Paronella Park: Queensland’s Juicy Jungle Garden

  Paronella Park, near Innisfail, is the legacy created by Jose Paronella, a prodigiously productive person. Born in Catalonia, Spain, and trained as a pastry chef, Jose emigrated to Australia in 1913. He started as a sugarcane-cutter, then worked at improving sugarcane farms before investing his savings and energy into creating Parronella.

Nicotine And Old Roses

Food security alert: Neonicotinoid pesticides, like Confidor, are creating a dangerous world where caterpillars are becoming poison bird bait, where bees and migratory birds ‘forget’ how to navigate and bees and other pollinators are becoming suicide junkies.

Autumn Open Day at Bellis

Every time I open my garden there is something to celebrate about organic gardening and seed saving.

Glyphosate, The World’s Favourite Herbicide

Glyphosate-based herbicides are bee-killing global pollutants of groundwater, rivers and surface water. More recently glyphosate has been detected in rain. The latest research reveals that glyphosate damages the beneficial bacteria in the gut of the honeybee, making them prone to to deadly infections. Previous studies have shown that pesticides such as neonicotinoids cause harm to bees,…

Curious Garden Creatures

Give me an Australian wasp anytime. The solitary species are so much safer to garden amongst than their vicious ‘social’ European counterpart, Vespula germanica.

In Flower Today

Brisbane‘s subtropical winter comes to a happy, floriferous end in mid-August. Today there’s around a hundred different plants flowering, two weeks before Australia’s official first day of spring.

Scrub Turkey Trouble?

Question Hi Jerry, I have just moved to Byron Bay and have a Scrub Turkey (aka Australian Bush Turkey) problem. Do you have any clues as to what I should do to get my veggie garden going? Me and my veggie-head friend in Sydney love your work, Vicki