An update from Henley’s Happy Hens

The Happy Hens garden at Henley ended 2022 with a slot on Better Homes and Gardens, much to everyone’s delight. Presenter Graham Ross delved into the gardening and Chef, Presenter Ed Halmagyi made scones for the garden’s volunteers with our homegrown strawberries. They spent two days filming, so we are sure that our garden will pop up over the year. There are already some clips on our website: www. happyhens.org.au

Over the summer, the lovely gentlemen from Hunters Hill Ryde Mens’ Shed custom built us a mobile coffee cart to use as part of our Coffee Project. It fits all our coffee making needs perfectly, plus more, so we are very grateful to them. It was also wonderful to get to know them and learn about the good work they do. Each Friday morning, we open the garden and invite anyone to come by for coffee. We call it our Coffee Project, as we also supply training and materials to people who want to learn barista skills. At the moment, we are working with the students at Riverside Girls High School, but we welcome anyone who would like to meet new people and learn a new skill.

We held some workshops last year for mental health month in October, one of which was making fabric chickens with a lovely group at Henley. We also had a workshop on recycling and will be running a series of workshops in gut health and good mental health, so stay tuned for those in a few months!

Our garden is about to undergo some changes, so if anyone has been wondering about joining a community garden, now is a great time. We have a new hive of native bees which is exciting too! And of course, our happiest of hens have expanded to six with the birth of a couple more ladies who have just started producing eggs. A GREAT time to come and see us!