Our New and Improved, Shade Structure made completely from Recycled Materials

We usually drape shade cloth from our trees when Adelaide temperatures heat up to 40 degrees Celsius.

So with 42 degrees forecast for tomorrow, this morning was spent erecting an efficient shade structure.

Last week a friend dropped off a 3 metre by 4 metre gazebo frame destined for the tip.

After a bit of experimenting with the pieces we eventually had the gazebo frame in place to provide support for the shade cloth over our unusually shaped veggie garden.

Well at the end of the day I can say our veggies were protected from the scorching sun.  Bees still feasted on the flowering plants, there was good air circulation and tomatoes ripened in the warm shade.

Our usual system was clumsy, hard to get under and far too humid.

This new and improved version is fantastic, we just hope it does not leave the Plains here for a flight to the Hills if the famous Adelaide gully winds pick up.

Markets & Other Gardening Related Events in Adelaide

We as Adelaide Hills and Plains Seedsavers  get many of requests for information on gardening, seed saving, seedlings and plants.
So it is great to pass on any event I think you may be interested in.

Here are a few events which all sound fantastic.

Food Connect was officially launched on Saturday, 13 February 2010, at the Plains to Plate convergence.
Soon you will be able to fill in your subscription form on Food Connect's website to get your box of predominantly local and predominantly organic fruit and vegetables. Produce direct from the farmers. The first box delivery is not far away! Get excited! Become part of the Food Connect community.  Food Connect will also have a stall at the Uraidla Sustainability Fair & Show this Saturday the 20 February 2010.  Do pop in and say hello. The friendly team will be able to answer any of your questions. (Or so we hope.)

Markets and Garden related events. Please check the details for your self.

This Sunday there is an Aboriginal Food & Plant Trail guided tour at the Adelaide Botanic Gardens. This is a free and very interesting tour.Meet at the Schomburgk Pavilion at 11 am. Check there website and events calender for more details.

Sunday the 28th February there is a Family Fun Day at the Adelaide Botanic Gardens from 2pm to 4pm. It is called "drawing on nature" and mentions you can do a watercolor painting and drawing to take home.
Meet at the Schomburgk Pavilion. Check there website and events calender for more details

Fullarton Park Community Centre Market is held on the 4th Saturday of each month, Heather Welsh sells lots of unusual herbs, there is great citrus available from Dave and Joy Schulz as well as many other plant and produce stalls.

Diana and Jen will be selling organic seedlings at Stirling Market which is the 4th Sunday of the month.

Urrbrae High Barn Market is always the first Saturday Morning of the Month.

I have heard there is a great Car Boot Sale twice a month at Brighton High front oval.

The Mount Barker and Adelaide Farmers Markets are very popular and have a huge variety of fresh organic produce.Check out there websites for the details of the growers who will be attending each week.

There is a Music? Art? Exotic Market, Summer of love 2010, Free Festival tomorrow at Macclesfield, Davenport Square from 2 to 8pm as part of the Fringe Festival.

Warp on the Wild Side, a contemporary basketry exhibition in historic Urrbrae House.This exhibition reflects a diverse range of techniques displaying intricate patterns, flowing lines & sculptural forms using plant fibres found in Waite Arboretum. Guided walks in the Arboretum on Sundays.

Urrbrae House - University Of Adelaide, Waite Campus, Fullarton Road, Urrbrae. 27-28Feb, 1-8Mar, 11am - 4pm.

There are heaps of  wonderful exhibitions for the Fringe Festival which opens with the Fringe Parade tonight near Rundle Street.

Keep Cool!
And please check the details of any event event as I only get my info from leaflets prepared many months before
Maggie

THE BIG WORLD OF STUFF

I do like to read La Vie Verte.... a guide to what's green in France.

Today I read Cheap, cheerful and green holiday gift ideas....

Fight the dross that fills up newsmagazines in doctors’ waiting rooms by donating money or your old digital cameras and laptops to International Reporting Project, which provides opportunities to U.S. journalists to cover international issues that have been neglected in the media. I stumbled upon this recently while reading an article in Business Week about the land grab in Africa, and thinking to myself, hmm this doesn’t seem like the usual Businessweek fare.

If you are in the USA and would like to help get some more real news into the lives of the rest of us, please think about donating your equipment to these people. I, for one, would very much appreciate it!

So I went to that website and found this.....

Donate Equipment

Another way to support the IRP program and our Fellows is through the donation of equipment. We are always looking for: Digital Cameras, Digital Video Cameras, Computers, Laptops, Software, Flat-Panel LCD Monitors, etc. Please send an email describing the piece of equipment you would like to donate to irp@jhu.edu.

And for those of you who live in France, there is this new recycling website ... La Premier Reseau Social  de Recycleurs. I don't know why they are so behind in France with EVERYTHING online and why they don't use freecycle much and people don't use eBay and there is no junk to find....I checked out Freecycle in Perigueux and the last message was in 2007! But some of them are active.... like the Montpellier Freecycle.

