Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

See you all in 2016!

Merry Christmas!

This Friday we created a Christmas 'tree' and hung it on the fence at the gardens. Members are encouraged to add decorations over the upcoming weeks.

Picnic Day every Friday during Daylight Savings

Join us every Friday (or however many you can make it to) until the end of Daylight Savings for a community picnic, arts & crafts, and gardening chat.

Starting 6pm every Friday up at the gardens

FREE - BYO food & drinks 

Craft items and gardening tools provided, or bring your own

Members and non-members are equally welcome so feel free to come along to see what we're about, and bring your family and friends along too.

There will be different gardening and arts & crafts activities held each week, which will be announced on Facebook during the week.

Sign-up & Plant-up Day

Spring has sprung! That means it's time to renew your Narrandera Landcare Food Garden membership for the year (or join us, if you're a newcomer)!

$40 gets you one year membership for an individual, couple or family. This includes membership in the Narrandera Landcare Group and your very own plot up at the Food Garden.

Join us on Saturday September 12 to become a member, or renew your membership, choose your plot and get planting. Seeds and seedlings will be supplied on the day for no additional cost.

See you there!

Bee Hotel Workshop a Great Success!

Thanks a lot to everyone who came along to our bee hotel workshop, and everyone who donated materials - you all helped make the workshop a great success!

Despite the cold, wet, grey weather we had a total of 13 attendees, including five children, and everyone had fun selecting just the right bits and pieces and assembling them in just the right order to make a total of eight differently sized and shaped bee hotels - including one for the Food Gardens, that is now set up beside the shed, so be sure to check it out next time you're gardening!

The new bee hotel at the Food Garden under construction

Read on for more photos.

Of bees, hotels and permaculture gardening

Where would gardeners be without bees? Probably down on our knees with little horse-hair brushes, or busy planting species that attract hoverflies and other pollinators. But many plants are selective about which insect species they’ll share pollen with, and who has time to hand-pollinate an entire garden these days?

Sometimes you just need bees.

Most of us, when we think of bees, think of the introduced European honeybee Apis mellifera, but Australia is also home to around 1500 species of native bees. Some, like the stingless bee Tetragonula carbonaria, form hives and produce honey, but most Australian bees are solitary and nest either in the ground or in small gaps and hollows in timber and stone. All bees are pollinators, although some are able to pollinate a wider variety of plant species than others; some species, like the native blue banded bee (Amegilla cingulata) I spotted up at the gardens earlier this year, are particularly valuable pollinators for food crops, and are a boon to gardeners and farmers alike.

So how can we attract more of these oh-so-helpful solitary bees into our gardens? By building them a hotel of course.

Upcoming Workshop - Making Bee Hotels

Join us up at the gardens on August 1st to make your very own bee hotels to take home (1 per household) - and one for the Narrandera Food Garden!

Places are limited, so please RSVP to a committee member, either by phone or via Facebook. Places are 'per household' so that could be one person, a couple, or a family group, so feel free to come by yourself or bring your partner and kids (or grandma!) along. However, having dogs underfoot could be dangerous, so no pets please.

$15 per 'household', all materials will be provided, and you will get to take your bee hotel home at the end of the day.

We encourage everyone to bring along a picnic lunch, and to stay as long as you like after finishing your hotel.

If anyone would like to sign up to become a garden member on the day, there will be forms available for you to do so.

Keep an eye on this blog for more information about bee hotels in the near future.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Joining forces with Landcare

As you may have already seen on our Facebook page - Narrandera Food Garden is joining forces with Narrandera Landcare Group!

We are doing this because both the Food Garden and the Landcare group are small local community groups and have similar interests (Kimberley and Betty have been members of both all along). Given our overlap in interests, the committees of both organisations thought it made sense to work together and share resources and insurance costs for all our volunteers. This will also help us in our efforts to attract funding for workshops, new gardening resources, and guest speakers, as we will no longer be competing against the Landcare group for the same grants.

Joining forces with the Landcare group will also give us the chance to get to know other local volunteers and share our ideas and expertise with each other, which of course is the reason many of us joined the community gardens in the first place!



What does this mean for members?
All paid-up members of the Food Garden are now also members of the Landcare group; from now on your $40 to become a gardener and secure your own plot for the year will likewise cover a year's membership with the Landcare group. This is an inclusive cost - there is no extra fee to cover Landcare membership, it's just the same $40 it's always been.

Does this mean members have to attend Landcare group meetings and activities? 
No. You may attend or not attend Landcare meetings and other events as you please, there is no obligation to go to monthly meetings if you'd rather not, although you will be most welcome if you do choose to go along, the Landcare group are a friendly bunch and would love to meet new people.

What does it mean for the Food Garden and committee?
The Food Garden will continue to operate as usual, with its own committee (now officially a sub-committee of the Landcare group, who will represent the Gardens at Landcare meetings), and we will stick to our plan of having get-togethers and workshops throughout the year. Both organisations will continue to maintain their own Facebook pages and websites/blogs.



In short: Food Garden members are now members of Landcare at no extra cost and are encouraged attend Landcare meetings and events if they so wish, but if you'd rather ignore the whole Landcare side of things you can continue on as normal and nothing will change.

If you'd like to find out more about the Landcare group you can visit their website or Facebook page, or head along to a Landcare meeting (held the 4th Tuesday of every month at 7:30pm at the Ex-Servicemen's Club).

Beneficial Insects in the Narrandera Food Garden

Hi all, Kimberley here. I recently attended a workshop on Beneficial Insects and thought you all might be interested in learning a bit about them too.

Read on to find out why I was excited to see this guy

At the Narrandera Food Garden we are trying to adopt permaculture principles into our gardening practices. Permaculture is all about working with nature to achieve an end goal that is beneficial for all. This means trying to encourage natural pollinators and pest control agents, rather than poisoning our environment, ourselves, and all those ‘good’ bugs (and the things that eat them!) out there by using pesticides and herbicides.

We live in a very chemical-based society, and it’s so easy to get caught up in thinking that we have to use pesticides and herbicides all the time to get rid of weeds and pests. However, this over-reliance on chemical controls has been proven to result in not only the loss of plants, insects and animals that can help us control the ‘bad guys’ but also to create environments that encourage weed growth and pest attacks (invasive weeds are the first to encroach on bare ground after weed spraying, due to the lack of competition; and loss of predatory insects, due to broad-scale pesticide use, can give the pest species that emerge later free reign). Agricultural scientists are also finding that weed and pest species are developing resistances to commonly-used pesticides and herbicides, making them less effective, and forcing chemical control companies to develop ever more potent poisons. The end result of this cycle is a higher and higher reliance on chemical controls as we steadily remove harmless and beneficial species from our gardens and crops, and more and more chemicals going on and into our food, soil, water and air. The only winners in this cycle are the chemical companies.

Narrandera Food Garden Rules

Are you a new member?
Would you like a reminder of the NFG rules?
Did we forget to give you a list of rules when you signed up and you had no idea there were any?
Don't worry, they're not onerous.

Download your own copy here!

*Please note: There is not currently a formal watering roster in place - please check with other gardeners regarding current watering practises.

Get-together March 2nd

Several of our gardeners, committee members and friends got together on Monday evening to enjoy a picnic in the gardens, discuss upcoming plans for the year and swap great tips for both gardening and cooking.

Keep your eyes on this blog and our Facebook page for more information about this year's workshops, working-bees and just-for-fun get-togethers!

Gardeners Get-together March 2nd