Well we had another well attended day at the gardens on Sunday. The air was crisp and the sun was shining hard at us and the plants. It has been fairly dry in the last month or so which has been a bit strange after complaining about too much rain for the last 2 years while the La Niña has been pelting us with water. We are in a neutral period currently according to the Australian Weather Bureau.

We started with a discussion about some of the mid to longer term projects we need to work on at the gardens including starting up a new ‘Arborist’ group who will be more regularly running sessions along side (or part of) the Sunday volunteers sessions and helping to focus maintenance on the trees like the heritage Apple Walk which is in dire need of a clean up and reshaping. Anyone interested in learning about shaping fruit trees and participating should keep an eye out for when these sessions are coming up via this blog.

We then directed our attention to the kiwifruit vine and trimmed it down for winter. This involved trimming most errant stems down to between 2 -5 leaf nodes and trying to disentangle the vine from the nearby umaboshi plum trees. We now have 3 fast growing female vines and one male vine planted around the central open space – all of which seem to like the local growing conditions. We cleaned up the resultant female vine cuttings for reshooting and growing in Spring.

We have plans for more plantings of both Kiwifruit and Kiwiberries (arguta) elsewhere in the gardens this next year as it appears it’s an ideal climate and location for growing them. However they need large and solid support to grow the vines on.

After this we continued our planned refurbishment and cleanup and raising of the beds located near the mud hut.

Then we ran out of time… as usual many thanks to all those who turned up to help out!

Next Sunday on the 27th of May for this time slot we have an offsite visit planned to a garden in Mount Tomah to talk about and look at Berries! We will be meeting beforehand at 9am at the gardens to arrange car pooling to get there. ( It takes up to 1 hour to drive there). We have limited spaces available so if you have not signed up yet give us a yell here on the blog or drop one of us an email – or turn up to the Friday session and let us know of your interest.

After a quick catch up from Lloyd on this busy Sunday there’s lots of activity in the gardens, one group is busy looking after annual vegetable and flower beds, from across the soup garden I see compost loaded into wheelbarrows and added to the scented rose bed. Another group meet to take a walk and review fruit trees, which require seasonal and regular tending as well as some specialist tools and skills. Already core volunteers shaped the circle of umeboshi plum trees for our big open day recently, but there are over a hundred trees on this site, and care has bad years as well as good ones, so not all the trees are in great shape today. Wayne, Brian Sue and I take an observation stroll through the apple tree walk, and with pruning loppers in hand is it not long before some emergency dead limb removal takes place. On the other side of the apple walk, are quinces, medlar and stone fruits.

As we examine the medlar, it turns out there are a couple of ripe fruits there, which of course we have to try. Rebekah suggests that although raw, they taste almost like a cooked fruit, indeed the flavour is comparable to a filling scooped from the loveliest of Danish pastries. The second is over ripe and dry but nontheless reminds me of Malt loaf, in colour and texture as well as flavour

In June a workshop is organised in conjunction with Transition Blue Mountains and the Fruit and Nut Tree Network. We will focus on pruning stone fruit trees along with this medlar tree, which are all looking a little straggly these days, in the process revitalising their beauty as well as their ability to bring us more fruit! To book in, check out the details over at the Fruit and Nut Tree Network site.

On Tuesday we had a group visit the community gardens hosted by the Blue Mountains  Cittaslow movement. http://www.cittaslow.org.au/

Cittaslow (pronounced “CHITTA-slow”) is an Italian idea developed from the *Slow Food movement. Cittaslow towns take the time to identify what is important and special about that town and its surrounding area and put in place strategies to preserve their unique qualities, making life better for everyone.
The “Global Village” may have created unparalleled opportunities for the exchange of goods and ideas, but it can also lead to the proliferation of uniformity which stifles individuality and creativity at the local level.

This included people from the Blue Mountains City council and other councils.

Also Yea and Goolwa - http://www.cittaslowgoolwa.com.au/australia.html

We talked about the history of the local Blue Mountains Community gardens and about some of the processes and politics involved in running a volunteer community garden space – for example – a community garden that is run without individual plots and funded mainly through locals contributions in work, time and ‘in kind’ donations.

We are always happy to receive visitors like this and welcome the opportunity to talk about the way we do things and what we would like to do in the future.

Well autumn/winter has blown in right on time… we had a brisk session today with temp down around 10c. We refurbished a small garden plot near the main mud hut that had been overrun with Greater Celandine and Buttercup.

Part of this was to re-use some of the biodegradable waste that was donated to us by the organisers of the Wilderness Society WildEndurance 100km team challenge event that was held on the 5th-6th of May recently up here in the Blue Mountains.

After delivery it had been placed in some general piles of other compost material we had going and today much of it has been fully ‘embedded’ in an active garden bed.

We then covered this with more developed compost and leaf mulch etc. to make a raised bed.

This bed will be used for more vegetables and herbs.

Thanks to those who turned up to help today

The WildEndurance event organisers also dropped off (after the event) some boxes of left over bananas that were shared amongst some of the regular gardens volunteers. Most of them ended up being dried – very tasty and a great way to preserve them. Here are some before and after shots