Carol for Gardeners

City Farm Community Garden, Ash Island Hexham

To the tune of "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen"

"Come all you weary gardeners

Don't throw your rakes away

The weeds aren't always thick and high 

The way they are today

Our pumpkins make the sweetest pie

The beans reach to the sky

We've got corn, peas and lettuces

Spinach by the ton

Melons, radish, carrots and some capsicum

Cabbage moths and funguses 

Will always pass us by

There's hoverflies and dragonflies

And ladybugs as well

The garlic spray annoys the pests 

And makes them run away

We have creeping crawly worms, bugs, wasps

Beetles and bees

And never ever aches or muddy knees

We know it is impossible

For choko vines to die

Our tanks will always be full up

The soil will never dry

Magic garden gnomes will work

While we sit idly by

We'll have gardening in comfort and joy

Comfort and Joy

We'll have gardening in comfort and Joy!"

Costa wants more weeds

Costa and Kathy Heyman

Costa talking to the "Elders" of March Street Community Garden and as you can see, very comfortable on the purple caterpillar

The pizza oven tended by Alex

The evening was full of colour and fun

Some of the crowd of over a hundred

Costa was inspired to visit Newcastle's community gardens after seeing Jamie's "Placestory" about Villiers Street and the need to move. Jamie Pomfrett and Jenny Cameron have collaborated to bring the story of many of the community gardens into context. A garden is not just a garden. It's a place where friendships build, individuals use and sometimes abuse them in their own way, food is grown and shared. Community gardens of all types are keepers of the knowledge of growing food in a social setting. They are a buffer against the reduction in home-grown produce. Over 50% of Australia's food is now imported. Costa says we should all be like the weeds in a bitumen carpark, getting seeds germinating in tiny cracks, wriggling roots into the soil, forming mycorrhizal connections with soil fungi, breaking down the barriers to water and bringing back productivity and growth, regenerating the land. "Be weeds" he said!  He has an hour-long special on Australia Day - worth recording if you can't watch it on the day.

Urban farm in Detroit USA 

Here's an idea for Newcastle.
As Costa says, even if your garden is one plant in a pot you are a farmer. Putting the areas of all the big, little, guerilla and domestic gardens together there is a considerable mosaic of farm-land.  In Newcastle there is a large piece of degraded land between  Throsby Creek, the railway line and Chatham Road, Hamilton North. It is roughly triangular, about 450 Metres by about 170 Metres so it is approximately 38 Hectares.  Some nice old brick buildings on it and enormous potential for an urban farm. Preserve some of our built heritage and re-use it as a base for a community green space producing food, now there's an idea.

Sunflowers, mathematics and Fibonacci

The Fibonacci numbers are the numbers in the following integer sequence

0,1,1,2,3,5,8,.13,21,34,55

By definition, the first two Fibonacci numbers are 0 and 1, and each subsequent number is the sum of the previous two. Some sources begin the sequence with two 1s. 

The Fibonacci sequence is named after Leonardo of Pisa, known as Fibonacci (a contraction of filius Bonacci, "son of Bonaccio").  Fibonacci sequences are used in finance and also appear in biological settings, such as branching in trees and in the model for the pattern of florets in the head of a sunflower. There is a formula which explains how the seeds pack together with the greatest efficiency, resulting in a spiral pattern.

Two very large sunflower heads with the spiral pattern very clear

 Mathematics - the language of Nature. If you want to know more follow this link to wikipedia and Fibonacci

Costa will visit Newcastle on December 13th

The plan is for everyone to gather around 6pm and share food, and then from 8pm we'll have the outdoor screening of stories from the PlaceStories website. Please bring seats/blankets to sit on. The Croatian Club will be open and serving drinks (and that's where we'll go if it's raining).

Re Food.
The pizza oven will be going from 6pm, and Fig Tree have kindly offered to make pizza bases. But that means we need to bring toppings, especially the basic cheese and tomato paste.  And it would be good to have some finger food that doesn't need to go into the pizza oven (just so people get fed!).

So could everyone coordinate within their community garden group to make sure that people bring along some of the basic cheese and tomato toppings, plus some extra toppings, as well as some finger food that doesn't need to go into the oven.

http://www.sbs.com.au/shows/costa 

The previous posts tell the story of why Costa is coming to Newcastle.

