Bass Coast Post - Gardening

Stick to the plot

29/4/2020

Permaculture whizz Rick Coleman shares his secrets of successful home gardening in Bass Coast.

By Wendy Christensen

LOCAL nursery and hardware stores have been inundated recently with many people spending their isolation time gardening. But without proper soil preparation or the correct sun to shade ratio, a lot of money can be wasted on seeds and seedlings that were never given the chance to thrive.

PICAL can help solve your gardening frustrations with some expert advice and a free introductory horticulture short course beginning in May. New tutor Rick Coleman has over 30 years of permaculture design and teaching experience. Internationally recognised, Rick has worked as an educator and consultant for a range of organisations both locally and overseas, including RMIT, World Vision Australia and Community Aid Abroad (Oxfam).

Plant medicine

10/10/2019

House plants aren’t just décorative; they can also make our homes safer and more comfortable.

By Anne Heath Mennell

DID YOU know that NASA (yes, the space agency) has been researching air quality for decades, including how plants can improve our air quality?

Plant enthusiast Monique Wilson shared this information at the Let’s Talk Plants event, organised by the West Gippsland Library Corporation, at the Grantville Transaction Centre. Monique is passionate about plants and generous in sharing her knowledge, tips and hints for being a good plant ‘parent’.

Mother in law’s tongue, also known as devil’s tongue, continues to releases oxygen at night. Photo by Ks.mini

Queen of the compost

1/9/2017

Make compost, not war on weeds, is the advice from veteran gardener Barbara Hallett. Barbara will share her gardening secrets at a session in Wonthaggi this week.

By Catherine Watson

WEEDS are not the enemy in Barbara Hallet’s garden. Describing herself as “messy but productive”, she has a relaxed attitude to garden surprises.

“Weeds are only what nature plants when you leave a space,” she says. “You can’t fight nature. You can only work with it.”

On Wednesday, Mitchell House Harvest Centre in Wonthaggi will host a talk by Barbara on seed saving, gardening and vegetarianism. She will give out seeds from her North Wonthaggi garden and answer gardening questions.

The heat is on

8/2/2015

By Linda Gordon

FEELING discouraged in your fruit and veg garden? Troubled by extreme UV, heatwaves, blasts of north wind and hollow-sounding water tanks? Join the club.

A heady brew

29/11/2014

By Linda Gordon

DO YOU remember a time when puddles of mucky water, dirt, long, stout sticks and an absence of responsible adults was all you desired in life?

Sex and death and the whole damn fig

25/10/2014

Cartoon by Natasha Williams-Novak

By Linda Gordon

FIGS are ingenious and highly successful trees. Did you know that there are 750 known species; more than either the eucalyptus or oaks?

End of the line

20/9/2014

By Linda Gordon

WONTHAGGI’S heathlands are particularly lovely walking in spring, when the plants put on their best in the hope of attracting passing pollinators. I was disappointed last week, then, to see that someone had used the area near the start of a walking track as a dump site for a washing machine and a bed.

Digging the dirt on health and happiness

6/9/2014

By Linda Gordon

WHAT do these good-looking, hard-working local people have in common? Yes, they were all working in the Wonthaggi Community Garden in the sunshine last week.

But what may not be obvious to you, or even to them. was that the closer they got to the dirt, the better their chances of dodging depression, rheumatoid arthritis, certain cancers and Crohn’s Disease.

The sap is rising

9/8/2014

By Linda Gordon

SUDDENLY, it seems, the garden has woken up, or could it be me who’s come out of hibernation.

She'll be apples

2/8/2014

Not a pink lady in sight.

By Catherine Watson

THE extended heat waves of summer and autumn made this year’s apple crop a hit and miss affair, but here in a shady corner of Wonthaggi I had my best-ever apple season. Royal gala and Cox’s orange apple trees that had sulked ever since I planted them more than 10 years ago suddenly decided this was their season and produced bountiful, tasty crops.

Lessons in life and composting

19/7/2014

Sister Loyala

By Linda Gordon

IT’S true gardeners have had an image problem in the past. Decent people, mostly middle aged and older, hopelessly unfashionable: baggy trousers stained at the knees, cardigans over jumpers and shapeless tee shirts, troubling hats or hair blown every which way.

