Food Connect Adelaide

http://www.foodconnectadelaide.com.au/

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....

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.

BOK CHOY MYSTERY

	Dec 3rd I planted some tiny, half caterpillar-eaten bok choy seedlings into this wheel creation I found in Hugh's junk heap. In the middle I put a bowl of water for the birds.
	At the same time and into the same mixture, I put some of them into little pots.... they looked like these that I potted up today... only in individual pots.
	Dec 12th Those in the funny old wheel look wonderful and in 9 days have become almost big enough to begin to eat.....
(I put the pot next to those in the wheel ... not a very clear photo!)	While those in the  little pots have certainly improved and grown a bit, but they are nowhere near as vigorous. Is this to do with the bowl of water and humidity, or the water regulating the temperature of the soil......  or what?

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!

 

HAPPY FIRST BIRTHDAY TO HUGH'S GARDEN!

 

 

It was the first birthday of Hugh's vegetable garden this November! Back in 2008 we cleared away years of rubbish and neglect from the yard of the house he rents. And then we dug out some of the acres of concrete.... a shocker of a back yard to start with!

The soil is very sandy and in places it is just white sand, being so close to the beach. We dug in bags of compost from SA Composters, a brick of coconut fibre to hold the moisture in and Rapid Riser as the "soil" seemed so lacking in anything at all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

He started off wanting neat rows and vegetables grouped nicely.... and didn't like my approach of inviting nature in to work for you by having things all mixed up.

Everything grew like mad and he was so proud of it all.

 

 

 

Then the earwigs and caterpillars discovered it. He made earwig traps and sprayed Dipel for the caterpillars but thought there must be a better way. He bought a couple of books and studied them well.... Jackie French's "Towards Backyard self-sufficiency" and Lolo Houbein's "One Magic Square". Jacky lives in NSW and Lolo in Adelaide so he did well. Funny he chose these 2 books of the hundreds available at book shops because, unbeknown to Hugh, this Jackie French book was also my first vegetable gardening book a trillion years ago and I had recently met Lolo at Fern Ave Community Garden and thought her book looked great! 

Anyway, the gist of all this was that he began to plant herbs amongst the rows of vegetables. He gradually moved away from rows and went for ....dare I say it.... Mum's more natural approach!

During the year I helped him expand the garden into more of that concrete jungle but the things he grows and what goes where are all up to him.... I am just the worker following instructions these days.... something I am pretty shocking at!

 

......until now it looks like this! It brings a tear to my eye to see such a wonderful patch of paradise grow from such a harsh beginning and it just goes to show what you can do....

 

 

 

 

 

So, we sat outside in the garden and raised a glass to Hugh's first year as a vegetable gardener.

May the future bring him happiness and may his garden flourish.

See more photos of Hugh's garden here.

....I have no idea why I am having such trouble getting this to post how it is supposed to look. Has Live Writer gone mad or is it me??

DANISH SEEDSAVERS ANNUAL MEETING

I love reading the blog "In the Toad's Garden" by Skrubtudsen in Denmark. And I noticed he has recently added this blog to his reading list, so I thought I would pop over to Denmark and see what's been going on there lately.

He has been to the Danish Seedsavers annual meeting and visited some interesting and beautiful gardens, such as this culturally diverse one, as he describes....

From Toftegård we drove to the allotments in Ishøj. It was exciting to see how much can be grown, when 100 sq.m. is exploited intensive. Ishøj is know for its large immigrant community. The allotments is a cultural melting pot, where people with very diverse cultural heritage meet each others gardening culture. Some are faithful to their origin, others are more curious, letting themselves getting inspired to grow new crops and grow in new ways. The joy of gardening prevail, almost every gardener there seems to share it. Almost, because here like every where some people with good intentions are not able to keep the garden from growing in to weed and wild trees. But in this allotment they are willingly helping if allowed. An old man kept his garden very well, but has fallen ill this summer. Those who can keep his garden for the time being. He probably helped others in need at times.

We are so lucky here, in Adelaide in particular, that we do not need to grow our tomatoes and capsicums etc in glasshouses like this one but I would so love to go and see how things are done in such a cold place as Denmark one day.