UNIQUE OPPORTUNITY AT NIRVANA ORGANIC FARM AT HEATHFIELD

FOR A LOCAL,RESPONSIBLE, ENERGERIC AND ENTHUSIASTIC PERSON.

A position is available for a 12 month part-time internship which offers an opportunity to learn from 30 years biodynamic growing and small holding lifestyle in the Adelaide Hills.

2 days a week – negotiable times and days. Can be made of some ½ days (week days only) Times may vary depending on season and conditions. (this is farming which is not 9-5) There is no money exchange only skills and knowledge.

For more information on Nirvana Organic Farm http://nirvanaorganicfarm.blogspot.com.au

Application in writing by October 30^th to:

Nirvana Farm 184 Longwood Rd, HEATHFIELD 5153

Further information Deb or Quentin 83392519 after dark, before 9pm.

 

BIO- DYNAMIC AGRICULTURE

BEYOND ORGANICS

Improve your soils water holding capacity.

A one day course to introduce the practical concepts of the biodynamic methods to farmers and gardeners.

The Bio -Dynamic method is a modern organic method that creates a holistic approach to building healthy soil, plants animals and humans.

The course covers history, concept of a living organism, soils, compost, special preparations that enhance nature and equipment required.

 

Sunday, Sept 23^rd 2012.

8.30 am. -4.30 pm.

Cost: $140

Includes: notes, lunch, Membership of Adelaide Hills Biodynamic Group..

COMPOSTING AND MULCHING

Sunday, October 7^th

9.00 - 12 30 $50

Principles of composting and mulching, techniques and materials used and how they can be used most effectively on your garden or farm.

ORGANIC VEGETABLES FOR YOUR TABLE

Sunday, September 30^th

9.00—12.30 $50

Practical guide to establishing and maintaining a productive and healthy

vegetable garden.

INTRODUCTION TO MOON PLANTING AND USING THE PLANTING CALENDAR

Sunday, October 14^th 9.00-12.30 $50

Working with the rhythms of nature can develop your skills in fine tuning your garden and can add a new dimension to your gardening experience.

ORGANIC FRUIT, NUTS & BERRIES.

Sunday, October 21^st

9.00 -12.30 $50

Practical guide to orcharding. Includes establishment, soils, ground covers, maintenance & pruning.

POULTRY KEEPING.

Sunday October 28^th

9.00 pm – 12.30 $50

All you need to know about getting started with poultry. Includes selection, housing, feeding, breeding, pests.

WEAVING A BIT OF MAGIC

Sunday November 4^th

9am – 4pm

$140

.The ideal way to recycle your garden prunings. This introduction to natural fibre weaving will show you the essential techniques, suitable plants & other materials to make baskets, fences, or trellises.

Course includes all materials, lunch, morning & afternoon tea.

.GUIDED FARM TOURS

Book your own tour anytime

An ideal opportunity to gain an insight into a successfully run biodynamic farm .This Garden Quality Farm demonstrates an integrated system incorporating orchards, poultry, native habitat & wetlands, home food production & hardy cottage gardens all rolled into a unique lifestyle.

minimum charge $60 for up to 5 persons

extra’s @ $12/ head)

SCHOOLS; Secondary $8 Student with 1 adult/15 student’s Primary $7 Student with 1 adult/10 students

CLUBS & GROUPS; 15 + @ $10/ head

WORKSHOPS Held at Nirvana Organic Farm 184 Longwood Road Heathfield Phone 83392519 Practical, ‘hands on’ courses conducted by experienced biodynamic/organic farmers, Deb and Quentin. Their successful small holding, which has been run organically/Bio-Dynamically since 1983. National winner of the Organic Federation of Australia Awards of Excellence as the leading Organic Educator The 4.5 ha property provides the ideal classroom filled with practical examples of how goals can be achieved and gives inspiration into this GARDEN QUALITY FARMING for both gardeners and farmers alike. Courses are aimed to maximise opportunities for participation and discussion. The number of participants will be limited so you will need to enrol ASAP

Spring workshops at Nirvana

INTRODUCTION TO BIODYNAMIC METHODS

Sunday, September 18th 8.30am – 4.30pm $120

One day course to introduce the practical concepts of the biodynamic methods to farmers & gardeners. The biodynamic method is a modern organic approach that creates a holistic approach to building healthy soil, plants, animals & humans. Includes notes, biodynamic preparations, lunch & teas.

