One Pot Pledge - getting started with gardening...

I hope you all had a lovely Easter long weekend. Dave and I spent a lot of it preparing our vegie patch for autumn plantings. The weathermen are predicting a long, dry autumn here in Perth, so hopefully we’ll have time to get a nice crop in before winter gets too cold. We re-layered the no-dig garden bed with fresh straw, garden clippings, manure and compost. It’s got to ’settle’ for the next...

Free magazines online...

I’m super busy this week and so won’t be making a proper post until Friday. But as a peace offering, I present to you 19 issues of the USA version of Organic Gardening. They’re free and online, via Google Books. Dating from December 2005 to the current issue, they’ve got some good tips for growing vegies, improving your soil and making your garden attractive and useful. I haven’t had time...

Bright green gardens...

Sustainable garden at the Painted Fish B&B Last week I posted about how our homes will be greener in the future; today we’re going to step out into the spring weather and think about the kinds of gardens we want to become commonplace. I actually think that the big change in gardens for our bright green future will be that nearly everyone will do what only a handful of people have got set up already. At the moment,...

Vegie patch update...

We got started on our vegie patch a bit late this winter, because it just wouldn’t cool down or start raining. But we’re starting to see some action now. We’ve also started a potato cage, but it’s not very photogenic at the moment. We did well with potatoes in the ground last year, and are hoping to get lots this year too. Broccoli, just getting started Chillies, still hanging on through the rain Lettuce,...

Kev’s Patch...

A couple of weeks back I posted about the Kev’s Patch campaign started by Darren at Green Change, which I heard about through Gavin. I thought it was a great idea and wrote an email to the Prime Minister about it, asking him to organise an organic vegie patch at his Canberra residence, The Lodge. Well, Darren and Gavin and I decided that if we wanted this campaign to take off, we’d need an official website....

Using Folia to track my garden...

When Dave and I started growing our own vegetables, we wanted to keep track of when we planted everything, when they should be sprouting or harvested or what worked well last year. Traditionally, gardeners who like a bit of record-keeping use a gardening journal, but I’m a bit too nerdy for that. So I started a free account at myFolia.com, which is pretty much like a normal gardening journal, but it’s online....

Guerrilla Gardening...

Have you been watching the Guerrilla Gardeners show on Channel 10? Personally, I find the show a little too stagey. What they’re doing is technically against the law, but when you film it and broadcast it on national tv, it’s hard to feel like they’re taking any real risks! So far, the worst that has happened is that one council ripped out their palm trees - since those were on a roundabout at the junction...

No-dig garden bed update...

A while ago I posted about how to make a no-dig garden bed. Since then ours has been doing pretty well. Here’s a few photos of it’s progress: We’re pretty happy with it so far. The tomatoes, chillies and capsicums are fruiting well, and we’ve harvested lots of coriander and basil already. In fact, we had so much leafy stuff we didn’t know what to do with it, so I looked up how to preserve...

How to make a no-dig garden bed...

As I’ve mentioned before here, growing your own food organically helps the environment. If you can avoid using petrochemical-based fertilisers and pesticides, you’re doing your soil and our waterways a favour. But it can also save you money! In Dirt Cheap, an article at Salon, Steve Almond tells how he was inspired by the Victory Gardens people planted in WWII to provide themselves with food during the war....

How to start a vegetable garden...

After showing off our vegie garden in the blog the other week, and making all of our visitors come out to take a look at it, I’ve had a few people ask me why we started growing our own vegetables, and if it was very hard to do. Dave and I had been talking about it for years, but when we read Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, she made it sound so good that we decided to just get stuck into...