Billie poses in front of our plot

Our potatoes are coming up and pak choi survives the bug attacks

some young plants can be protect with cut down plastic bottles

We’ve had a few servings of mixed salad leaves this week and the watercress has been a surprising star of the well-drained plot.

Our plot isn’t big enough to grow potatoes in tyres, but we use recycled materials wherever possible. The trellis for the passionfruit was found in a skip!

Me and our gardening neighbour, Tom, at the other end of our little plot

Part of the Arctic Circle community garden

Our community plot is fairly small – about a metre and a half, by 3 metres. We want to grow a lot of things, so decided to give “square foot gardening” a try. I had read about it on the net and seen a piece on Gardening Australia and it seems like a good way to maximise space.

measuring out the plot

View from the North (and visiting minah bird)

View from the South, boyf, dog, rollercoaster in background (Luna Park)

Oscar experiments with aquaponics

Oscar shows Ed his aquaponic fish

These strips are based on a report I read on Treehugger, which has a more recent article here

…there is a huge amount of interest in combining hydroponics with fish farming for a mutually beneficial partnership. Most notably Will Allen’s Growing Power team in Milwaukee have shown how aquaponics can produce a remarkable amount of high-quality protein and veggies on very limited urban land.

Howard's gardening advice

The boyf and I volunteered at the Veg Out community garden in St Kilda yesterday. Like my previous sessions, we were on compost duty, which means shovelling a lot of decomposing veggies, clippings and weeds to make a layered pile that will break down into the rich, dark compost that gets dug into the gardens.

I’ve been volunteering a few months, but only applied for my own plot two months ago, so it was a great surprise to be told we could have a plot yesterday. Turns out we were in the right place at the right time, as the plot assigner was there for the last day before he went off on travels and two plots had just become vacant.

The boyf and I having dug in some compost into our new plot