Some dates for your diaries

DCFG is conducting a productive gardens tour by foot next Saturday, 2 June as part of the Good Life Festival. We leave from the Albert Street community garden. It is a free event, all welcome; a 2-3 hour walk visiting three productive backyard gardens.

The beautiful persimmon fruits behind the library are turning colour and nearly ready for picking. Persimmons are best eaten almost bletted, in other words very, very over ripe.

Peter O'Mara's buzzy sign has attracted many bags of leaves since the last working bee. We'll be able to conduct another compost workshop on Saturday June 9, the next working bee.

Speaking of which we need to attend to some weeding and composting at the Rea Lands Park community garden. So keep an ear/eye out, next working bee (June 9) might be held at Rea Lands, which is where we'll conduct the composting workshop.

May working bee was all about leaves and compost

Today is the last day of International Composting Awareness week so we held a workshop to celebrate the earth's generous and non-monetary fertility, demonstrated the building of a warm lasagna (or layered) compost and the easy assemblage of a cold leafmould compost using just damp gleaned leaves donated and walked for by DCFGers.

Patrick explains why leafmould compost is an excellent soil conditioner. It is a slow cold compost which takes 9-12 months to be ready to use as a rough mulch and another year to become fine rich humus. According to fungi teacher and photographer Alison Pouliot, leaf litter creates the most biodiverse ecologies in the world. If we burn leaves we put carbon in the atmosphere, if we compost leaves we put it back in the soil where it is needed most. By not burning but composting leaves we address the anthropogenic problem of the carbon cycle – greenhouse gas emissions and soil infertility.

Jasper, one of the youngest working bee participants today, listens in and feels his way into the wonderful worlds of layered leaves. Then we all move down the back of the Albert Street garden and Patrick begins to demonstrate a warmer, faster style of composting using various nitrogenous and carbonous layers.

Four posts surrounded by chicken wire form a meter cubed frame. Damp cardboard is laid down and then some coffee grounds, then some straw, then some blood and bone, some leaves, green vegetable waste, and this layering keeps on going with as much diversity as you can get, misting each layer to establish a humid not soaked environment. Gabe (who manages permaculture property Melliodora) recommends 30:1 carbon to nitrogen ratio, but a little less is fine too.

People shredded newspaper, Tony went home and got his little shredder (which he found on the street on a hard rubbish day in Melbourne) for the more woody material, and layer by layer we built our stack over the course of an hour.

This technique was taught to Patrick by a friend, Joel, who in turn learned it WWOOFing on a Biodynamic farm in NSW. In a biodynamic compost many more materials would go into such a stack such as seaweed, willow and pine barks, fine ground eggshells, animal manures, weed and compost teas, etc., whatever is close at hand.

We had a big patch of comfrey in the garden, which is about to get munched by the first frost of the season so Gabe cut it to the ground and we hand shredded it into the mix, added newspaper and again misted the layer.

And here is our stack complete with a think layer of pea straw on top as a lid and rain absorber. In a few days there should be considerable heat in the centre of the stack, and this compost should be ready in three-four months, just in time for the spring plantings.

Patrick is going to be holding another informal compost workshop at next month's working bee, so if you missed this one head down to the Albert St garden on June 9 between 10am and 12. And any time during the month, please feel free to drop off your leaves and compost scraps.

A new community garden in Daylesford will make four

A community group has formed to grow another community garden at the Daylesford Community Reserve (skatepark et al). The group asked DCFG reps Patrick Jones and Peter O'Mara to meet them a month ago to discuss a possible garden there. Pete has been involved with the reserve's development for over ten years, facilitating the birth of the skatepark. Patrick went along to discuss the site and possible design. This is the first drawing he has done for the group, prepared for the second meeting on site tomorrow.

A gift from Castlemaine

This doc (made in Castlemaine) is a good reference resource for treating disease and infestations this winter.


From here.

March Working Bee

Thank you to all 50 people who turned up on Saturday for our monthly working bee and the Harvest Swapmeet. With so many enthusiastic people it's no wonder we got so much done.

We extended the chalk wall to include a space to list all the jobs that still need doing.

