News from the Tennis Courts

Hi everyone

there has been lots of progress in the garden in the last few weeks. Terry laid the pavers for the floor of the chook house that the wonderful Year 11 TAS boys made; they used recycled materials (funding from the HiCUB project) and the result looks great! The boys came back last Tuesday and did all the heavy lifting to shift it up the garden and into place.

Lots of work was also put in recently by Mick Jarochowicz and the guys from Jobs Australia, cleaning up the overgrown mess of grass, blackberry and other woody weeds from the bank at the western end of the garden. They have done a fabulous job, it looks heaps better – you can now see that the bank is actually a rock wall, with some very nice dianella growing there in places. Hopefully we will be able to keep on top of the (inevitable) regrowth and keep it looking like that!

The beans that were planted around the bean tepee have begun showing through, and lots of tomato seedlings have been planted along two of the fencelines. Other seedlings were planted some time back into the semi-circular beds that Mark created and they are all growing well now and look really good.

Rowan and the wonderful team over at Neram Harvest raised an amazing $300 for the garden recently and we are putting that towards setting up drip irrigation systems in some sections of the garden; one has already gone in and a second will be set up shortly. (We are hoping eventually to set up a few different types of irrigation, so that people can see them in action and get an idea of what might work best for them at home).

There’s been lots going on, but it is a really busy time right now, with all the usual watering, weeding and compost-making needing to be done as well as building new beds for all the spring planting. (We are greatly indebted to the Stephen family at Warrane for donating a huge pile of sheep manure just when we needed it most for building up all our new garden beds and also improving all the old ones). So if anyone is able to spare us a few hours every now and then, *we could really use a hand! *We tried hard all over the winter to prepare for this, and we did make a lot of progress, but there is still so much to do. Alan has been starting heaps of seedlings for us in his greenhouse, so that means we have lots of beds to either clear out and reinvigorate or else create from scratch if we are going to find homes for them all.

The work needn’t be all that onerous if there are enough of us to take a turn at wheeling a barrow, it only gets tedious when there are just one or two people toiling away all afternoon.

For anyone who thinks they may be able to help, we open up at around 1pm on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays and seem to keep going, most days, until the train comes through at 6:10, so you could also drop over quite late in the afternoon and probably still be able to lend a hand for a while.

cheers

Jo