Waverley Park Communal Garden

Greetings you fabulous lot and Happy New Year from the Garden in the Park!

“Ho! what news of the garden” I hear you cry. We’ll if you haven’t been there in a while, you’ve got to get down there and drink in the plentiful goodness. We’ve got eggplants exploding out of bed number two and tomatoes tumbling out of beds three, four and five! There are pouting purple chilli, succulent sage and tremendous thyme not to mention a bunch of silent secret seedlings laying low for now but harbouring great ambitions.

Peter from Honeysuckle Garden Centre in the Junction continues his kindness in supplying us with freebies for our working bees and our team of gardeners expands every month – welcome to all the newcomers!

In sadder news, this month saw the demise of our dear friend and garden guardian Costa the Scarecrow, may he rest in peace. In the words of his creator and biggest fan Adam Brass “Green fingers may pop up from his shallow grave” and here’s hoping they do!

I’m feeling a little sentimental about the garden seeing as we just successfully sailed past the 18 month mark so just want to say a big thank you to everyone who has been involved so far! On a personal note, I’ve just brought a brand new baby girl into the world and I’m very proud to be able to show her, as she grows in tandem with the tomatoes, a little of the future of our city where veggie gardens blossom on every street corner and city orchards command the same respect as the footy pitch.

See you at the next working bee at 10am on the 17 March – as always the third Sunday of the month.

Hi friends,

I confess that I’ve been a little remiss in keeping this blog up to date, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been loyally caressing the garden and pumping it full of plant loving vitality in the intervening months…oh no! We had incredibly successful September, October and November working bees and the garden is looking SO BEAUTIFUL! What lucky folks we are to have this on our doorstep. Last Sunday was the November working bee and I’ll tell you a little about it to whet your appetite and make you long for the feel of earth under your little finger tippies…

Greens, greens, greens – we love’em!

First BIG THANKS to the wonderful Sarah who made an extra special early morning trip to Honeysuckle Garden Centre to pick up a great variety of goodies (mulch, seedlings and seed raising mixture). At the garden, we met with Jon, Amelia and a lovely newbie Matt and immediately got stuck into some serious compost maintenance. When we asked how Matt heard about us, he said he’d been enjoying picking and munching on the spinach and other garden delights over the last month and was here to “repay the karma” so we were thrilled our philosophy of “give a little, take a little” is working so perfectly! Horray!

Peppery Lettuce – a little goes a long way!

Fieke, Jules and Adam were there not too long after and soon the beds were home to lots of new tomato, basil and lettuce plants and having a nice looooong drink to settle in. With my baby due next week, I was most useful sat in the shade sign making. Keeping up to date signs to tell everyone what plants actually are has been a bit of a bugbear for us, so we’re hoping this new method will work. Head down there, take a look and let us know what you think.

Improved signage will help passers-by choose what to have for dinner!

Highlights at the end were a visit from a freelancer writer for Green Lifestyle Magazine (our fame increases all the time – stuff the A-List, I’m keen to make the G-List!) and a lovely German girl wanting to find out all about the history of the garden. Then we shared the harvest. There were beetroots galore! Oh so tasty and full of organic yumminess!

Our gardens are very wise

In other VERY EXCITING news…we also won first place in the Waverley Council Garden Awards in the Gardening Together category so in order to celebrate we’re going to spend the $300 prize money on treating you, yes YOU, to a very special open day and picnic on 16th December (watch this space for more info).

Open day! All welcome

Till then
Stay green!
Penny

Hear ye, (ding-a-ling) hear ye!

I’ve just got to tell you about the wondrous August working bee as the September one is already hot on our heels…

Cooo, what a great turn out. It seems that there is nothing like the kiss of spring sunshine to get green fingers a-moving. So what did we all get up to?

• The usual walk and talk around the beds and compost bins, weeding, trouble-shooting, marvelling at our newly-growns and planning the planting activities of the day.
• It was ace to see so many kids among the crew and we gave them the important job of painting and decorating the compost bin. Also in a fit of recycling, we’d claimed a polystyrene box that was littering the park and it needed jazzing up before we could use it as a planter box.

Compost your food scraps at the garden in the park

• We discovered no less than 3 baby bumps within the gang – how exciting! Those lucky kids are gonna know a thing or two about fresh local produce! Perhaps a future activity will be weekly mums and bubs gardening session?

Baby bumps!

