For those of the composting persuasion there is a event coming up for which we may like to organise some related activities at the Gardens. Any suggestions? Costa is apparently the ambassador for the composting week.

International Composting Awareness Week Australia

Better Soil, Better Life, Better Future

Monday 7 – Saturday 12 May 2012

International Composting Awareness Week Australia (ICAW), is a week of activities, events and publicity to improve awareness about the importance of this valuable organic resource and to promote compost use, knowledge and products. We can compost to help scrap carbon pollution by avoiding landfilling organic materials and helping to build healthier soils.

The Centre for Organic & Resource Enterprises (CORE) is the organiser of ICAW Australia. CORE is a dedicated marketing and research network for participants in the resource recovery, organic and clean-tech sectors.

CORE also organises National Organic Week Australia (NOW) which will take place between Friday 5 and Sunday 14 October 2012.

You couldn’t ask for better weather for gardening in the mountains! The seeds planted last week are already starting to emerge. After we perused the effects of the hail storm during the week we moved on to planting and tending. Thanks especially to recent newcomers Jane, Karen and Nat for participating in some hard labouring!

Activities included:

• tending and tying up the tomatoes and other bendable crops
• turning over and prepping new bulk planting beds for mixed lettuce, radish, rocket, flat parsley some more russian kale
• adding more herbs to the physic herb garden
• weeding the citrus rounds and uncovering the rosemary seedlings that are to form small wavy hedges around them
• some random harvesting of fruit and vegetables
• planting a newly donated fig tree

The squash and pumpkin area has been trashed by the hail but looks like it will grow back quickly [we hope]. And there are a lot of squash still thriving on the vines.

The front area near the car park has been cleaned out for rehabilitation and we can plant out into the raised metal garden next week. There will be several others added in the next week or so for the quick pick herbs to grow in so they stay easily available to garden visitors and accessible from the verge area and we can more easily suppress those surrounding weeds! It is great to see the various areas of the gardens slowly being connected and integrated better – eg. the native plant regen areas and the functional produce spaces.

note – The nashi’s have been great this year – although small they have been very tasty and crunchy and the birds seem to have not discovered them. There are not many left now… too tasty to last.

Well the day was fantastic for gardening so I guess people stayed home and did their own thing this weekend. A very small turnout but we got some weeding done, replaced some damaged seedlings, prepped some more soil and planted out some new seed. Some plants are putting on strong growth and recovering from the heavy rain with even these few slightly warmer & dryer days.

We started the russian kale, spinach, silver beet and several types of beets all from seed.
And two more citrus were planted.

Ever the optimist I believe even (gasp) the tomatoes and corn are looking possible for producing an ok crop! It does seem true that we are about 2 months behind the rest of Sydney in effective planting and growing times. But we can only be positive about the 3 months of the traditionally pleasant mountains autumn we have now before the cold and snap frosts of April kick in…

It’s good to see people harvesting the small squash and Zuchinni’s which are finally producing large numbers.

After the session a few of us went foraging for some excellent local Blackberries. We should probably start a list of good local food sources. We got about 2 kilos and this is what they looked like.

Good to see people turning up for work on friday sessions despite the unpredictable weather. We had a small but ‘quality’ turn out of a few regulars and newcomers

Good news was that the older kiwifruit vine, despite initial appearances, is in fact a female and has been developing fruit this year. The pruning, feeding and tending this last year seems to have paid off. This is good news as we now have 3 established female vines – one of which is significantly developed – and one male vine growing now in the central garden area.