Kensington Town Hall Compost Hub

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Kensington Town Hall Compost Hub

Community composting in Kensington, Melbourne. Messgage us to get involved!

Our Compost Hubs provide places for residents to compost organic food & garden scraps to support local gardening and food growing.

02/09/2024

Busy day yesterday at our monthly Wildlife Gardening Working Bee - mulching and planting and coffee in the Spring sunshine.

We have put out a variety of indigenous habitat plants: grasses, ground covers, and climbing plants along the fence line. Great work and massive thanks to our community volunteers for working to make a difference, and to create habitat for biodiversity in our urban environment!

12/08/2024

21/07/2024

The ancestors of kangaroos once lived in the trees – but their evolutionary history is murky. Here’s everything we know so far.

21/07/2024

A lovely mild Winter’s morning to enjoy . Nice change after the cold rain and gusty wind… thankfully nothing appears to have blown away yesterday! We have finished compost batches to screen, and new batches to turn.

LOcal Community Compost ALliance (LOCCAL) Sustainability Victoria City of Melbourne Kensington Neighbourhood House City Compost Network Cultivating Community Costa Georgiadis Official

08/07/2024

Never say something cannot be done

Who would have thought that almost any innovation was possible, back in the day?

This is Camden. If they can do it, so can your town

30/06/2024

Watching the piles of wood mulch quietly steaming at dawn. What a beautiful day to conserve some local nutrients and make a stack-ton of compost as a community…

Have an amazing week everyone!

LOcal Community Compost ALliance (LOCCAL) Sustainability Victoria City of Melbourne Kensington Neighbourhood House City Compost Network Cultivating Community Carlton Neighbourhood Learning Centre Inc Soil Sisters Singleton Costa Georgiadis Official

25/06/2024

Reminder this Saturday 29 June - we are having a winter forest care day and would invite you to come along and help us spread the compost, plant in potatoes and a banana tree, prune some trees, remove some grass, chop and drop. Refreshments of cake and tea will be available. Bring your own hand trowel and gloves. We hope to see you

08/06/2024

Wait for it… (but don’t expect to understand any of it!)

08/06/2024

Did you know there's a new market in Flemington? It does exactly what it says on the box - AFFORDABLE Fruit & Veg for EVERYONE. We love being part of it. Visit some of our micro-business stallholders while you're there.
The Community Grocer
Debney Meadows Primary School

07/06/2024

We are very excited to have received a West Gate Neighbourhood Fund Grant for our Footscray Community Garden & Learning Place. This is a joint project by Borderlands Co-operative & St John’s Church. Please contact me if you are interested in being involved or getting more information, Jorge Jorquera at [email protected]

03/06/2024

02/06/2024

Great work by our volunteer wildlife gardeners on revegetating a strip of degraded urban monoculture (aka lawn).

We are borrowing the “mulch moat” technique described by Katherine Horsfall to push back the running grasses and invasive weeds, and create space for our habitat plantings to get established.

Plenty of discussion and learning around how to best plant for the conditions. As well as sharing knowledge, various seeds and cuttings exchanged hands!

Circularity means a lot more than just hiding the impacts of ongoing fossil fuel burning and plastic pollution into the landscape better. It involves restoring the natural systems that allow us to move away from destructive linear economics and regenerate the living world.

We planted out hardy Knobby Club-rush (Ficinia nodosa), Blue Tussock-grass (Poa poiformis), and beautiful flowering Magenta Stork's-bill (Pelargonium rodneyanum) to increase the diversity of ground cover plants, plus Small-leaved Clematis (Clematis microphylla), a strong forest-dwelling climber to twine up the fence for support.

LOcal Community Compost ALliance (LOCCAL) Sustainability Victoria City of Melbourne Kensington Neighbourhood House City Compost Network Cultivating Communities Costa Georgiadis Official

01/06/2024

Just a reminder about our Wildlife Gardening working bee tomorrow at , 11am - 12pm!

You can let us know on Facebook if you are planning on joining us: https://www.facebook.com/share/thHtVDdHBnGy5zTB/?mibextid=9l3rBW

Remember to bring your gardening gloves, drink bottle, hat and sunglasses, and also a respirator mask if you are sensitive to the risks of moving and spreading mulch.

Sustainability Victoria City of Melbourne Kensington Neighbourhood House City Compost Network Cultivating Communities Costa Georgiadis Official

31/05/2024

The fresh food market is on tomorrow - come along and share in the locally grown produce.

31/05/2024

Coming up this Saturday!

31/05/2024

Native Bluebells (Wahlenbergia sp.) in flower, surrounded by Weeping Grass (Microlaena stipoides), and Austral Stork's-bill (Pelargonium australe).

This Sunday we will be working on developing our indigenous habitat garden at

https://www.facebook.com/share/nQ6cXePgsh9PCH7g/

Join us for mulching, soil preparation, planting and propagation to create habitat for beneficial native species!

Site tours and inductions available for new participants. Come meet your local composters and make a difference with us.

LOcal Community Compost ALliance (LOCCAL) Sustainability Victoria City of Melbourne Kensington Neighbourhood House Carlton Neighbourhood Learning Centre Inc City Compost Network Soil Sisters Singleton Costa Georgiadis Official

30/05/2024

Did you know we have have a community garden across the road at Christ Church Kensington, 76 McCracken St? We are holding a working bee to plant winter seedlings this Saturday. Come on down between 10.30am - 12pm and help out!

