Humans of Blue Mountains – Liliana.
I’m Liliana, I’ve lived in Springwood for around 23 years. I moved to the city after a little while because I had a young child and I’d given up a job, and there’s only so many playgroups I could go to! But I moved back to Springwood and found a really nice place to live.
My involvement with the community garden happened maybe eight months ago, I knew about it because a friend and neighbour were involved with it from the beginning, so I went along with them. I love gardening, I love growing vegetables and I love that sense of community around the garden. The other reason I went to the garden was in order to help me practice a bit of self-control, because I’m a bit erratic and I want things done my way. I find going to the garden and having meetings about what we have to do helps me focus on zoning in. We go to the garden twice a week officially and we have working bees. We work together and harvest what we grow and we invite anyone to come along.
The Catholic Church lets us use the land and CatholicCare Social Services set it up from the beginning, got us funds and keeps the behind the scenes stuff going. The premise of the community garden is a place of relaxation and rest and healing, and we encourage people to come along and do as much or as little work as they want. We always share the harvest from the garden on the working bees. Those are on Wednesday and Saturdays from 9.30am.
Essentially I suppose what I like about the mountains is a sense of community, there’s a sense of people getting together and doing things to help others more disadvantaged. So that’s what I’m doing at present and hopefully Springwood will become a really nice, cohesive, inclusive community.
With thanks to Liliana and CatholicCare.