We continued pruning the apple trees alongside the library.

Then we mulched all the branches and covered them in lime to get rid of the apple scab.

We dug up a hefty crop of potatoes.

We dug in some donated mushroom compost. (Thanks Dougmore!)

We planted some seedlings.

We discussed the medicinal herb garden we are going to plant at Rea Lands Park. (If you'd like to be included in these discussions and plantings, please email us.)

We swapped goodies from our home gardens at the monthly Harvest Swapmeet.

And we marvelled at how lucky we are to live in a community with such abundance.

Virginia of the Herbs

Virginia Langsford, a local herbalist and botanist, met with Mara, Lena and Patrick at Rea Lands Park today to discuss the place of medicinal plants in the garden and the teaching of their benefits in the community. Behind our meeting lay the enormous pumpkin patch, demonstrating the success of multilevel garden ecologies. Virginia is keen to teach people the healing properties of plants for humans, our kin animals, the health of the soil and companion plant relationships.

As Rea Lands is a perennial food forest garden in the making, it seems only natural perennial herbs and other medicinal plants be planted among the fruit and nut trees for both culinary and medicinal uses. 

As we're getting so many people to the monthly working bees at Albert Street, we thought Virginia could meet us there on occasions and poach herb-orientated folk to join her for both planting and learning sessions at Rea Lands Park. Virginia will let us know which working bee Saturdays she can come and we'll do a little publicity before hand... Speaking of which...

Our meeting today was brief and very inspiring, so if you're herb inclined and want to keep informed about the working bees with Virginia email us to go on the mail out list.

Managing the Apples

In 1999 community food gardener and poet-artist Patrick Jones planted a Granny Smith (as cross-pollinator) and eighteen Fuji apple trees around the Daylesford Public Library as part of a public artwork he called Poemscape: A Physical Anthology. Each tree was accompanied by a poem etched onto a plaque and fixed to a plinth he'd carved from local hardwoods. Three local poems, six Australian poems and twelve international poems all with ecological themes comprise the anthology. The Granny Smith was the title tree, and marks the first of nineteen physical pages each now sheltered by an established tree.

The Poemscape just planted in 1999.

Over the past twelve years Patrick has fed, mulched, pruned, picked and watered them as they grew.

The trees have provided much free public food over the past decade but in the past few years with attacks by Sulfur Crested Cockatoos, apple scab (ascomycete fungus Venturia inaequalis) and coddling moth there has been little to no harvest. Community gardener extraordinaire Paul Dempsey and Patrick have been brainstorming ways to bring the yield back to town. And Paul's recent research determined a whole plan approach was needed. "We must make public fruit trees viable and productive if we are to attend to the coming food crisis and get council's backing to plant more", said Paul.

The first task was to remove all the fruit infected with coddling moth, which we did at the last working bee.

Community gardeners Anthony Petrucci, Fiona Porter (up ladder) and Jasper Fullerton-Crane making the ladder steady.

The apples went to feed Chris and Diane's (Spa Venison) pigs. Chris estimated there was half a tonne and no doubt the pigs would have enjoyed the extra protein from the moths.

Then last Saturday Patrick and Paul spent a blistering nine hours (on a 35 degrees day) pruning and chipping the trees to try to attend to the apple scab, which is a form of fungi. The first thing to do was to thin the trees to allow more airflow. Apple scab appears in humid conditions and as the last two summers have been particularly wet this problem has grown. Paul drove the pruning tools...

While Patrick drove his noisy wood chipper turning the wood and leaf prunings into mulch which was placed on the north side of the Albert St community garden to protect the plants inside the fence from harsh drying out.

The next day Paul attempted to spray all the trees with a lime/water solution, but it was a difficult task with nearby cars parked too close, wind howling and an extremely time consuming, fiddly job.

So this is where we got to. The next working bee is just around the corner (March 10) and there's more to be done. We need to cover up the pile of mulch so as the fungus doesn't spread and we will probably need to do a second, even more harsh prune to remove as much leaf as possible. This will assist us to spray lime onto a small leaf mass next year as well as net the trees from cockatoos and closely observe and remove any apples with coddling moth.