• We gave some encouragement to a new local gardening buddy, who dropped by to gather some ideas on how to set up a raised garden bed on her local street – it’s funny to think that we’re now “experts” on verge gardens  having started out as complete novices ourselves!
• Last, but certainly not least, we had our favourite local celebrity, Costa Georgiadis (star of the ABC’s Gardening Australia) drop by to donate some seedlings and pose with his namesake our scarecrow…can you tell the difference?

Costa meet Costa

It was a really beautiful day and as the remaining few of us sat down to a well-deserved piece of delicious sweet potato flan (homebaked by our wonderful friend Jewels) and some sweet mint tea, we all felt the delicious tingle of community spirit and felt the truth behind one of life’s paradoxes: in order to receive, you must give.

In order to receive, you have to give

In other news:

• We’ve applied for the Waverley Garden Awards “Gardening Together” category so get your fingers and toes crossed for us!
• Annie has been very patient and kind for letting us store the pond liner and left over gravel in her driveway, but seeing no further purpose for it we decided to try out FREECYCLE a newly discovered local distribution network for people to pass on their unused/unwanted stuff. What a fantastic service! Within 10 minutes of posting the goods on the site, I had takers and within a week it had all been picked up. If you’ve got stuff you want to shift, check it out…FREECYCLE
• Join us at the next working bee….

Next dig day SUNDAY 16 SEPTEMBER 10am

Well bless me if it isn’t that time again. YES folks it’s our regular 3rd Sunday of the month, Waverley Park Communal Garden DIG DAY…

Sunday 19th July from 10am

We’ll be doing our usual activities:

i.e. Composting, planting, weeding, smiling, chatting, picnicing and giving Costa the scarecrow’s nose a happy squeeze.

As always please bring a wee dish for nibbling on after we’ve done the hard work.

Look forward to seeing you there!

Costa says… “can’t wait to see you there”

Greetings one and all!

The sun has got his hat on, hip, hip, hip horray…don’t you just love Sydney winters! Mother Nature treated us to a glorious cloudless sky for the July dig day and happy were the gardeners to pull out our winter white limbs and soak up some vitamin D while planting out and cultivating vitamin’s A-Z!

Progress report on the new beds: The new garden beds’ wicking method (i.e. the reservoir we built under the soil that waters the plants from the roots) seemed to be working well but, as yet, the seedlings weren’t thriving. I suspect that onslaught of rain the week after we put the beds in didn’t help, but hopefully the worms and critters are working their magic below ground and the plants will perk up soon.

Jobs we concentrated on this week were:

• The usual weeding, planting and compost turning
• Stalking out the beans (which, by the by, were planted in memory of Anwar, a friend of one of our volunteers who died of cancer this year and are now reminiscent of Jack and the Beanstalk. Go Anwar’s beans!)
• Scarecrow and sign maintenance (Costa needed a cuddle and the chalk board needed a fresh coat of varnish)
• Painting and pimping up the new compost bin. As you can see from the pics below, it is now a burst of colour and has silver stars stuck all over the lid!

And then… After all that hard work…phew! We were in need of refreshment so sat down to a lovely picnic. Thanks to all volunteers including Di, Jules, Annie, Sarah and special thanks to Serena who has taken over Salla’s day on the watering roster while she is away in Europe.
Next dig day is on the 19th August so see you then!!!

Cheerio for now, Penny

Smiles all round for another successful day

Pimping up the compost bin!

Successfully pimped

Roll up, roll up for our regular 3rd Sunday of the month, Waverley Park Communal Garden DIG DAY = Sunday 15th July from 10am

We’ll be doing our usual activities:
i.e. Composting, planting, weeding, smiling, chatting, picnicing (please bring a dish) and giving Costa the scarecrow a kiss.

AND if the weather is kind, I’ll bring the paints so we can go mad on the new compost bin and pimp it up YO! (Yes, I even have glitter)

Look forward to seeing you there!

Come meet the fairies…

Hello loyal followers,

Just a brief note to let you know that our humble garden in the park is having a stall at Bondi the Beautiful Fair tomorrow which is part of the Winter Magic festival…

Date: 1st July 2012

Location: Bondi Park, next to Bondi Pavillion

Not only that, but yours truly will be selling a variety of fully recycled beach bags and other  goodies that I reclaim and refashion from the banners that flutter so colourfully over our wonderful city. Be great to see you there to represent the garden and show your support of all things beautiful in Bondi

See you there!

Penny