Category: How-To
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Worm Farm (Inexpensive)
Worm juice is a key fertiliser in our garden. We have three worm farms in a nice shady spot in the garden to recycle fruit and vegetable scraps from the kitchen. For an easy and inexpensive worm farm setup try this: 1. Get two styrofoam boxes and place one on top of the other. 2.…
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Curry Bush
Curry bush (Helichrysum italicum). A beautifully aromatic perennial herb with a warm curry fragrance. This wonderful companion plant even appears to deter possums. It grows well in a pot that can be moved around as need be. It thrives in full sun, growing into a hardy dense bush that releases a beautiful curry scent when…
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Outsmarting the Possums
Companion planting techniques to deter wildlife from vegetable gardens. We’ve had success with planting strongly aromatic plants such as Curry Bush, Vietnamese mint, dogbane, native basil, rue and Tansy around vegetables. Planting Brazilian spinach as dense borders along garden pathways also helps. The possums tend to graze on the more accessible border plants rather than…
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Outsmarting the Birds
You’ve spend months nourishing your plants and tending their every need. The fruits of your labours are just about ripe, then birds swoop in just when they are ready to harvest. Animals have an uncanny knack for knowing when a crop is just ready to eat and often beat us to our produce. While we…
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Hand mattock planting.
Written by Vicky Mills. Glorious rainy weather planting with my trusty hand mattock. A main stay tool of choice for us is a hand mattock. I have a Hart brand it was about $50 at the shops and it was worth every penny. I’ve put over 6,000 native tube stock in by hand with this…
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Building our food forest
The Mount Crosby food forest sits on a rural-residential block in the Western suburbs of Brisbane. It was a challenging western facing, sloped block with poor, acidic dirt and was growing more rocks than plants when we started. We also started gardening at the height of the drought in 2008. Having moved from lush tropical…
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Pollinator Garden
1. First mark out your area. We started with a simple circular garden. A stick drawing in the dirt is more than enough to provide some rough lines. 2. Arrange logs or old bales in the general shape of your garden. 3. Cover your logs or bales entirely with forest mulch. 4. Burrow a hole…
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Native Bees
Native bees are wonderful pollinators. Most native Australian bees are solitary animals that you can easily attract to your garden by hanging up native bee hotels. These hotels were constructed for native Reed Bees by filling a series of 20cm deep holes with pithy stems (in this case Tiger Grass and Lantana). Other native bees…
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Why Perennial Plants?
For many years we gardened, diligently buying potting mix and planting European annuals like large tomatoes, cabbage, eggplants, lettuce etc. While we had some successes, lettuce often wilted and tomatoes were plagued with pests. The effort and expense involved kept us buying from the local grocery store. However, all of that changed after a chance…
Brisbane Edible Gardening 