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!

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.

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)

The Grand Opening

What a great day. a good crowd came to see Deputy Mayor Jim Howard officially opening the gardens and plant a Robinia in the centre of the gardens to mark the day (6th June 1014 by the way).

                                          They're arriving!

                                          They're here.

                                         Some of our guests planted up a raised bed, under                                                                                    the direction of the fabulous Karen Lenehan.

Prepping for the Opening

 We planted a few beds up to show how it's done Signs and bunting up too.

The Fairy Garden

            Mia Hallie and Nate Briggs's Fairy Garden - ready for our opening planned for 6 June.

Pavers Down!

 Ok - we have pavers in place, and our raised beds look about right where they are too.

Our first wicking garden - in a raised bed.

Well in week three of the Links to Learning relationship with Narrandera Food Garden the students built a wicking garden. A wicking garden is a system in which water is retained in the gravel at the base of the bed, and only moves up as the earth above dries out. It's a simple permaculture principle and reduces water use by reducing evaporation and reduces the frequency with which watering is required by retaining water within the loop until it's needed by the plants.

TAFE teacher Karen Lenehan demonstrated the way a wicking bed works first using a small one made using a polystyrene box, gravel, shade cloth, soil and a poly pipe. It's simple, anyone can do it. Karen has built 5 larger beds at home and she only needs to water weekly or less.

The students laying the shade cloth (you can use weed mat in the base of the garden.

With pond liner in on top of weed mat - the gravel layer goes in.

Our first garden bed

In October the phone rang and it was TAFE Teacher Karen Lenehan. Karen was looking for a garden for her students to work on. She had 4 mornings in which to take the boys through some units of study that where essential to their graduation. It just happened that Narrandera TAFE admin manager Heidi Loggemen had attended our Permaculture workshop and was able to tell Karen about our NFG.

She had found the right place. Karen inspected the gardens and we agreed that we would create a no-dig garden bed in week one, plant it up in week two, then build a Wicking garden in one of our raised corrugated iron beds in week three and plant up in week four. I undertook that these beds would be maintained over the long term by NFG.


Karen describes how the keyhole garden should look.

First you measure out the key hole shape.

Then you start adding layers.

Then you wet it all through and leave it (say a week) to start composting. After a few days it should feel hot if you put a finger down through the mix.  Ours was steaming on plant up day.

 

This should be good to plant up soon.

And the seedlings go in.

More from the Men's Shed team

Well we needed some picnic tables - two for the Community GArdens at the Sandhills Aboriginal Advancement Foundation in Audley Street (which by the way looks fantastic!) and one for the NFG/ the Men's Shed took on the project and with the generosity of Grants Sawmilling created some low cost and very solid tables. I've since heard we have several umbrellas coming out way, thank you to Tammy Galvin and Jim Knagge for these.

We're making great progress. Actually the Men's Shed members are keeping their eyes out for anything that may be useful to us re landscaping or decorating. We have wood blocks and antenae towers already which we can certainly use.

Julie

Pretty good work, I think you'll agree.

Infrastructure away!

The news now is that we have our space fenced and we have negotiated a further 10m  x 17m of the cattle yeards to be fenced after April 2014.

The men from the men's shed have erected our garden shed on the slab, so now we have a place to put our gear.

I've started purchasing our tools, and also some basic materials in bags (so that they are easily moved as we landscape the garden).

A job well done.

Let's Get Started

Hi all, Narrandera's Food Garden is coming to Narrandera Showgrounds soon!

We've made a great start with a fabulous workshop on Saturday 3 August led by Permaculture expert Cecelia Macaulay. (Special thanks to Tammy Galvin and family for looking after Cecilia for the weekend) Cecilia unwrapped before our eyes gift after gift. The gifts were insights into just how Permaculture works and how its principles, derived from nature can transform our gardens, our homes and our lives.

We learned practical things we can do, create, and dream-up that will make our garden sustainable, productive and fun.

There'll be loads of waus you can be involved.
You can

• help create the basic structure, yes a little bit of landscaping to be done
• create garden art
• donate garden features and materials (we are working on a wish list) to make the garden funky as well as plant and people friendly
• sponsor the gardens
• contribute gardening tips or great recipes to this blog
• serve on the Food Garden Committee - we only need a small group
• mentor new gardeners
• make friends - not compulsory, but it will happen, watch out!
• share in the creation of the shady sunny, cool, warm, green, worm friendly, people friendly garden

...and garden - compost, plant, water, pick!

We've a great plot of land at the Showgrounds thanks to the Narrandera Showground Trust and we are hot to trot. The area will be fenced in a week or so. The Narrandera Shed for Men has built some raised garden beds from re-cycled corrugated iron for us and they will construct our garden shed as well. Thanks gentlement! I think we'll be great neighbours.

Enough for now. Call me, the Live Well Narrandera Project Officer, Julie Briggs at Narrandera Shire on 02 6959 5510 to get involved.