Happy hugelkultur

19/6/2014

A completed Hügelkultur bed prior to being covered with soil. Photo: Jon Roberts

By Linda Gordon

ANOTHER dry cool day, another pile of prunings. It’s inevitable at this time of the gardening year that we want to cut back, tidy up and plan for the warm growing season.

Autumn gold

17/5/2014

Photo: Frank Coldebella

By Linda Gordon

BRUISED and confused by the budget news, I put my head, heart and hands into the garden this week and had a moment of clarity. Yes I’m cash poor but, hang on, I am compost rich!

Easy pickings

3/5/2014

Fat hen, or melde, which indirectly gave its name to Melbourne. Photo: Rasbak

By Linda Gordon

“WEEDS are the ultimate convenience food. They ask of you no money, no search for a parking space at the supermarket, no planting, no watering or any other maintenance whatsoever.”

One part potash, two parts imagination

5/4/2014

By Linda Gordon

MY GARDEN shed is an open-plan affair, a very convenient design for getting in and out with bulky things. There are no doors and just one corrugated tin wall.

That’s one smart tomato

22/3/2014

By Linda Gordon

IF YOU are in the habit of singing to your plants, you’d better make sure you’re in tune. It turns out they can hear you and they are more than somewhat sensitive.

Rethinking the loquat

3/12/2013

By Linda Gordon

THEY come from the far east, are exotic and easy to ignore. You may not have eaten one since you were a kid when you idly picked the orangey ball off a neighbourhood tree, took a bite and chucked the rest away.

Man the barricades

22/11/2013

By Linda Gordon

To net or not to net? That is the question. Every fruit season we have the same quandary: the netting is awkward to use but the crop is vulnerable.

And there is the scale of the exercise. We have about 40 fruit and nut trees in our medium sized garden: 11 apples and two crab apples, three apricots, a fig, pomegranate, persimmon, two plums, one cherry, three peach, two nectarines ... and so on.

Orchard co-op thinks big

2/11/2013

By Linda Gordon

“We’re just a bunch of locals who want to plant some trees,” says Phillip Island orchard co-op member Lars Olsen.

Land of plenty, in the right hands

14/9/2013

Win Kyi at Wonthaggi's community garden

By Linda Gordon

IN A former life Win Kyi was a farmer. Like most successful farmers she understood the land and worked with it to produce food.

Unlike most farmers she was forced to leave her land and her country behind and join the ranks of Burma’s dispossessed. More than a decade in a refugee camp for displaced people on the Thai Burma border followed.

A fertile imagination

23/8/2013

By Linda Gordon

WELL, look at that. More rain. Driving rain you might call it, straight off Bass Strait via a bitter westerly wind. Nothing for it but to get a fire going and nourish the soul with inspiring words, words that lift one up and speak to the heart of renewal, hope and faith. The new garden seed catalogue!

Aunt Peggy's winter

10/8/2013

By Linda Gordon

WHEN the weather is winter with a capital ‘w’ and no mercy, as it is this August day, I think of the indomitable gardening spirit of Aunt Peggy. She grew a garden wherever she lived, from pokey boarding houses in inner Melbourne to rented rural houses on poor land, to the place she finally called home, in the foothills of the Dandenongs.

Just as nature intended

6/7/2013

By Linda Gordon

BASS Coast Shire is lagging behind other municipalities and its more environmentally minded residents when it comes to planting out nature strips.

South Dudley’s Helen Searle and Richard Kentwell have been disappointed with the council’s reaction to the fruit and veggies they carefully planted in front of their Station Street home.

Sweet taste of success

3/11/2012

The "Tomato Man", Steve Morant

By Catherine Watson

THE ladies are talking fascinators, the punters are talking odds, the best horses in the country are raring to go. It can mean only one thing … time to put in the tomatoes.

Melbourne Cup Day, the first Tuesday in November, is traditionally the day when home gardeners take a calculated punt and plant out their tomato seedlings, trusting that the odds of a late frost are now at least 100-1.