Garden update - June

Now that winter has decidedly arrived the garden is slowing in terms of growing and planting. However, it’s the perfect time to make changes to your layout, improve soil, add any infrastructure and make plans.

And so, it was a great time to build on the overall plan for the Gungaderra Community Garden. Now that the annual beds are ticking along and nicely planted for the season ahead - garlic, broad beans, peas, greens and more broad beans! - we have turned our attention to the other areas of the garden. Namely the fruit tree area and the edges.

A key principle of Permaculture is to use edges and value the marginal, lucky for us the community garden is enclosed in by a fence that offers plenty of scope for just that. There has already been some beginnings of this with fruit trees, a native garden strip and a pollinator patch around the edge lines. 

On the northern edge of the garden, outside the boundary fence, there is a gradual slope and some fruit trees currently planted. And after a dry summer and autumn it felt like a great spot to introduce some passive water harvesting via a swale - activate new garden project and an opportunity to learn some good stuff.

We were lucky enough to have Dr Cally Brennan from Canberra Permaculture Design lead a workshop on both the theory and practice of using swales. Bonus, our eager participants got busy digging and we have the beginnings of a swale. There’s still a little more digging to be done and then the mulching but it’ll be great to see how the swale performs through the winter rains (fingers crossed) and then the subsequent summer. And continuing on with the plans we will be planting out the swale and surrounding area to a food forest using fruit tree guilds and plenty of beneficial plantings.

If you’d like to learn more about Backyard Food Forests, guilds and the like come along on 30 August to check it out.

And if you want to pop in to check out the swale and potter in the garden our open garden sessions are held each Thursday in term time 9.30-11am. Hope to see you there!