A sunny friday afternoon a couple of weeks ago and Finn Macksey, permaculture man extrordinaire came back to check out our progress in the orchard and add to our tree collection with 3 banana plants, which are apparently referred to as pups. He also brought us some sugarcane and comfrey. Thanks Finn, you have been great to us!
Archive for 2009
Goodbye to the weeds
A big thank you to all who came to our last working bee for the orchard this year. We had a lovely sunny afternoon with enough people to tackle the last hard clearing job. Between us we cleared the debris and weeds from the left hand side, along the wall and even got a fair way up the slope. The stone circles around the trees are completed and we straightened up the wooden edges of the bed that holds the vines (and now also marigolds and thyme). Plus we spread the last of the mulch around where it was needed. The wildflower seeds that were sown a few weeks ago are starting to come up around all the trees. It is all looking fantastic.
Last Working Bee for 2009
Hi all – we are having a working bee in the orchard on Saturday November 14th at 2pm. We just need to clear the northern edge of weeds and last bits of debris and also clear a few weeds from the slope behnd the back wall to stop them taking over all summer and seeding all over our orchard.
The site is looking great now and the bare dirt around the trees should soon be covered in wild flowers as the first seeds were sown this week.
Also I thought it would be good to have a few before and after photos so we can see what a huge difference all our hard (but enjoyable!) work has made in the last few months.
First Fruit
Whilst not expecting a glut of fruit this year with the trees all being so new in the ground, it is still exciting to see we have 1 almond growing and 3 small apples from the ballerina apple trees.
Here comes the Mulch
The cheapest quote I could get for mulch for our orchard was $850!! Way beyond our budget. So how happy was I to come back from the school holidays to find 2 large piles of mulch waiting for us courtesy of Scott our fantabulous Caretaker. He had some of the school trees trimmed over the hols and got it mulched for us and so it cost not a penny! So the last couple of weeks we have slowly been spreading it around our fruit trees. Some folks helped out after school, the Enviro action group have put some muscle in and we had a working bee last sunday to finish it off. It is looking fantastic and thank you to all who have loaded wheelbarrows and buckets of endless mulch. It has been a big job.
We have had a green crop in the circles around the trees, which puts nitrogen into the soil which the trees like. This has now done it’s work and has been cleared from the circles to make way for the next stage which is planting orchard friendly wildflowers around each tree. The flowers will attract lots of beneficial insects who will hopefully eat up any destructive ones that lurk about. I hope to get the seed sown this week, so it won’t be long before we see some bright colour around our orchard.
At our last working bee we also planted 2 more tamarillo trees, 3 grape vines and 4 passion fruit vines, all from Incredible Edibles.
Take a look at some of our latest photos:
Lots of garden mix
August 28th, another sunny Friday afternoon and here comes the garden mix for our vege beds from Central Landscape Supplies, plus some scoria to go in the base of each bed to improve drainage. The Enviro Action Group had already put wet newspaper in the base of each bed to keep the grass down. This was a pretty big job when we got into it but the great weather and masses of enthusiastic volunteers meant we got it done in a couple of hours.
Raised garden beds arrive
On August 19th, a beautiful sunny wednesday afternoon the new raised beds arrived for our vegetable garden to be. We got them from Kiwi Backyard and they are made from untreated macrocarpa, as our permaculture men had recommended. I could smell the wood as soon as I walked into school that day and it was very exciting to see that they were finally here after all our planning. After the bell rang at 3 we suddenly had a group of parents, teachers and kids all chomping at the bit to get the beds put together so just we just got stuck into it. As usual, someone was on hand with a camera so here’s the pics…
Welcome to the Garden of Edendale!
So post number one has a bit of catching up to do about the development of our new school garden so lets get to it. Discussions began last year between some parents and teachers about the possibility of a school vegetable garden and an orchard. Through various contacts we had a Permaculture designer and teacher, Dan Palmer, come and visit the school in May and help us decide what to plant and where. Dan lives in Melbourne so the local contact he gave us was Finn Macksey, who also teaches permaculture. Finn has been to the school twice to assist us with planning irrigation and the placement of specific trees in the orchard.
We have had 3 working bees so far. The first one was on July 12th to clear and prepare the ground for the orchard, which as most of you probably know by now, is down by the swimming pool.
We got to work one blustery Sunday morning (it was the weekend that the ‘weather bomb’ was predicted, whatever that is), clearing rubbish and piles of garden waste. Then we dismantled the old long jump pit and spread the sand around, which will be good for drainage. After that we covered the site with blood and bone fertilizer and sheet mulched the site with soaking wet newspaper and cardboard. This was then covered with all the mulch we already had.
After much planning of what trees to plant, Finn came and helped us position them in the orchard. The idea is that we have something fruiting all through the school year (hopefully!) and avoid too much fruit at one time. We also had to leave out trees that mainly fruit in the school summer holidays.
The first lot of trees were delivered from Kings Plant Barn, and our second working bee was August 2nd. We planted 3 feijoas, 1 lemonade lemon tree, 2 mandarins, 1 loquat, 1 dwarf almond (which is flowering already!) and 6 apple trees – 5 of which were ballerina apple trees which grow 3-4 metres high but only 50 cms across (they are the ones that currently look like little dead sticks). We also plan to get one dwarf heritage pear tree but this is not available until next year, so we have left a space.
Last Saturday (August 22nd) we had our third, very well attended working bee to plant 30 chilean guava’s to create a hedge. We also planted one Tamarillo. And people even brought baking. I think we had 12 adults and who knows how many children were running about. It was great to see so many people getting involved and a big THANK YOU!! here to all of you who have given up your time to get this project going. I also would like to mention a lady called Natasha at Kings Plant Barn who has endured about 1 million of my questions with the utmost patience.
Karen Ward
And now for some photos…..
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- The ‘Before’ photo
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- View from the top
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- First Working Bee
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- Sheet mulching
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- End of the first working bee
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- Isla helps unload the trees
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- Isla counts the bags of compost
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- Second working bee – planting trees
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- Second working bee
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- Ava checks out the flowers
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- The almond tree – first flower in the orchard
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- Third Working Bee
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- One of 30 Chilean Guava plants
