Growing Vegies in a Box - First Step to a Blue Mountains Food Garden

Lizzie Connor and Sue Girard have been teaching residents of the Blue Mountains the fundamentals of growing vegetables in small containers. I experienced their first workshop at the Festival of Joy 2007 held at the Katoomba Community Gardens. Their combined wealth of knowledge empowered the participants both young and old with the knowledge that it was possible to grow salad vegetables without a garden.

Last month I was invited to participate in another workshop held at Lizzie's Katoomba house on a day that was particularly cold and wet. However, the atmosphere was convivial and both Sue and Lizzie taught us some of the principles of Permaculture and together we helped create 4 boxes of veggies.


On Lizzie's deck, we were able to see previous boxes in different stages of development and a bubble wrap cover invented by Sue that provides protection in harsh environments.









Another workshop will be held in June and online support is available to all at http://www.katoombachamber.com/ (follow the links to Kitchen Gardens and then to Questions and Answers). Sue and Lizzie are both members of the team that monitor the Forum and help answer queries.

Photos by Helena Wong.
Maryanne Bell.

A Kitchen Garden in Every Blue Mountains Home

In February 2008 Cittaslow - Katoomba/Blue Mountains plans to launch an ambitious but very exciting project "A Kitchen Garden in Every Blue Mountains Home". As part of this project two members of the Blue Mountains Permaculture Network, Susan Girard and Lizzie Connor, conducted two free pilot workshops for beginners at the Blue Mountains Community Garden's Festival of Joy on 20 October. They were based on creating and maintaining a simple container-garden in a re-used styrofoam box with 10 easy-grow summer vegetables.

Lizzie and Sue prepared and presented the workshops as part of their work on Cittaslow's Kitchen Garden Project sub-committee; BMCC funded some bulk potting mix; and participants were also asked to donate $5 to go towards the cost of the seedlings. Three other members of Blue Mountains Permaculture Network, Vickie Walker, Belinda Selke and Maryanne Bell, also came along to help in various ways.

The workshops were aimed at people who had no vegetable growing experience, and were either renting or had no garden space. Information was distributed by flyers at community centres, the Korowal Eco-Fest, and by email to interested groups (including the Network's email list). Both were booked out and the participants gave enthusiastic evaluations. Several have been active in email Q&A since.

A word on our choice of container-gardens. This was the suggestion of another member of the sub-committee, John McNaull, but Lizzie and Sue embraced the opportunity to explore this way into growing food. The aim was for beginners to learn about how vegetables grow and what problems might occur, rather than for them to learn about sustainability as such.

David Holmgren's first two designer principles were the focus: Observe and Interact (easier if the plants are close to the house and within sight) and Catch and Store Energy (seeing how plants catch and store energy from sun, water and fertile soil). His third principle: Obtain a Yield, was relevant in the sense of beginning to understand what's involved in getting one. And his fourth principle: Apply self-regulation and accept feedback, was the underlying motivation for the whole project and for participants' attendance.

JUST ABOUT TO START
On Saturday 1 December Lizzie hosted a follow-up morning tea, which 6 people attended and for which 8 gave their apologies. They discussed what they had learnt so far and what they would like to do in the future, and also did a quick tour of Lizzie's container garden and larger garden in drizzling rain. 20 people have booked in for a shared harvest lunch at the Katoomba Community Gardens on 16 February 2008, with 2 apologies, and that morning we are also conducting a no-dig-garden workshop, at which we expect about 10 people.

The Cittaslow sub-committee is also planning another series of beginners workshops in March based on growing winter vegetables in containers. On Saturday 8 December Lizzie and Sue are conducting a similar workshop for 40 graduates of BMCC's Earth Works courses in 2007. BMCC are funding the costs of the workshop materials and also a modest fee for the two presenters.

We hope this will be just the start of an ongoing collaboration. If you haven't attended the Earth Works courses yet, we really recommend them, particularly the tour of Katoomba's Waste Management Facility (you also get a free compost bin). Email Lizzie for more information about this project.

Lizzie and Susan

Creating a kitchen garden at a local school

I am now the proud ‘grandmother’ of twenty kindergarten children at Katoomba Public School. Each Friday at noon (weather permitting) I turn up at the school, hopefully with dear friend Sue (Girard) in tow, to add a bit more to a steadily growing garden, carefully chosen for its closeness to the classroom and its north east aspect. We work with four at a time for about fifteen minutes, while the others do a Round Robin set of activities inside.

The first bed was built on top of the kikuyu, following Rowe Morrow's great diagram. The children helped at very stage – deciding what vegetables (and fruit) they liked to eat, talking about whether they would grow in Katoomba, marking out the first bed, wetting and laying the newspaper, adding a layer of lucerne hay, then a layer of almost compost (they enjoyed identifying the various vegetable remains although a few didn't want to touch or smell them), then a layer of straw and wetting it thoroughly.

Finally we made holes for pockets of good soil, and each child sowed two peas or beans or planted a potato seedling or a lettuce. Then they added tags with their unsteadily printed names. I explained that some might die or be eaten (just as well, for by the next week the slugs had found two of the lettuce - we put in a substitute straight away in each case).

We talked about the difference between the fresh peas and beans that we eat and the dried-up peas and bean-pods that we use to get new plants. The most dramatic moment was opening up some dried old pods of Scarlet Runner beans to reveal the delicately coloured beans inside. We sowed them even out of season just to see what happened.

As the peas grew we attached them to tripods, and we also gave all the plants a dose of Charlie Carp (after a smell of the bottle). We also had to weed out the wheat as it grew out of the straw, and keep pulling back the kikuyu. The name tags haven’t worked very well because some names have washed off – even though we used what I thought were the right markers. Any ideas?

We have now added a wall of bubble-wrap on the south east of the bed (it's protected to the west by the school building), after talking about how plants get cold in winter too. And we are just about to make our second bed, with two keyhole sections. This time we'll have to cut off the kikuyu around the edge and then pull out all the runners. Great fun, as long as the ground isn't too wet. Then I'll give it a bit of a hoe, and we'll sow a row of carrots and some rainbow chard - we have already looked at the seeds (brought by Sue).

I expected them to be interested in the physical gardening activities such as planting, watering and seeing the plants grow (of course a few just like being outside), but I have been excited by the interest some of the children also have in what might be called the intellectual element in the exercise – the why, why not and how? One of these children is not quite five.

We've already had other teachers wanting to have a similar garden, and the P & C have agreed to raise money for hay, straw etc, so all we need is some volunteers. Of course we could do something similar at other schools as well. The project is part of the just established Katoomba-Leura Climate Action Now group, which hopes to consolidate the activities of various local groups.

Let me know if you would like to join us, grandmother or grandfather or auntie or uncle. Everyone welcome to what could become an active network. From little things big things grow.

Lizzie Connor