It poured with rain at out last working bee, unfortunate for us but great for the plants. Thank you to the couple of people who braved the weather and stopped by! We spent some time tidying up the tomatoes by removing dead leaves and any fruit damaged by insects. There is a lot of fruit that is nearly ripe, so we're hoping for a big harvest soon! The sweet potatoes (on the left, below) that we planted a couple of weeks ago have taken off. Aren't the heart shaped leaves beautiful? On the right in this garden bed we have potatoes, spring onions and asparagus, and they all seem to get on very well.
We harvested cucumbers, zucchinis and a few tomatoes. There are also more herbs and other greens than we know what to do with, so please come along, say hi, and grab some!
Farming Concrete is an initiative to measure and record data from gardens worldwide, allowing measurements of everything from produce harvested to happiness levels and producing reports that clearly display the benefits of these gardens. We know that MUC garden has innumerable benefits, but recording these allows us to quantify them and really see the impact that it has on the environment and the community. We also hope that recording this data will make it easier for future community gardens to get established by raising awareness of their positive impacts. Anyone can access our data, by visiting the 'Mill'. 1. Access the Farming Concrete website via this link. 2. Scroll down to "DOWNLOAD DATA' 3. In the 'Groups' box select 'Melbourne Uni Community Gardens. 3. The search results will look something like this: 4. Use the tabs at the top to see the different data that has been recorded (we are currently recording 'harvest count' and 'landfill waste diversion by weight'). Alternatively, you can create your own account here and add the MUC garden to your personal account. This will allow you to download detailed data that we have uploaded. Once you've made an account, follow these instructions: 1. Under the 'Barn' tab, scroll down and MUC garden should be listed under 'Your Gardens'. Click 'add data' to access it. 2. Under the garden's page, you will be able to see all data we have collected. Please don't add your own data - we will record this at the garden and add it collectively. If you would like to be involved with data collection and recording for the garden as a whole, please get in touch! 3. Click 'add data' next to a topic you are interested in, for example 'landfill waste diversion by weight'. Not all categories will have data available. On the right of the page, click 'download data' to open an Excel spreadsheet, or click 'download report' to download a report automatically formulated by the Farming Concrete website. 4. There you have it! We will endeavour to put a monthly report up at the garden, so keep an eye out for it.
At our last working bee we weeded, mulched, harvested and of course...turned the compost. As you can see from the picture below, the garden is overflowing! The native edibles bed is coming along and starting to recover from its upheaval. This bed has been a challenge for us as its requirements are quite different from those of the rest of the garden, but it has been a great learning experience and we are happy with the progress it is making. Thank you to those who came along to help - hope you enjoyed the produce you took home! Keep an eye out for our next working bee soon.
We haven't updated for a little while, but we've still been busy! We have been enjoying fresh lettuce, herbs, broad beans, alpine strawberries, blueberries and cucumbers, and we have tomatoes, zucchinis and basil well on their way! We've run workshops on propagating unusual veggies, soil health and growing plants to make your own tea, just to name a few! Check out the photos below to see what's been happening.
P.S. If you would like to come to working bees and events next semester, please answer our poll under the 'Working Bees' tab!
WORDS: Karin Holzknecht, PHOTOS: Karin Holzknecht & Bec Korossy-Horwood Last weekend, on Saturday 12 October, some very curious Horticultured members gathered to hear all about the secret life of fungi from Dr Sapphire McMullan-Fisher. Sapphire is a fungal ecology expert at the Royal Botanic Gardens, an author for Fungi-Map and a passionate fungi lecturer from La Trobe University. She is also a gifted speaker and quickly had us all enthralled. “Try to not to think like a discrete organism,” she challenged us all, before diving into her lecture. Over the next few hours she explained how complex fungi are and how integral to our world. We covered basic biology of fungi, structure, form, physiology, and reproduction. Then Sapphire took us through the general understanding of what makes up the ecosystem (sun, water, herbivores, carnivores, decomposers etc.), and demonstrated the roles that fungi play at every point. Ultimately, fungi are critical to ecosystem success. They create multiple connections and perform multiple jobs, and are the third largest group of species in Australia (after invertebrates and microbes). Yet we know hardly anything about them, and the vast majority of funding for research and conservation goes to plants and animals, which make up just 7 per cent of Australia’s total species. As land managers, we should be asking, what diversity of fungi are needed for healthy, functioning environments? What are the fungi in our environments and what jobs are they doing? How can we manage the soil to take the critical functions of fungi into account? All these revelations were hunger-making, so we feasted on pizza, some with fungi toppings, before heading out into Burnley Gardens in search of lab samples. We fossicked about, particularly near fallen trees, and found some great fungi to examine. Back in the lab, Sapphire gave us some tips on what to look for when identifying a fungus (e.g. spore prints), handy tools for the field, and good reference books. And then we got out the microscopes and spent some time examining the samples we collected. They definitely look a lot different up close! On the whole it was an action-packed day and all of us who went along are very grateful to Bec White, who volunteered her time as lab technician so we could hold the workshop, and to Sapphire, who gave so generously of her knowledge and her infectious enthusiasm for the subject. The life of fungi, not quite as secret as before!
