Blue Mountains Organic Community Gardens

Compost week – May 7-12 2012

nano_entity — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 23:03:05 +0000

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.

Growing vegetables in the mountains

nano_entity — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 05:21:24 +0000

On Sunday March 4th at 12 Midday till 1pm [1 hour max] we have a short workshop & question and answer chat session planned for anyone interested in discussing ‘vegetable’ growing in the mountains. This will follow the usual volunteer session on the Sunday that runs from 10am – 12 midday.

This is a huge and varied subject and the plan is to swap stories and experience with growing the full range of vegetables possible in the Blue Mountains with it’s cool temperate climate. i.e. what to plant when and how to try and fit in with local conditions. We will have some practical suggestions based on local experience with weather and soil, and suggestions for ways to access resources that may help.

Some of the recently formed North Katoomba transition group will be attending.

Sunday volunteers 19 Feb

nano_entity — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 04:45:03 +0000

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.

sunday 12 feb session & local foraging

nano_entity — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 07:16:21 +0000

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.

friday

nano_entity — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 03:24:07 +0000

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.

sunday volunteers

nano_entity — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 07:10:19 +0000

Well the weather has been dire… what happened to our Summer? You could see the nutrients just washing away. And the slugs and snails have been at epidemic levels.

Just a quick update on the sunday sessions so far…

The previous two sundays have been very dismal with pretty heavy rain both sessions and pretty depressing. Despite this there were still a few people who dropped in – mainly accidentally finding out about the sunday sessions on the spot. However they all showed an interest in returning on sundays in the future. All of them people who work during the week and usually unable or unlikely to attend on fridays.

This Sunday there was fantastic weather and a much better turnout with a number of new people coming and going who intend to return on sundays.

From discussing what people were interested in these last three sundays there is interest specifically in:

growing more vegetables onsite [ie more to harvest]
harvesting fruit and vegetables that are onsite
obtaining or swapping seedlings and plants on a regular basis if possible
helping weed, clean up and develop more defined functional spaces in the gardens
learning propagating techniques such as grafting [eg to make use of the heritage apple trees etc]
learning about and swapping information about specific plants that grow well here in the mountains and tips for growing plants better locally
helping develop the new herb garden and learning about herbs and plants uses other than culinary

With this in mind assuming the weather holds out over the next few weeks we will try and work out activities and sessions based on these interests on the day. Hopefully more people will continue to turn up.

This sunday we

weeded some of the cut flower garden – great job new comer Jane!
tended the vegetable garden and tied up tomatoes etc.
planted 2 new citrus trees at north end
added some more damp tolerant plants to the herb garden
made a metal container garden by bolting some old sheet tin together and located it in the carpark area – this is to help clear up and replace the old completely overrun herbs on the left side of the carpark. It still possibly needs painting and the area further cleared around it and then filling with compost and planted with easy access culinary herbs like the ones that were there. This way people can drop in quickly to the gardens and grab a handful of parsley or origano etc without fighting through the inedible weeds.
And I believe Jed progressed the mapping of the gardens significantly

At around 11:30am we had a visit from a group of people from the South Coast transition movement. They seem pretty interesting…

North Katoomba – our sustainable future: meeting this Sunday

Kat Szuminska — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 05:01:25 +0000

North Katoomba – our sustainable future!

 What will our neighbourhood look like in 10 years?
 How can we live sustainably in our local community?
 What can we do to increase our food security and economic resilience?Come and join your neighbours to talk about growing food, building a local economy and lowering our carbon footprint. This is the first step to build neighbourhood transition groups.
Gather for afternoon tea at North Katoomba community gardens, Sunday 29th January at 2 pm. More information: Sue 0418 292 672 or: bmpower@live.com

new volunteer timeslot added on Sundays 10am-12

nano_entity — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:10:53 +0000

A new timeslot for volunteer meetings at the Katoomba community gardens will now be run on Sundays 10am till 12 Midday.

For many working people living in the mountains it is hard to make the current Friday 10am-2pm timeslot. We are keen to get more people involved who cannot make those Friday sessions due to work or other commitments.

These sessions will be only two hours and tend to be focussed on undertaking a specific range of tasks or workshop like activities. It is assumed that the intent is also to meet up with like minded community gardening people and catch up with how the gardens are progressing, swap plants, seeds and information. Feel free to come and help or possibly just watch the plants grow.

The shed will be open and tools available for this two hour period.

The first of these Sunday volunteer sessions will be this coming Sunday 22nd January [2012]

This does not replace the Friday volunteer sessions which will continue as usual each Friday from 10am till 2pm.

physic & herb garden progress

nano_entity — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 11:44:23 +0000

The physic & herb garden progresses...

Phew! the weather has been extreme for a while now… but work is still happening on developing the physic & herb garden.

Stage 3 of the herb garden is complete with a layer of soil now sitting on top of slightly aged base layers of chip, compost, lucerne and straw. The top layer has mushroom compost, cow manure, general compost and a range of other goodies in it. It is about 10-15cm deep all over.
Stage 4 – next work is making the sides more defined and stabilised.
Stage 5 – Given a week to settle this top layer will sink a bit and we can level it again and start planting while adding more soil and mulch as we do it.
It will be complex getting the soil PH and build/texture correct for a lot of the herbs initially but it should support some of the hardier ones now the weather has settled.

2011 in review

Kat Szuminska — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 04:28:45 +0000

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 5,400 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 5 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.