Unlike here in Adelaide where you can drive across a couple of suburbs and be sure to find a hard rubbish collection going on where the experienced eye can scan the foot paths and collect enough stuff to make a chook shed or an old clothesline to make shade for summer herbs or whatever project you have in mind! When the boys were little we got a slippery-dip and a blackboard and more recently a laser printer.... a little temperamental but almost brand new and still going strong after 5 years! Dare I admit it but last week we found an as new, beautiful queen size futon mattress, still in its plastic wrapping.... now we just need a base......I'd better look on Freecycle myself....

Hills Sustainable Living Day Sunday 8th November 12:45pm

Where?     Bridgewater Hall      (just opposite Coles on the Bridgewater/Carey Gully Road)

Speakers, plants, stalls, organic wine and olive oil, afternoon tea and talks and home and garden tours.

Information Talks

1pm   N Mullard                   Building with mud brick and stone

1:40 Peter Harwood             Building with reclaimed timber

2:15  Lola Houbein              Author of “ One Magic Square” Easy organic veggie gardening

2:50  Tim Marshall               Author of “Compost the Ultimate organic guide to recycling your garden”

Visit 3 sustainable & environmentally friendly homes and gardens and talk to the owners.

I picked up the leaflet for this at the Stirling organic market, there is no contact number but it says “arranged by the Mayo Branch of the Australian Greens”.

SALISBURY WETLANDS

Water is a serious problem here in South Australia but one local council is doing something about it. In fact, they are leading the world in storm water treatment and re-use. Many years ago they began to use some dry and dusty land as a series of holding ponds for storm water runoff. It was then a rough and ready arrangement which has now grown to be a showcase for water conservation.

Stormwater is water that runs off surfaces such as roofs, roads, footpaths and driveways when it rains. Much of this water flows into stormwater drains and then into creeks and rivers, eventually making its way into the sea. About 160,000 million litres of polluted stormwater was being released into Gulf St Vincent each year, much of it into the Barker Inlet.

In the 1990's the City of Salisbury defined a vision that it would seek to eliminate the flow of polluted water into the marine environment of the Barker Inlet of Gulf St. Vincent. The Barker Inlet is a delicate marine environment of mangroves and sea grass meadows serving as a nursery for a majority of the State's fishing industry. However, years of neglect and polluted inflows have reduced the Barker Inlet to a delicate state.

The creation of wetlands to cleanse stormwater was Salisbury's key strategy to help the ecological rehabilitation of the Barker Inlet while providing cheaper water to local industry and other users. Nutrient and pollutant loads are typically reduced by up to 90 per cent and the treated water salinity is less than 250 mg/L. The system is designed to hold stormwater for around 10 days to ensure optimal treatment efficiency.

Stormwater is treated and harnessed in a series of more than 30 wetlands along urban stormwater paths to slow the flow and allow pollution to settle out. The wetlands cover an area of 260 hectares enhancing the landscape and creating habitat diversity.

All the wetland plants are propagated at the Council's nursery and they play an important role in the treatment of polluted stormwater. The nursery has developed a high level of expertise in propagating various wetland species, and it sells wetland plants to users all around Australia.

As drought hit our state, demands for water also increased and the council researched storing cleaned stormwater underground in aquifers for re-use later. Aquifer Storage and Recovery (ASR) is the process of injecting water into a suitable underground aquifer for storage and later reuse, and it can be a means of artificially recharging depleted underground water supplies.

ASR is a modification of the natural system that has been occurring for millions of years. Natural recharge occurs by filtration of rainwater through the soil profile, past the vegetation root zone and down to permeable rocks known as aquifers.Aquifers can store large quantities of water without losses from evaporation and with reduced risk of contamination, both of which are problems associated with surface water storage areas such as reservoir.

In March there was an excellent talk given at the Rare Fruits Meeting, by Colin Pitman, the Director of Projects at the Salisbury Council. He explained that they have now mapped the whole of Adelaide and made plans for supplying enough water to Adelaide to make it independent of the River Murray. The wetlands and aquifer system is suited to Adelaide's winter rainfall and underground geology and can hold the best solution for all our water needs, relatively cheaply and will return a profit, as it does for the Salisbury Council. I would be very happy to dispense with our current, antiquated water authority and buy my water directly from such a system as this.

I have a CD of the talk which is inspiring and full of information. If anyone would like to borrow it please email me.

Last week I went for a walk at what is now called the Greenfields Wetlands and found it to be not only useful but full of wildlife and photo opportunities! It is amazing to think that what once a dry, barren and awful part of the outskirts of Adelaide, in a triangle between 2 major roads, is now home to thousands of birds, frogs, lizards and insects. It is worth the drive.... go and look for yourself. 

more photos here

 

	There are many bridges through the Melaleucas
	You can see the oxygenating of the water happening here as nature cleans the water
	If I had binoculars, I could see my house on the top of one of those hills, from here.