 

 

 

 

VEGETABLES FOR YOUR TABLE.

Sunday, October 2nd 9.00 -12.30 $50

Practical guide to establishing & maintaining a productive & healthy vegetable garden. Our climate offers many opportunities to grow food for your table all year round. Discover what plants to grow, and when. Practical tips & ideas.

 

 

 

 

 

COMPOSTING & MULCHING

Sunday,  October 9^th 9.00 -12.30 $50

Reduce water use by learning the principles of composting & mulching, techniques & materials used & how they can be used most effectively on your garden or farm.

 

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION TO MOON PLANTING AND USING THE PLANTING CALENDAR

Sunday, October 16^th 9.00 -12.30 $50

Working with the rhythms of nature can develop your skills in fine tuning your garden and can add a new dimension to your gardening experience.

 

 

 

 

 

.

ORGANIC FRUIT, NUTS & BERRIES

Sunday, October 23^rd 9.00 -12.30 pm. $50

Practical guide to growing fruits, nuts & berries. Establishing, maintenance, ground covers, soils.

 

 

 

 

POULTRY KEEPING

Sunday October 30^th 9.00 – 12 30 $50

All you need to know about getting started with poultry. Includes breed selection, housing, feeding, breeding, pests.

 

 

 

WEAVING A BIT OF MAGIC

Sunday, November 6^th 9am 4pm $120

The ideal way to recycle your garden prunings .A introduction to natural fibre weaving. Includes techniques, suitable plants & other materials to make baskets, fences & trellises. Includes all materials, lunch & teas.

 

 

 

All courses are held at NIRVANA ORGANIC FARM

184 LONGWOOD ROAD, HEATHFIELD

UBD 157:G7. Exit from SE Freeway at Stirling, turn right at roundabout & travel 3.5 km.

The courses are practical, ‘hands on’ conducted by experienced biodynamic/organic farmers, Deb & Quentin. Their successful small holding has been run under BIO-DYNAMIC principles since 1983.

The 4.5 ha property provides the ideal classroom filled with practical examples of how goals can be achieved & gives inspiration into this GARDEN QUALITY FARMING to both gardeners & farmers alike.

FOR BOOKINGS & FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT

DEB OR QUENTIN PHONE/ (08) 8339 2519 nirvanafarm@gmail.com

RASPBERRIES–the taste of summer direct from the Adelaide Hills.

 

With the late start to summer and the Christmas rush over the berries are now at there best. The raspberries along with their cousins, the English gooseberries,  black currants ,and  red and white currants are all ripe and dripping with flavour. All the berries  are grown using biodynamic methods in a cool spring fed valley.  We take the same care in picking our berries as we do growing them. This ensures only the best are sold. We don’t sell seconds for a couple of reasons-(1)  the way they are grown and picked and (2) we do all our own value adding.

 

Our berries are only available from our farm shop which means they have travelled no more than 300 metres. While we are picking, people drop in to the farm to buy berries. It is nice to stop picking for a few minutes and chat with regulars who enjoy buying directly from the producer. We receive direct feedback and the visitors take away high quality, fresh, biodynamic food.

Our farm shop is unique as it only sells our produce, fresh fruits in season  and value added products made from our own fruit by Deb - 20+ varieties of jams and preserves to choose from Plus a range of Deb’s baskets hand crafted from materials growing at Nirvana and roadside weeds. 

 

 

 

Nirvana Organic Farm is 5 kilometres from the Adelaide GPO the way the crow flies but for those who do not fly take the Stirling exit off the South Eastern Freeway , turn right at roundabout and travel 3.5 km to 184 Longwood Road HEATHFIELD. or check out your street directory UBD 157:G7 .

We are open Daily 9-5 during the berry season.

As the raspberries fade the Black Mulberry harvest begins.

10/10/10 Today in Our Garden

Succulent mulberries

Flowering Herbs

California Poppy

Cherry Tomatoes just about ready to plant out

We love chicory

Sage and Oregano

We have spent several enjoyable days working in our garden. The weather has been lovely and we have been able to make lots of mulch from our winter pruning's.

We have made a zucchini bed, a potato cage bed and a pumpkin patch. Our artichoke bed is looking good and we have lots of mulberries on our small trees.

The highlight of our garden is the herbs, rapa and rocket plants going to flower and forming seed.

