food leader - on her project of "unlocking the secrets of cooking and local food".

And then we will share some wonderful wood oven pizza with ingredients straight from the garden to help celebrate the 10 years of the Happy Patch Community Garden. 

There will also be a share table so if you have any surplus produce, seeds or recipes to share please bring along.

This event is supported by the City of Onkaparinga 

Further details on the speakers:

Beck Stevens is a health and food educator, horticulturalist and soon-to-be Agricultural Scientist with a passion for building strong, resilient, and sustainable communities that are linked with their food sources and have a sense of environmental stewardship through sustainable and regenerative land management practices. She is a founding member and co-ordinator of ‘Happy Patch Community Garden’ and ‘The Happy Pantry Community Food Co-operative’, both located in Aberfoyle Park.

Beck and her family live on a semi-self sufficient permaculture designed property in the Adelaide hills where they grow an abundance of organic, seasonal produce and run a small flock of chickens. Beck is highly experienced in a wide range of food preservation techniques and regularly runs community food workshops, specialising in the Fowler’s Vacola method. 

Amanda Fleming

Passionate about growing food and the many benefits that can bring, Amanda loves to share the pleasures of home grown produce and guiding people on their own growing journey.

Actively involved in the community as a food gardening educator and writer, Amanda is a coordinator for Magic Harvest, a community program created to inspire home gardening and cooking fresh produce. Amanda is now very excited to be taking the Magic Harvest program into Schools and inspiring a new generation of enthusiastic food gardeners and cooks.

Amanda also runs a business in Fruit Tree Pruning servicing local home gardeners and businesses. In her spare time, she tends her own large vegetable garden, fruit orchard and chickens with her family in Willunga

Stella

12 year old Stella aspires to unlocking the secrets of cooking that are rarely found in recipe books. She dreams of foraging for wild edible things that can be transformed into simple dishes with recipes to share, inspiring others to do the same with this lost knowledge. 

After attending several workshops with the Food Embassy, Stella began to realise this was possible, that the knowledge is out there, it is just a matter of making new connections with interesting people. 

Brought up in a family of enthusiastic home gardeners and cooks, Stella cites her Nonna as her greatest cooking influence, with school holidays spent making and eating pasta, zeppoles and sushi.

Stella and her family live on a large urban block with a food forest in the front yard, chooks, guinea pigs, bees, veggies and a small citrus orchard out back. Thanks to inspiration from the Food Embassy, Stella now loves to collect seeds and has the title of most successful seed sower in the family.