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!

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

Sign-up Day!

Drum-roll please...

The moment you've all been waiting for has arrived!

If you'd like to join Narrandera Food Garden as a community gardener, head along to the Garden at 11:30am Sunday November 2nd 2014. Narrandera Food Garden is located at the showground, next to the Men’s Shed.

There will be committee members at the Garden from 11:30am until 1pm taking membership subscriptions.

For $40 you will get your own plot for a twelve month period, to plant up with whatever herbs and vegetables you like. This year the committee will be providing seedlings and seeds at no additional cost - and of course there will always be someone available to give you planting advice should you need it.

There will also be a series of workshops held for members throughout the year – keep an eye on this blog and the Narrandera Food Garden Facebook page for details.

If you are unable to make it on November 2nd, but would like to become a member please drop us a line on Facebook or call Julie on 69592440. (Please don't state your interest in a comment here on the blog, as we might not see it.)

Narrandera Food Garden is a family-friendly environment and we welcome members of all ages, abilities and gardening experience - so if you'd like to learn new gardening skills, share the skills you have, or simply make new friends, come along and join the fun!

Composting tips with Sophea

This weekend the Time Space Place: Nomad Project Performance Space project was hosted at Narrandera by The Cad Factory, and took up residence for a few days beside our Garden.

One of the artists, Sophea Lerner, is passionate about composting, both at home in her apartment and while she travels. Sophea and her friends were happy to work with Narrandera Food Garden to make use of our compost tumblers while they were in residence, and in return Sophea shared some of her home composting tips with us.

While in Narrandera, Sophea also showed us her portable 'garden in a suitcase', and some of her friends conducted wild-greens foraging activities and created artworks based on the edible plants they found. (If any readers have photos of these let us know!)

Sophea Lerner sharing some of her composting tips with Narrandera Food Gardeners and friends

One of Sophea's key tips: make sure you have enough (chemical free!), carbon-rich, dry, 'brown' waste - such as shredded paper, dried hay, or dead leaves - to balance your nitrogen-rich, wet, food scraps or fresh garden clippings. This will help your scraps break down into rich, friable compost, and avoid becoming slimy and smelly. Keeping your wet scraps covered by a dry layer can also help keep pests out of your compost.

Sophea preparing to open the compost tumbler after 
several days of adding food scraps

Inspecting the compost in the tumbler

 - it was a little wet, we needed to add more brown matter!

Four-footed gardener Gigi learned a few tips as well (and caught us a mouse)

Gardening Workshops

We held a number of gardening workshops in the early part of 2014 - Urban Garden Design, Soils and Composting, Low-Water Use Gardening, Companion Planting, and Goring Vegetables. These were delivered by Karen McLennan of Karen McLennan Permaculture. They were a huge success!

 

Our Youngest Gardener

                                                  Zoeay Hodgetts with her mum Tammy.

Making Mosaic Pavers for our Gardens

Julie Roffe and Joyce Spencer getting things moving.

Jeanette Miller and Julie Roffe

Caitlin,Tim, Jeanette, Nathan, Layla and Jessica and volunteers, working on a few dozen beautiful pavers for our Narrandera Food Garden.

Resources and Learning

We are beginning to get together a collection of resources our gardeners can use over the future years of community gardening. This is the worlds largest catalogue of heirloom seeds. A good start.

News from the Wiradjuri Food Garden

Hi all,
This garden is at the rear of the Sandhills Foundation in Audley Street. I ate snowpeas fresh picked from the vine just this morning. It is so so lush!  It was planted up by a group of Year 7 - 10 students and a small group of community Elders who regularly visit the foundation.  As you can see the raised beds are working a treat.  Thanks to Cory Prior who checks on the garden and waters daily.  It's at picking stage so it's wonderful to know our elders are picking salad items and taking them home.

Tomatoes, lettuce and companion plants - marigold. The marigolds are doing their job. They attract the bugs that would normally attack the tomatoes. Might need to plant more Marigolds - they have been much munched upon!

 
The citrus goes in.

Uncle Kevin gives our seedlings some attention.


Very pleased with ourselves.

You have to agree - that is success!!!!.  And I ate snow peas straight from the vine.

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