We have planned our summer garden and we will are just hoping that we do not have heatwaves and that we can keep our garden healthy and productive. So for the moment we are dreaming of a mild Adelaide summer with tropical rain showers and cool nights. Reality will hit in January or even in November like last year.

Happy gardening to all.

Excel Fig

 

The excel fig has to be the sweetest fig we have ever tasted.

It has a rich luscious flavour and is great eaten fresh or made into ice cream (whipped cream, chopped Australian pecans & fig puree which is then frozen).

We bought this fig as a cutting from Julie at the SA Rare Fruit Society, thanks Julie we love this fig tree.

HOBART BOTANIC GARDENS... HOME OF PETE'S PATCH

I think I watched every episode of Gardening Australia while Peter Cundall was on it and I came to really like that pom enough to almost accept his advice. What I like most about him still is his determination to stop woodchipping Tasmania's old growth forests and to stand up and be arrested, at 82, for the cause. He also single-handedly brought organics into the homes of every Australian TV gardener, making purchasers of chemicals quiver in their boots, with his outspoken criticism of chemical agriculture and horticulture.

Yesterday I visited the Royal Tasmanian Botanic Gardens, where Pete's Patch from Scratch began. Cleverly, placing this in a botanic gardens gives it credibility somehow and also ensures that it continues to inspire people long after Peter has left Gardening Australia and hopefully long after Gardening Australia has finished too. I knew I was approaching "his" vegetable garden because the use of vegetables as garden features seemed to have leaked out and spread into surrounding garden areas, as good ideas are wont to do. In this photo, left, of the conservatory garden, a narrow, stone wall raised bed is filled with silver beet (foreground) and each corner of the square is punctuated with a teepee of scarlet runner beans in their full flowering glory. Herbs and more vegetables form 90% of this entire beautiful garden, including the centrepieces of the 4 lawns filled with sweetcorn and rainbow chard (right).

The vegetable garden was of course lovely but what I loved most was the ecology of it all.... like I am always going on about.... surround your vegetables and fruit with herbs and flowers and native plants and you will gain on every level.... few pests, more variety to pick, whether food or flowers, and the sheer joy of seeing such abundance flourish so effortlessly as a result. And the earth will gain too, in too many ways to go into again here. There were bees and butterflies and birds and all things wise and wonderful in this beautiful border of herbs and perennials which formed the backdrop of the vegetable garden.

 

At the very back you can just see a corner of a massive, old, brick wall which provides a much needed warmer microclimate for some of the fruit trees which are thriving here in less than ordinarily ideal conditions. There are citrus and tamarillos and passionfruit to name a few.

Scarlet runner beans grow to enormous heights here, as you can see in this photo and beans in general seem to produce incredible crops right through summer.

In the glass house were some tropical herbs like lemongrass.

All in all it was a wonderful, lush, productive garden full to overflowing with fruit and vegetables, all grown without chemicals of any sort.

"I guess that's your bloomin' lot".... as Peter would say .... "but you'll be absolutely blown away by the rest of the Botanic Garden that I will write about soon."

I will upload some more photos here soon. In the meantime, you can read about this beautiful garden here.

PYO CHERRIES AND BLUEBERRIES

If you would like to pick some berries and didn't get to the Gnomes' Home that Andrew wrote about, there are a couple of websites that you should consult so you can pick your own before Christmas.

 

Cherries South Australia has a list of lots of local cherry orchards, their openning times, contact details and a map.

 

 

 

This coming weekend starts the season for blueberry picking at The Blueberry Patch at Mt. Compass. The damp, boggy land, in the middle of dairy country was seen as a waste land, until these people bought it and turned it into a beautiful blueberry patch, the likes of which I have never seen anywhere else in South Australia.

I went there with friends Kathy and Ken in December 2007, and wrote about it here. We picked 30kgs in 1 hour! They freeze beautifully so long as you don't wash them first. I just put them into 500gr yoghurt containers and put them in the freezer. They came out as good as the day I put them in.

Berry-picking at the Gnomes’ Home

 

Among the more experienced seed-savers in South Australia are “The Gnomes” – Vegie Gnome and Flower Gnome to their friends - who inhabit Gnomesville high in the hills above Lenswood in the Mount Lofty Ranges, where the cool winter temperatures are just right for raising berries of all sorts. As it turns out, it’s Flower Gnome who’s the berry grower, and today we were lucky enough to be invited up there with a handful of other seed savers to pick silvanberries, boysenberries, youngberries, raspberries, loganberries and red-currants. Strawberries and blackberries are either finished or yet to fruit. Pine needles from the nearby commercial pine plantations are added to blood-and bone and compost to boost the acidity of the acid-soils so loved by the berries.

