Luscombe St Garden

Letters to July 2020: III

By Thomas Feng

July 20^th, 2020

Dear July,

Before you arrived we'd just signed up to be members at our local community garden: Luscombe St Community Garden, aptly situated on Luscombe Street on a rare vacant block surrounded by flats.

Having lived in an apartment that feels like a hotel on a busy suburban corner for over a year, we had been missing a sense of community. We don't really know our neighbours, and the communal spaces/notice boards are just filled with signs by the owner corporation and building managers which essentially say "any sign of personalised communal notices/touches will be removed and shamed".

We were also craving connection to the ground. We wanted to be more in touch with where our food comes from, and the process and labour required for it to exist. It is incredibly convenient and simple to think that all of our vegetables magically show up at reasonably cheap prices at our green grocers and supermarkets.

So when I started looking around for local community gardens and stumbled upon one tucked away within a few blocks, I signed up immediately.

A dozen or so people trickled were at the working bee. Everybody toiled away in the rare winter sun replanting garden beds, working the compost bins, and getting rid of weeds. Michelle and I hacked away at the weeds in the flower bed. It had been probably over a decade since I had anything meaningful to do with dirt.

We felt very welcome and included by everyone. Some people brought sugar snap peas, cabbages, kale, broccoli and more from another garden to replant and share with the wider group. Usually there would be a communal lunch afterwards, but with COVID-19 we made peace with meeting everybody at a distance.

It is seldom in Melbourne to connect with complete strangers and feel like you will see them and enjoy their company again. We live in a city of cliques.

Val and Abhi signed me up to be resident photographer on the day and potentially help out with the garden's dormant social media channels moving forward.

You can expect a few more snaps of this small doggo Daisy and her owner Holly. Daisy is probably one of the most quiet and adorable dogs I have ever met. She didn't yip or bark at all; she just had the time of her life running around the garden with stems of grass all over her face.

July, you're probably wondering why I'm telling you so much about the garden. Consider this my long-winded story to explain that I've been saving my food scraps for the garden compost. But also this was the last time I felt connected to the land I live on, and it was one of my happiest days this year.

Over the weekend as we were coming back from the shops we ran into a couple of people from the garden who gave us some excess rosemary they'd trimmed. While this was a small, insignificant interaction, it was our first interaction featuring any neighbourly spirit in over a year. This feeling of belonging and community is something we all miss, especially during ongoing quarantine lockdowns in Melbourne.

We need to keep checking in and looking out for each other to make sure nobody gets too lonely during this pandemic. Being surrounded by loving, caring people in a community is a reminder that we are small, that we don't have to do everything and be everything at once all the time.

Let's not be socially distant while physically apart. I challenge you to be warm and kind to your local supermarket worker, your neighbours, your barista, your local restaurant owner, your frontline health worker and whomever else is in your community. Hopefully as each monotonous day passes, we'll see mundanity replaced with humanity.

Thanks for reading through my wholesome rant. I hope you're staying safe, baking too much bread, sewing up masks and learning every language ever created.

With love, Thomas

P.S. Thank you for stopping by and reading the third of my 2020 letters to July, where I write to the entire internet with empathy, honesty and a hope that you will be more open in sharing with your own community. I love hearing from you in person, over the phone or via an old-fashioned email. Drop me a line and tell me how you are, how you really are, and how you've coped with the roni.