Hopper stopper?
Gardenophobes may ignore this post, but there’s some interesting discussion about grasshoppers happening in the Centre, as they take their share of the rain’s bounty. ABC Rural news reports that the plague of grasshoppers is causing thousands of dollars worth of damage to crops, while the ABC’s talkback gardener Geoff Miers is quoted saying it [...]
The presence of the past
For a relatively new town Alice Springs has tons of history – and it’s still very close to the surface. Recent chats with long-term residents like town camper, Vietnam veteran and Tangentyere council founder Geoff Shaw – born in Charles Creek – have made me more aware of the layers of human experience underlying [...]
Bring nature into nature strips
in a few days, if you happen to live in Alice Springs, the town council will come to a nature strip near you, in the form of a large noisy machine with a human at the wheel. If your footpath is erupting with luridly green buffel and couch, that’s probably a good thing. But apart from dealing with the invaders, isn’t it time to drop the short back and sides approach to nature strips?
Pipe Dream
Aquaponics is a system of gardening that combines fish and vegetable farming by cycling fish wastes into vergetable crops and returning freshened water to the fish. It’s becoming popular in urban areas for the reason that it uses less space and much less water than a conventional garden. But Steve Patman believes it could have [...]
The School Garden
It used to be called “the farm area”. In the days when there was no private land ownership in Alice Springs, people leased the town’s rural blocks on the condition they would provide food to the town. There were some successes, including a free-range egg farm and a goat farm. But attempts at market gardening [...]
Alice Springs, AUSTRALIA