Gnomesville is a 3 acre block with its own dam (supplying water for the sheep who graze alongside the chickens outside the kitchen garden) and rainwater tanks to provide water for the kitchen and the gnomes’ personal use. Solar photovoltaic panels on the roof offset energy use in the home, and solar hot-water heaters on the roof reduce reliance on mains power for water heating. Wood fires fuelled with fallen timber from around the property provide warmth during the long winter evenings when the gnomes snuggle inside and entertain themselves from the vast and diverse collection of wall-to-wall books.

The kitchen garden is fenced off to keep the hens and sheep on the outside, and contains nearly every herb, vegetable and fruit tree known to man. An elderberry tree out in the chicken yard was the source of the elder wine that we drank with desert made from ricotta cheese and berries, along with dried figs and fresh raspberries.

The sun shone, the air was crisp and clear, and the surrounding vineyards, grazing lands and apple, pear and cherry orchards provided a many-shaded green contrast to the darker eucalypts and pine forests. Eighteen years of effort have gone into Gnomesville and, as in all gardens, Mother Nature provides endless change and challenges to mix in and enjoy the outdoors and fresh produce together. We picked our own berries, and purchased fresh farmhouse cream and honey that the gnomes had purchased in bulk from local suppliers. A wonderful day!

 

Biopark Organic Farm Visit

Once again, about 30 of our intrepid seed-savers took to the roads to learn more about vegetable and fruit growing, this time on a professional level. Our visit took us up to a 150 acre organic farm high in the Adelaide Hills, about 5 kms out of Mount Barker and overlooking Lake Alexandrina on a clear day. Biopark Organic Farm is managed by Bill Hankin – one of our seed-savers – with the help of 3-4 permanent staff and a number of casual workers. Bill has been an organic farmer since 1985, starting out in Victoria, and taking on his current job at Biopark in January 2004. The farm itself has a long and chequered history, firstly as the home of a wealthy Mount Barker agricultural industrialist and MP in the mid- to late-1800s, then as a Salvation Army Orphanage called Eden Park thoughout the early- to mid-1900s. Biopark’s current owner has asked Bill to develop the property to become a model organic farm able to provide for his family and turn a small profit.
Along on the tour was Dr ‘Harry’ Harrison – another seed-saver and President of the South Australian Rare Fruit Society. That’s Harry on the left and Bill on the right – two of the grand old men of the organic growing community in South Australia. Harry helped Bill field questions about the hundreds of fruit trees on the property, including rare heritage plums and figs rescued from the NSW Department of Agriculture when they bulldozed their Bathurst heritage orchards.
Bill believes climate change has already reached his property, and is having to re-adjust his farming methods to avoid the over-hot summers, starting the planting cycle after the breaking rains in March-April each year. Bill started the orchard with apples and pears, adding plums and figs later.In retrospect, Bill thinks that early maturing fruits such as apricots would make a better bet than autumn-maturing pome fruits such as apples, as this obviates the need to irrigate with scarce water resources throughout summer. Netting the whole orchard will be imperative in the future to prevent bird damage to soft fruits; even slightly green apricots couldn’t dissuade some of the local bird species (below) from nibbling early fruit. Eggplants in the vegie patch have also to be netted, as they are a favourite of the local wood ducks.
Even raspberries are becoming difficult to grow under the current warming conditions, says Bill, while crops such as asparagus are doing really well without any irrigation and with the ferns providing a welcome touch of green through the hottest times of the year.
 Of greatest interest was Bill’s crop of garlic, which he hangs in one of his cool stone heritage buildings for a few weeks after harvest to allow the nutrients in the stem and flower head to return to the bulb, increasing storage time. Red shallots are also grown, as are peas and tomatoes.
 

As always, the time came for us to retire to our tables and chairs under a shady tree, swap gardening tales, offer or seek advice and to eat, drink and be merry.
For a full photographic tour of the farm, look through the album (photos - right panel) created by our champion vegie grower and photographer Bob (below), seen here standing outside Bill’s poly-tunnel, used for propagating all sorts of seedlings, including native trees and shrubs for his wind breaks and conservation strips on the farm.
Thanks Bill – great hospitality and inspiration in large dollops.