Thank you also to everyone who came along - we know it's a tricky time of semester for some. If you missed out or would like to learn more about fungi, we're planning to host a fungi walk in prime fungi season (Autumn) next year. Keep your eyes peeled for updates on that! In the meantime we encourage you to check out the resources on Fungi-Map; you can even get involved in a spot of crowd-sourced citizen science by submitting records of fungi you find. WORDS: Michael Darroch, PHOTOS: Julianna Rozek How do you keep an expansive two-acre Victorian garden thriving and lush through a long, hot Melbourne Summer? A 300,000 litre underground water tank should do it! This was one of the insights gained on Horticultured’s latest outing to the delightful Astolat private garden in Camberwell on Sunday, as part of the Victorian Open Gardens Scheme. The perfect Spring weather was ideal for a visit to the historic gardens, which were established in the late 1890s and have been restored faithfully to their former glory over recent years. The head gardener explained on a tour how the seven different themed areas of the gardens are kept looking sharp and interesting year round, incorporating diverse plant selection, skilful pruning and mulching. She spoke about a number of the feature trees at the site, including an imposing Queensland Kauri and Bunya Bunya Pine, and detailed the regular health checks they receive for pest and disease issues. Interesting tips from the garden tour included growing Wisteria in a pot to great effect in a courtyard and the use of Elaeocarpus eumundii (Quandong) as an impressive hedge.
Free wine tastings courtesy of Scotchmans Hill Wines and opera performances by members of the Melba Opera Trust complemented the event, with the day very much in sync with the Horticultured theme! WORDS: Kim Kitchen, PHOTOS: Julianna Rozek Last sunny Thursday, Andrew Smith, the brilliant Gardens Coordinator at Burnley, took a bunch of Horticultured members on a behind-the-scenes tour of the field station. Armed with a stack of old photos, we discovered all about the history of the station, including its original purpose as a field nursery, trialling all kinds of fruit trees (220 pear varieties, 200ish apples, 70+ cherry varieties and a whole bunch of other delicious things!). We learnt about two large floods that wiped out the area, and that it is the oldest continually operating teaching garden of its kind in the world, staying operational throughout the two world wars. Did you know that the centre of the field station gates aligns with the big Sequoia tree within the Burnley Gardens? Check it out next time you head out of the station. Or that there was once an avenue of Chinese Pistachios lining the central path? Or that the Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show (MIFGS) had its origins right here at Burnley? The array of mismatched gardens along the top fence are the remains of the first student-designed-and-built display gardens, built for a garden show held for a few years in the late 1980s. The area now taken over by Chris William’s edible forest was installed initially as a teaching area for hort students, complete with hedges and fruit trees for pruning practice. A number of the trees, like the citrus and stone fruit, still remain. And that leaning row of pears, that confuses all of us? These have been grown as cordons, a method of training fruiting pears and apples, and borders this area along with the espaliered apples, albeit in a somewhat neglected form. Those little huts? Green infrastructure research! That eucalypt forest? A research project on drought-tolerant species. That house? Previously a centre for school kids to come and learn all about alternative energy.
We learnt all of this and more, and it was a great way to spend an hour or so away from the books. Many thanks to Andrew for his time, knowledge and expertise. Spring! Daylight Savings! Blossoms! Hot weather! It's a pretty great time to be in the garden. And its always a great time to learn about soil, because where would our plants be without it? Craig aka the Urban Agronomist aka soil scientist extraordinaire taught us a bunch of incredible and useful things about soils.
Loam, about 40% sand, 40% silt and 20% clay, is the ideal soil for a veggie patch: having a great capacity to hold onto nutrients and an ability to hold on to some, but not too much, water. The the ideal pH for most gardens is around 7 - at this pH all nutrients are readily available to plants. At much higher or lower pHs, many of the nutrients required by plants become unavailable. One of the best things we learned was that if your soil hasn't got a great texture, or isn't quite the right pH: compost will help. If your soil isn't full of life: compost will help. If your soil is low on nutrients: compost will help. If soils have a superfood, it's compost. Which is great news for us, because as you will have seen from previous posts, we have plenty of compost!
WORDS & PHOTOS: Julianna Rozek On yet another gloriously warm spring day, Horticultured ventured out to CERES, joined by Engineers Without Borders Unimelb. CERES Community Park is also known as the Centre for Education and Research in Environmental Strategies (not Ceres the Roman agricultural goddess, or dwarf planet). Their main goal is to promote environmental sustainability - something both of our clubs are highly interested in. CERES do this through a range of initiatives including community gardens, educational workshops on everything from beekeeping to kombucha making, renewable energy demonstrations, and developing and trialling new green technologies. While there is heaps to see and do on the 9-acre site, the main activity of the day was a tour of the sustainable water initiatives with Nick the site manager. CERES harvest and manage water from their carpark, sealed roads, roofs and the broader catchment area. This water is used to water their organic farm, in the Merri Table cafe and in a dam supporting biodiversity. Nick is directly involved in many of the projects and gave us a great understanding of not only what they are doing and why, but also the challenges. One example is the permeable pavement which CERES have been investigating in conjunction with industry and university partners. While it looks great on paper - roads which allow water to filter through and reduce stormwater peaks and floods - the reality is expensive and hard to maintain. Without labour intensive management, permeable roads can quickly become impermeable. Recently re-surfacing a main service road required CERES to align reality with their goals of environmental sustainability. The solution was a convention impermeable road made of partially recycled tar and printer cartridges, with features to direct most of the runoff to a dam. CERES is a very valuable urban site for investigating new technologies. The opportunity afforded by 9 acres of land in an inner-city suburb, passionate employees and generous donors and partners is rare in a city of ever-increasing development and density.
One of the themes that surfaced in the tour was that CERES should be a model for the future and innovation, but short-term grant funding and harsh regulatory compliance meant that they continually rely on tried-and-tested solutions and technologies. If we are serious about addressing the problems presented by climate change and expanding populations perhaps we need to show a little more bravery. Thank you Nick for being so generous with your knowledge while showing us the water-saving initiatives operating at CERES. We had a great time and learned lots from walking around the gardens with you. |
AuthorsRead all about it: MUC Garden and Burnley Student Association share updates on their activities. Blogs about...
All
|