Renegade gardeners take fight to councils in race to beat the heat

Published in ABC News, 22 September 2019.

It’s a Sunday morning in Pascoe Vale South, a northern suburb of Melbourne, and Serena Everill is digging in her front garden.

She stops when she sees me, and we walk to her nature strip where a small raised garden bed sits not quite flush with the kerb. A few tiny seedlings sprout from the dirt: basil left over from summer, silver beet and leek.

Serena, a member of the Moreland Food Gardens Network, lobbied her local council for over a decade so residents could grow food on their nature strips.

“A whole mob of us got involved,” she says. “It took us years, maybe even 12 years of advocating to council to get a policy around growing food on Moreland’s natures strips.”

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