Crimson Red

There’s rumblings and whispers in our little valley of starting a food co-op, well… I say whispers but once you start putting notices in the local newsletter advertising a fact-finding trip to another food co-op nearby I guess it’s gone past that stage. Anyway, we met at Hollisdale hall in the morning and before you could say “allons-y” our little convoy was off, winding our way across and up to Comboyne. Like any good fact-finding mission there had been time allocated for drinking, but as it was morning tea time we settled for a yummy coffee at the little café in Comboyne, right next door to the Comboyne Hall where Elly directs the local choir on Tuesday nights.


And what a hall it is. Sadly the ceiling at Hollisdale Hall has been lowered so that it sits flat at the top of the walls but at Comboyne the ceiling is high, leaving the big timbers exposed and consequently a bigger, more impressive space. It’s also got a funky paint job, a stage and extra little ornamenty bits that really tie the room together.


Our trip was to the little village of Elands, higher again than Comboyne and further out – big trees and steep country. Em and I are having a Radiohead and REM revival at the moment, all the mellow, soaring songs, and we wound our way through the hills singing along with Thom and Michael. The food co-op in Elands has been going for over thirty years and has obviously evolved along the way but it has presently come to rest in the corner of an enormous old shed that was once a sawmill. Quite an amazing space but waaaaaaaay to big for my liking – I imagine it would be perfect for a shed co-op. Enough room for at least a dozen workshops along the sides and then a big space in the middle for big projects, a fire pit and a pool table. And a swimming pool. It is a big space.


We were early so we went and checked out the beautiful Ellenborough Falls and then headed back to the co-op for a yummy lunch with our kind hosts and a guided tour of their set-up. We came away with heads full of seeds, ideas growing in our minds. If we are going to get a food co-op going I think we’ll need a very clear, simple objective that we can promote and refer to; we’ll also need a core group of people with lots of energy and enthusiasm prepared to drive it; and we’ll need to do it well. Judging by the experience of our little field trip I think it’s going to happen. And once again thanks go to Elly for organising it all.


We also came away with a return trip planned in a couple of weeks to get some rhubarb crowns from a fellow Zombie Apocolypse’r we met who is dividing up his patch soon. He grows a variety called Sydney Crimson Red which has a sublime colour – far better than the pink-tinged green stuff that we grow now. We had some with custard for dessert – delicious! Anyway, I must go, we’re off to PLAGGA today and poor Em has gastro, out the front as I write this, doing her best impersonation of a dog barking underwater. We’re converts to Ken’s approach to gastro – at the first sign of any belly shenanigans drink lots of water and make yourself vomit until it is all out. Too much detail?