The rain may have deterred some potential expo-goers, but it certainly wasn't slowing the vegetables down! Not having visited Northey Street Farm for a number of months, I was excited to see this new structure greet me on my way in! It's their new education centre, which they've obviously been working hard on since the City Council gave them a grant. It's great to see these guys getting real support for the amazing work they do, and it was very exciting to see the building they'd come up with.
There were some great stallholders at the Expo, like Mi-Essence which produces natural perfumes, and Wort Organics which produces some of the finest tasting lemon and ginger based soft-drinks that even in their sugar free form are bloody good. There were also some great Organic newsletters around with organic trade directories, as well as stalls with information on Vegan & sustainable living. And of course, the edible landscapes nursery blew me away as usual with their range of delicious looking plants and fruit trees!

Tom, Australian Organic Certified Tampon

One of the magazines I picked up, 'Australian Certified Organic Magazine', which strangely enough is full of advertisements for organic products, has an article on Time Of the Month or TOM tampons - the first organically certified tampon. Cotton is a bit of a bastard on the environment because of the heavy spraying it tends to get, so it's nice to know that there's a tampon around that isn't packed with chemicals. Aimee Marks, the young designer of the TOM tampon says that when researching her product, she discovered that "The ingredients on the back of conventional tampon packs included things like rayon, viscose, polypropylene with a cotton string. In simple terms: tree pulp, synthetics and plastics. I then discovered cotton is considered to be the most highly sprayed crop on the planet." TOM contains only organic cotton. Simple yet clever, no?