A blooming good weekend

IDEAL weather conditions last Saturday saw four Heathcote gardens open to raise funds for the SES.

The gardens ranged in ages from two-years-old to 90-years-old. Visitor Barbara Clement was impressed by the variety.

“The gardens are mind-boggling,” she said. “All the work that has gone into them is amazing.

“It is really good to have open gardens here in Heathcote.”

SES member Sally Duncan said everyone was thrilled with the response to the event.

“Last Saturday, four amazing Heathcote families offered their gardens to be part of an Open Garden event,” she said.

“All proceeds went to support the Heathcote SES with fund raising for a new 4WD Rescue truck.

“The weather was beautiful and encouraged well over 100 visitors to our four open gardens.

“Many of these were from Heathcote and surrounds, but we also attracted a good number of visitors from afar.

“In addition, with extremely generous support from many local traders, we were able to offer tickets in a Mega-Raffle. Some of the gardeners also made available seedlings and seeds at bargain prices.”

Organiser, Deb Williams, was delighted with the outcome.

“The event has raised close to $4,000, and more donations are coming in,” she said. “This is an incredible outcome.

“At SES we are very grateful to our community for this amazing support.

“We need to raise $150,000 for the new Rescue Truck, so this amount of fund raising is a real boost.

“We received some really lovely comments in the visitor books, and it was great to have the hard work so appreciated by all.

“The 19 raffle prizes are being distributed and now we have a big job to make sure we thank everyone who contributed to the success of this event”.

Heathcote SES provide emergency response all hours, every day of the year, for road crash rescue, storm and flood and work closely with partner emergency service organisations.