On Sunday I drove up to the Wollongong Wholesale Nursery at Albion Park Rail to buy some fruit trees with my Sustainable Illawarra Super Challenge vouchers. The staff there were really helpful, and gave me some good ideas for the types of trees that would suit our needs for the front yard.

I pretty much already [...]

Bags of mushroom compost are cheap, and will grow more mushrooms than those expensive kits you can buy at chain stores. And the fresh mushrooms they grow taste incredible!

When we did our house extensions about 5 years ago, we didn’t really do much with the front yard. We always meant to come back to it someday, but never quite got around to it. We never bothered to plant much in the way of trees and shrubs either, since we didn’t want them to [...]

Lunar planting, or lunar gardening, does not involve nude gardening at night by the light of the moon!

It is all about timing your gardening activities to coincide with certain phases of the moon.

Here’s an example of how much difference some people claim lunar planting can make to your gardening success.

I’ve read various explanations of the [...]

On Saturday, I took our two youngest girls to the Glengarry Cottage Gala Day.

They had talks and tours running throughout the day on stuff like permaculture gardening, composting, worm farming, etc. There were also some stalls, selling/displaying things like compost bins, worm farms, bags of compost, seedlings, etc. Sustainable Illawarra had a stall there as [...]

Yesterday we had our Sydney Water “Love Your Garden” session. For $33, a qualified horticulturalist comes and inspects your garden and gives you advice on its watering needs.

Our horticulturalist (let’s call her Linda) arrived bang on time. She was very friendly and knowledgeable, and understood right away where we were coming from. I explained about [...]