Echium in flower at Aldinga Community Garden in South Australia

Jamie's Placestory and our Placemaking grant from NCC

http://ps3beta.com/story/15127

Copy and paste this link into your browser  or click on the link

 http://ps3beta.com/story/15127

Jamie has produced a "Placestory" as a brief introduction to the transition Villiers Street Comunity Garden made to becoming Church Street Community Garden.  We are all waiting to see if a notable TV gardening presenter will be able to launch it very soon.  

But wait! there's more! We are in the process of receiving a "Placemaking" grant from Newcastle City Council, just the paperwork and funds transfer to complete. This grant, combined with the grant we received for Villiers Street as a seed grant, is a huge boost to us. From little things big things grow. 

We are very grateful to NCC for the financial support we have received. Gratitude is one of the least long-lived emotions, so we will use the cash to turn it into long-term social, emotional and environmental gold in our local community. The grant application was for a picnic setting which is safe and suitable for public use, and for an event to promote membership and community participation in the garden.  Now we will have the pleasure and fun of making it all happen.

Church Street Community Garden Inc is an autonomous community group hosted by St Andrew's Mayfield. Rev Andrew emailed the link 

 http://www.insights.uca.org.au/2010/11november/community-garden.html

to a Uniting Church newsletter and it shows just how community, humanity and environmental stewardship unites us all. 

 

The picture is apropos absolutely nothing in particular except, is this what bakers do when they are bored stiff?  Driving from Adelaide to Ardrossan on Yorke Peninsula, stopped at an eatery for lunch and there were these wild cakes.

 

And another, just because the sky and the sea at Ardrossan were being gorgeous.

Aldinga Community Garden in South Australia and Aldinga Aero Club

On holidays in SA we checked how things are going at "our" house of 8 years ago, how the Aldinga Aero Club is going (I was the founding President nearly 20 years ago) and to see what has happened at new-ish community gardens at Symonds Reserve Aldinga.  The nearly 1400 Eucalyptus cladocalyx (South Australian Sugar Gum) we planted on "our" 4 acres 12 years ago after we bull-dozed the almond trees are MONSTER tall. The aim of growing them was as possible wood fire fuel and garden mulch, or maybe just let them grow and grow. They were planted on 3M by 2M spacings so they go straight up tall and clean of low branches. They can be cut to the ground and will resprout - epicormic growth. The regrowth can be chainsawed back to one main leader and hey presto the tree grows again, and can be cut again - twice more in fact- when the trunk has reached the height needed. This becomes a carbon cycle of taking in carbon while growing, storing it as the growth matures, releasing it again when harvested, then storing it again as the tree grows. Ultimately the tree is best left alone, perhaps after the grove is thinned out to give each tree more light and share of water.  Very mature Euc cladocalyx make good furniture timber, bees love the flowers for honey, and as the adiabatic winds (gully winds) which pour off the Sellicks hills in Summer are pretty fierce at night, they really shelter the house and other garden plants.

"Our" house faced north and looked over what became vines after the almond industry moved to the Riverland. The house is built of cement-stabilised rammed earth, walls 30cms thick, local Willunga slate on the floor. A very simple rectangular house and very comfortable. We used to fly gliders at Gawler and the airstrips there are cement stabilised rammed earth, built early in WW2, Liberator bombers and Kittyhawks operated there. It was the major receiving station for military signals and an early radar station. The entrance to the signals room - an underground concrete bunker - was via an unguarded chook shed. The apparent entrance was a conspicuously guarded building much further away. The airstrips still survive but now have bitumen taxiways to minimise dust and prop damage to powered aircraft.
Anyway, back to present day Aldinga  --
At the airfield it is all we dreamed of all those years ago. The airfield is owned by a group of shareholders, Aldinga Aviation,  the flying school and aero club are separate organisations and both operate there. The flying school is the operator of the training aircraft and the aero club is a social flying group who hire/fly from the school. Great arrangement, great flying school, lovely shaded verandahs to sit on and watch air ops and talk flying and drink real coffee and eat great cake.

Modest but comfortable clubhouse for Aldinga Aero Club   http://www.aldingaaeroclub.org.au

The Sellicks hills behind the Aldinga Airfield are low, rounded and look like a line of sleeping elephants

http://www.adelaidebiplanes.com.au  The PC-12 turboprop

The Aldinga Community Garden is built on old tennis courts so it has the advantage of being close to other social groups and an old but substantial chain wire fence which is pretty tall.  Nobody there as they work on Wednesdays and Saturdays. 
http://www.flickr.com/photos/broughamjulia  
Copy and paste this into a browser box to see lots of photos on my Flickr and you are not required to create an account with Flickr to see them.

CROAKEY blog on organic gardening, it's history and our health

New book