Gardening
The arid zone presents a challenge to gardeners: how to take advantage of brilliant sunshine but cope with long dry periods, depleted soils and a huge range of temperatures. Our responses are often innovative.
On the verge of abundance
It would be nice if last week’s lovely rain had greened up the thoughts and policies of Alice’s prospective new Mayor as councillors as much as it has the buffel grass. Various creative minds are pushing the idea of a comprehensive town plan for Alice Springs; perhaps it should include a more holistic, less fragmented approach to good old H2O. The Alice Springs Town Council could lead the way. I note from an article in last Friday’s Centralian Advocate that candidate Jade Kudrenko is keen ...Read more
The joy of composting
Despite numerous experiments and occasional failures, I have always found the dirty business of making compost a deeply satisfying and somehow magical experience. Not everyone gets it, of course. But Alice Springs Steiner School gardener Bill Pechey and Colleen O’Malley do, and for that reason I heartily recommend their compost-making workshop at the school this weekend. I took my video camera along to a similar session in August last year, and got more than I bargained for, content-wise, whic...Read more
Bush food’s new life in garden
An Aboriginal-owned enterprise near Alice Springs is pioneering the cultivation of one of the world’s most ancient wild foods with help from an unlikely source : a Chinese university. Desert Garden Produce’s Max Emery is anticipating a record harvest of as much as one a half tonnes of kutjera, which will be exported to Melbourne and end as part of the recipe of a mass-produced gourmet sausage. After interviewing Max in 2010 about the Rainbow Valley farm, which is owned and operated by local ...Read more
Buckley’s chance
As you stock up on your holiday feast supplies this year, imagine a Christmas of such abundance that wherever you walked you were surrounded by fresh fruits from all over the planet, and all in season. The dream is not happening in the crowded aisles of your local supermarket, courtesy of big oil and diesel. It’s right in your own back yard, where ripe or ripening cherries, peaches, apricots, two kinds of apples, grapes, mangoes, bananas, avocadoes and figs are hanging from trees and vines, ju...Read more
Biodynamics: stirring stuff
The first time I heard about biodynamic farming was from a TV program set on a dairy farm in Victoria and broadcast on the ABC’s now defunct Countrywide series. Amazed, I watched a farmer bury two cowhorns filled with manure – the first step in the creation of a substance called “500″. This month, nearly three decades later, I stood among biodynamic gardeners as they did the same thing, this time in the arid, infertile heart of Australia. In the years between these two ev...Read more
Cottage garden desert-style
If you’re in town this weekend you can learn something more about the wildflowers that have been blowing minds all Spring with a guided walk around the Alice Springs Desert Park. Rebecca Duncan will be running a Wildflower Walk at the Alice Desert Park on Sunday, showing people who’s who in the wildflower world and advising people how they can grow them in their own gardens. The Alice Springs Desert Park is one of the few places around the Centre that has a good crop of semi-domes...Read more
Planetary gardeners
By Dave Richards I’m in Brisbane for a week, so I can’t make it to the Saturday morning buffel battle at Maynard Park tomorrow. That may sound like an excuse to get out of a working bee, but it’s not. If you want to experience the amazing world of Central Australian plants and understand how important they are to us, at so many levels, I can’t think of a better way to do it than join one of Alice’s landcare groups as they strike a blow for biodiversity. I spent a ...Read more
Suburban wilderness enlists allies
Imagine a small triangle of wilderness flourishing on and around a spine of unknowably ancient rock, surrounded on all sides by Australian suburbia in full swing: a school, a main arterial road, houses and even a BMX track at the perimeter. There may be nowhere else in Australia something like this could happen, but in Alice Springs a small group of dedicated Alice people seem to be pulling it off. The amazing thing about what is happening at Maynard Park is that ‘creating’ this ...Read more
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 is the biggest plague of the winged green devils in a decade, devouring veggie patches overnight. “They come in and get ten punnet...Read more
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 the town, some visible and some not. For example, says Geoff, the shopping centre on North Stuart highway used to be a Drover’s camp, home to Matt an...Read more
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?...Read more
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 much broader uses. Steve snapped up some old bathtubs from the nearby tip shop in Alice Springs to use in an system he hopes will soon be supplying him and partner Trish...Read more
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