Anyone can buy compost in bulk. But these products are often highly variable and sometimes even unsuitable. The traditional alternative is to sow green manures and to make your own compost. If you need bulk compost, consider the sandwich mulching technique. You’ll need a soil pH Test kit and, ideally, get your soil laboratory tested to check for nutrient deficiencies and contaminants.
Category: Food Security
Gardening Together As A Family: People, Plants, Place, Community.
In recent years, families who garden together have become the most prominent visitors to my annual Open Day. It’s delightful seeing these gardening families, because that was how I started life: in an English family that gardened and holidayed together. Planning, harvesting, saving seed, cooking, bottling, gathering materials for gardening were activities we did together.
Fast Food: Self-Sown Vegetables Are The Quickest Meal You’ll Grow
Fast food: By learning how to recognise self-sown edible plants in the garden, you’re on the way to the quickest free meal you’ll grow.
The Wartime Kitchen And Garden, TV Series and Book
The Wartime Kitchen and Garden television series and book by the BBC. The big swerve in 19th century British horticulture away from ornamental gardening to domestic food security. A television series and a book explore low tech solutions, reuse, thrift, and home grown food.
Household Food Security? Every Growing Year Is A Rehearsal!
Here is a list from my garden – my living larder – and my store of home grown food that might serve my household if a coronavirus lockdown occurs: protein, carbohydrate and fibre.
Sweetleaf aka rau ngót, Sauropus androgynus: Living Off The Fat Of The Land
Living off the fat of the land: A two metre row of Sauropus androgynus, aka rau ngót or sweetleaf, provides more nutritious leaves than two people can eat in the warm seasons. While growth of this trouble-free vegetable slows down in the cool seasons, sweetleaf provides protein, fibre and nutrient-rich leaves all year round in subtropical Brisbane.
Versatile Bamboo: Food, Shade, Construction and Carbon Sequestration
I planted bamboo because it is important in sustainable living: food, shade, privacy and for supporting vines. Pheasant coucals and possums gravitate towards the shelter of my bamboo which, now it is seventeen years old, has grown to become a landscape statement without outgrowing the allocated space…
Is There Hope For The Environment?
The actions I have taken here at Bellis and which I encourage others to adopt are the brakes, airbags and seatbelts to help protect us in the coming global environmental car crash.
Garden Fresh Festive Fare At Bellis, Brisbane’s Sustainable House And Garden.
A taste of summer from Bellis, a sustainable house and garden in drought-affected subtropical Brisbane: 108 edibles available for my kitchen.
Sign The Petition To Ensure Genetically Modified Organisms Are Regulated in Australia, Back Friends of the Earth.
At a time when we urgently need stronger laws to regulate GM business, the Australian Government has removed regulations designed to keep us and our food safe. This means that from now, many genetically modified (GM) animals, plants and microbes will enter our environment and food chain with no requirement for safety testing or traceability.
On 13th November 2019 the Senate will debate whether to disallow these regulatory changes, and Labor Party support for the disallowance motion will be vital.
Now is the time to act. If you want to know that the food you are eating is GM free, please contact your local MP and senators to demand that all genetically modified organisms are assessed for safety and labelled for consumer choice.
Please sign this petition organised by Friends of the Earth, Melbourne.
Sweetpotato: Combat The GM Yellow Rice Scare Campaign While Feeding The Poor
You may be aware that Gene Technology multinationals are on the media warpath claiming that communities are wrong to oppose their new GM yellow rice, an artificial plant invented with higher amounts of Vitamin A than normal rice as their contribution to help combat malnutrition of the world’s poorest people. Think again.
Between 2013 and 2019, UK Aid funding allowed the International Potato Centre and partners to deliver pro-vitamin A-rich, sweetpotato cultivars to more than 2.3 million families in five African countries and Bangladesh.
How much do you know about PFAS, the ‘forever’ poisons found in homes, workplaces, food, soil, water…even compost?
In the last two decades, the Australian government has failed to have PFAS sites remediated or PFAS wastes destroyed. This failure has resulted in offsite dumping including release of PFAS contaminated water to rivers and the ocean. The most shocking example was the almost a million litres of PFAS contaminated water that was used in to make NuGrow compost.
Jerry Coleby-Williams 