Written by New day, new time, new venue! I’d love some comments from those that went as to what you thought of the afternoon. I thought it was really good. The Community Gardens is shaping up to be a lovely space to be and I for one prefer the idea of being outdoors to inside! We started with pizza lunch and kudos must go to Serge for his efforts in making the dough, putting together and cooking the pizzas, and to Regula for her efforts in buying all the topping ingredients and all the chopping. I had the very difficult task of making the tomato base……ha ha, that was a bonus for me, because we didn’t use it all and now I have enough tomato base in my freezer for at least 2 or 3 pizza meals at home.
We had a good rollup to the lunch and then to the meeting with a few (sort of) newcomers – welcome to Alison and Skye, Annette, Phil and Shane. Some of you may have been regulars before, but not in the couple of years I’ve been around so……welcome and if you’re reading this and haven’t been to a meeting for a long time, please come along next month and see what you think of the new venue etc. Next month we won’t have pizza – that is way too much work for a regular occurrence. However, we will start with a shared lunch. I also thought it was nice to start with lunch and having a good chat first before getting into the meeting.
Shane started off proceedings by discussing a plan he has to expand upon his own experimental farming, which I wrote about in a previous blog post here: https://gympiepermaculture.com.au/seed-saver-workshop-and-garden-walk-at-serges-place/ . He would like to get other growers on board that would like to help him by growing out some of his varieties of plants in a trial format. He wants to see what sort of diversity he can develop by growing in different areas around Gympie to select the best plants for this area. Shanes’ view is that we need to be growing plants that want to grow here, plants that are resilient to this climate and that will produce reliably without too many inputs or too much pest impact. For example, crossing the tough little cherry tomato that doesn’t seem to be affected by fruit fly with a larger eating tomato – the result giving a robust tomato plant resistant to fruitfly. If you are keen to read more about Shane and his work, you can find him on substack and this post gives a good explanation of what he’s doing: https://zeroinputagriculture.substack.com/p/vegetable-breeding-redux-2024
If you’d like to be involved, send him a message through substack or on this email: [email protected] He’s asking for expressions of interest in his variety trial/breeding program:
- Shane will supply seeds or seedlings – a minimum of 3 varieties and up to 12
- You would grow them out under your usual gardening conditions
- Save and return seed from the best produce – this will be defined by Shane
Please direct all correspondence on this to Shane as mentioned above.
Phil suggested that the Gympie Permaculture Group provide funds to install a rocket stove at the Community Gardens (in lieu of rent, which we are not paying anyway). This would make boiling the kettle more energy efficient by using twigs and branches rather than gas. A great idea I think!
Regula has started spring planting, as have Lissa and Des (I’m jealous that I haven’t yet!) Regula also acknowledged Foz’s efforts in the compost building at the Gardens. If you want to know how to establish a good compost system, head over and check out the bays there – 3 bays, a full cubic metre each and made out of solid timber. They are very substantial and work well. The full bay was so hot.
Serge has been busy butchering a cow over the last couple of weeks. He has set up and ingenius cold hanging space in an old freezer. I believe he’s even making sausage skins out of the intestines. That’s an effort and such a great example of the permaculture principle – create no waste! Of course, there’ll still be waste, but that takes nose to tail eating to the extreme.
Rhonda has had an epic passionfruit harvest this year and brought along plenty to share. I am collecting the seeds as I type this. serge’s suggestion was to suck the juice off the seed. Believe me this is not fun!
Pete gave a quick update on the Community Gardens – 50 native plants have been donated by Landcare and will be planted soon. Work to establish paths and a nursery are in progress. They would like to focus on growing annuals to harvest for a community feast once a month.
Foz recently visited a friend out Kilkivan way that has established a native flower farm. He said it’s going to be amazing in a couple of weeks when the plants are flowering. We discussed organising a tour out to have a look. Stay tuned for more on that.
Florence mentioned that there’s a lady going to the Museum Markets that sells seedlings. They are good quality and are doing well in her garden. Her name is Stephanie Chadwick and business is called New Leaf Horticulture.
Renee has been busy pruning etc. She’s also late getting some cabbages in but still hoping for a harvest for making sauerkraut. Hope she does better than I did!
Jo and George are using edibles for a privacy screen along their boundary fence. Much more sensible than ornamentals, in my opinion. They’ve chose bananas and Panama berries.
Alison and Skye have chickens, which is great for their egg supply, but they are causing havoc around the gardens. Foz suggested going to the tip shop and getting the trays out of old fridges and using these (or other mesh) around the base of vulnerable plants.
Annette likes gardening and uses pots mostly as her ground is very hard. A couple of suggestions came forward on this: no dig gardening using cardboard and mulch and/or above ground beds and using hügelkultur principles to fill them up.
Lucy (me) is desperate to grow a good crop of tomatoes this year and will trial planting them, as well as eggplant, zucchini, capsicum (and maybe more) on the syntropic row she has established below a contour. This has recently been planted with fruit trees.
Danny is still enjoying his cows. He is amazed how they’ve cleaned and eaten so much grass in areas that he doesn’t normally access or use. The expression for this is using the cows as a tractor. They can cause damage in the wrong spot if they get out and they also take quite a bit of work, as he moves electric fencing and water around for them.
Phil and Foz have been chipping a lot at the Community gardens and discovered that chipping rosella stems and stalks leaves a lot of soft fibre. Fibre that looks like it could be used to make rope or other material. So keep this in mind if you are yet to remove your old rosella plants.
It was a nice quick meeting this month and as usual, a great opportunity for like-minded people to get together.
On a final note, and a personal one – I also write on Substack. I write about our farm in Langshaw and what we grow to eat, as well as processing it, and generally living a permaculture lifestyle. You can find me and my latest post here: https://anabank.substack.com/p/mushrooms And if you’re interested, I’m almost finished saving the seeds from one passionfruit!