WED World Environment Day 2009

Today Friday the 5th of June is World Environment Day.

Check out their site.

We also had our 50,000 visitor to this blog last night.

Congratulations Kate and everyone else who has added so many interesting articles to this blog.

It is fun to see that someone on the far side of the globe has googled something we have written about.

The suns out and its a beautiful day, we had rain overnight, wow a great day to be in the garden.

Cheers Maggie.

MORE HILLS ON THE PLAINS FOR KGI MEMBERS

In some States of America and some other countries it is illegal to dry your clothes outside, you must use an indoor clothes drier, how crazy is that!

Here is Aussie land most of us dry our clothes outside, I very rarely use an indoor clothes drier and many of us hang our clothes indoors, on drying racks, in winter or on wet days.

Well let me shock you America, look over my side fence today and you will see a work of art, my new Hills large size collapsible clothes line.My very talented Industrial Designer son designed this and I love it.

It has 32 little lines, 60 metres of line space and 64 hooks to hang shirts on. The whole darn wash fits on it and it glides effortlessly up and down. It has a cover to make it like an umbrella and you can remove the whole thing and it folds away for storage.

Remember the old steel Hills Hoists (Icon of South Australia and included in the Sydney Olympics Opening Ceremony) they were hard work to wind up sometimes. But as you can see Kate is growing peaches on hers.

Okay now for the gardening bit, it did not take me too long to work out what I could do with my old hills hoist. A shade house for young or shade loving plants. We have some new plans for arranging the shade cloth down the sides. I think I shall even grow some things hanging from pots, I have been reading on the KGI forum about people growing things upside down to save space!

Check out this cool shade house. Gardening Australia - Hills Hoist Makeover (I actually like my air conditioned version better.)

I could say I would love to fill up our heat barren front yard with old hoists and shade cloth but I wont say that. But instead I am digging tiny circular gardens in the front and planting zucchinis and pumpkins. I dont know they will survive the hot summer days, Deb uses old sheets to protect some plants and we use shadecloth over our back garden bed.

Bob is really the gardener(i.e. the one who makes the compost and does all the hard work) but I am becoming more interested because I love eating the fresh veggies and herbs we grow. I also like designing garden beds and letting plants go to flower then seed. I love the bees and bugs that come to the garden and I love growing different things, last year we grew a pepino plant and this year we are growing okra.

I can understand now why people get obsessed with their gardens, there is always something to plant or prune or harvest or just enjoy. There are always new varieties of seeds to germinate and new things to cook, eat and learn about. I reckon it wont be long before I start calling myself a gardener but for the moment I am still a cook, well maybe a kitchen gardener.

And speaking of Kitchen Gardeners please sign up and join KITCHEN GARDENERS INTERNATIONAL, we need all the experiences of gardeners from different parts of the world, different climates, different experiences, you who grow different plants and have different ways of storing, cooking and preserving veggies.

SO COME ON VEGGIE GARDEN BLOGGERS JOIN UP AND GIVE KGI A PROMO ON YOUR BLOG!

Computer Recycling

The Unley Computer Share Project is a local initiative. Unwanted computers are collected and volunteer technicians prepare the computers for re-use.
These computers are provided free if you need a computer.
For further information
phone 8272 5881, or
email eddiecl@adam.com.au

Hills on the Plains

In some States of America and some other countries it is illegal to dry your clothes outside, how crazy is that!

I remember an old "domestic science " teacher telling a group of 12 year old girls how wonderful it is to smell the sunshine on your sheets. We all giggled and got told off but I always think of her when I bring the warm sheets from outside and squash them against my face.

Well let me shock you, look over my side fence today and you will see a work of art, my new Hills large size collapsible clothes line.

My very talented Industrial Designer son designed this and I love, love, love it.

It has 32 little lines, 60 metres of line space and 64 hooks to hang shirts on. The whole darn wash fits on it and it glides effortlessly up and down.

Remember the old steel Hills Hoists (Icon of South Australia and included in the Sydney Olympics Opening Ceremony) they were hard work to wind up sometimes.

My hoist folds down so you can store it away and put an umbrella in the base if you are having a garden party.

Okay now for the gardening bit, it did not take me too long to work out what I could do with my old hills hoist.

Bob is going to sew this shade cloth to fit properly cause he likes neat things, but for now this extra shade has brought this corner of the garden to life.

As the sun moves during the day it gives little bits of shade to tired plants. I shall be able to grow heaps more herbs and the potatoes love it.

I found this site yesterday check out this cool shade house. Gardening Australia - Hills Hoist Makeover (I actually like my air conditioned version better.)

I could say I would love to fill up our heat barren front yard with old hoists and shade cloth but I wont say that.

Recycling

I collect things that may be useful one day then put them in the recycle bin when I have not used them. As soon as I do this I find how I could have used them.
Does anyone have a use for empty wine bottles or yoghurt containers?
Do you have any thing you are throwing away which may be useful for someone else or are you looking for something?