29/05/2024

Imagine city sidewalks bursting with life, not just concrete! Planting a variety of fruit and nut trees can create an "edible cityscape" with benefits for everyone.

Together, we can create a more sustainable and nourishing urban environment!

27/05/2024

At we have salvaged a hardwood fence from less than 100m down the road that was being demolished and sent to landfill. The project over the next few weeks will be converting this to a vermin-proof, low-effort, high productivity hot composting station to expand our capacity and process more urban household organics into valuable food growing nutrients!

If we are going to spend generations deforesting native habitat forest to decorate private dwellings, only makes sense that we conserve and reuse these materials to rebuild our blighted suburban landscapes into something we may be able survive in as a species ;)

Right now, carefully de-nailing by hand to make it safe to handle and store at our open-access compost hub, and putting metal the metal aside to send to recycling. This timber is not light!

Sustainability Victoria City of Melbourne Kensington Neighbourhood House City Compost Network Cultivating Community Costa Georgiadis Official

26/05/2024

Sunday is plant and seedlings sales day at from 11am

Today we have succulents, canna lilies, and seasonal veggie seedlings including beetroot, kohlrabi, and broad beans.

All funds raised go to keeping the compost hub operating!

LOcal Community Compost ALliance (LOCCAL) Sustainability Victoria City of Melbourne Kensington Neighbourhood House City Compost Network

25/05/2024

Managing our bulk Browns (carbon inputs) supply: commercial operators drop off large wheelie bins full of industrial byproduct like untreated wood shavings or coffee chaff and take away empty bins to refill and (hopefull)y reuse for as long as we can.

Bulk wheelie bins keep the dry materials stable while stored outdoors in the yard.

We combine those into smaller wheelie bins along with leaf litter collected from around local public reserves, chipped wood mulch from “urban forestry” and any other carbon-rich materials the community contributes, like shredded paper. The mixed-grade browns bins live at each community compost station and are swapped out as they get used up

LOcal Community Compost ALliance (LOCCAL) Sustainability Victoria City of Melbourne Kensington Neighbourhood House City Compost Network Soil Sisters Singleton

24/05/2024

24/05/2024

After celebrating the end of native forest logging in Victoria, conservationists say it continues under another name.

24/05/2024

City of Melbourne have a fleet of trucks and portable chippers involved in providing maintenance and removals across their meticulously managed “urban forest” trees on public land. We have just taken a delivery of freshly mulched wood at to support community composting across all the sites we assist with. This will be left out in the weather to slowly break down, and distributed around the neighbourhood as needed.

LOcal Community Compost ALliance (LOCCAL) Sustainability Victoria Kensington Neighbourhood House City Compost Network

Address

Rear, Kensington Town Hall, 30-34 Bellair Street
Melbourne, VIC
3031

Website

https://form.jotform.co/KensingtonCompostHub/registration

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Videos

Some gratuitous slowmo #compost amendments today for #ICAW2024 #30DayCompostContentChallenge Mixed food and garden waste has been contributed by community composters - adding fine browns to ensure a good C:N ratio (just going by feel), and a splash of water to ensure good moisture levels to promote active microbial colonisation #KensingtonCompost #CommunityComposting #EarthDayEveryDay @loccal_aus that’s hot

Some of the compost we make can go straight onto soil as nutrient-enriched mulch, but for growing in containers and raised beds, a lot the larger pieces of wood or bark left over from hot composting are too chunky. Especially important when raising seeds... We have rigged up a dedicated screening bay designed to sift out large stuff to send it back through the composting process. The screen is portable and also can used on any other crate or even a ute bed if needed. We have tried ultra-fine 11mm mesh in the past, which is very time consuming to push a full cubic metre of compost through. Using a manual process, 20mm apertures seem like about the right balance for quick sieving and getting a reasonable grade of medium for planting in. This year will be setting up a screening trommel to try and speed the process up even more! #ICAW2024 #compost #naturesClimateChampion #Kensington3031 #KensingtonVic #KensingtonCompost #CommunityComposting #EarthDayEveryDay #CircularEconomy #betterSoilBetterLifeBetterFuture #30DayCompostContentChallenge Soil Sisters Singleton LOcal Community Compost ALliance (LOCCAL) City Compost Network City of Melbourne International Compost Awareness Week

Screening a batch of finished compost at Kensington Town Hall Compost Hub

Our volunteers are at the hub each weekend! Last week we added a lid mechanism to make it easier for you to compost.

Is that actually compostable?

Hey composters! We are taking a weekend off over the holidays, we will be checking in and making sure things are ticking along, but there will be no inductions next Sunday. Also, check out the first edition of 'is that actually compostable?' featuring a compostable plastic bag. Stay tuned for an update in 2020!

Shortcuts

Kensington Closed Loop Project

The Compost Hub consists of compost bays, located at the back of the Kensington Town Hall building. Along with the Stockyard Community Garden and through the support of the community, we seek to create a closed-loop food system.

The City of Melbourne has provided a compost hub in response to community demand to process organic waste locally and thus reduce the amount of household food waste going into landfill.

Many residents do not compost at home due to a lack of space, lack of skills and/or living in medium to high density housing without access to home gardens. Compost bays have been installed at the back of the Kensington Town Hall to be easily accessible to the wider community 24/7.

Other benefits include: decreasing greenhouse gas emissions and producing a product containing valuable nutrients for vegetable plots and plant growth for residential or community gardens.