Our community garden is becoming more productive every year and we like to celebrate a good harvest on the shortest day of the year. Why not come down for a tour and celebrate with us as we demonstrate making compost and pruning our deciduous fruit trees?
When: 10.30am – 2.30pm Sunday 22rd June, 2014
Cost: Gold Coin donation: M/tea provided
A morning of activities including demonstrations of: 11am: making a hot compost pile 12.00 noon : winter fruit tree pruning
Lunch: Wood-fired Pizzas using local tomatoes Members – No charge Non members – $7
For further details: Jill (0414) 545735 www.mossvalecommunitygarden.org.au
Lots of our regulars at Moss Vale Community Garden turned up to walk behind our wheelbarrow float in the NSW Bush Week Parade 2014. We gathered in Leighton Gardens with our barrow loaded with seasonal veges and fruit along with the potted dwarf apple tree we grafted last year. Polly Wolly, our sulky doll, upstaged the proceedings as usual.
Nikki, Dini, Jo and Dennis with our float awaiting the start of the Parade.
At 2pm, along with all of the other floats and parade groups we headed up Argyle Street towards the Moss Vale Showgrounds. Onlookers lined the streets showing their appreciation as the groups passed. It was good fun and the weather was great for a paradeas well as for the Agricultural Show.
Ed wheeling our float full of organic veges & fruit on the Bush Week Parade in Moss Vale – March 2014
For the last few years we have entered our best quality fruit and vegetables grown at the community garden in the Moss Vale Agricultural Show. This year we entered 29 exhibits in the pavilion and won 22 prizes, including the sash for most successful exhibitor in the Fruit category.
Look at all those winning entries!
It’s a fun thing to get involved with and, we think, an important tradition to support. Hopefully, over the coming years we will see more locals getting back to growing veges and fruit in their own backyards and entering them in the local agricultural shows. They used to engender lots of hot competition between regular exhibitors (the biggest pumpkin or the best compost) which can only lead to improved quality of food crops exhibited. The thrill of seeing a blue ribbon attached to your exhibit is not to be underestimated!
Moss Vale Community Garden will be there again next year, hoping for lots of prizes and also hoping that the pavilion tables will be spilling over with impressive specimens of locally produced fruit & veges of all shapes and sizes.
It’s a great activity for all the family! Everyone, all ages, can get involved!
Our basket of six distinctly different types of vegetables.
In October, the Community Garden was invited by Wingecarribee Shire Council’s Environment & Sustainability Department to present a couple of activities relating to gardening and the environment. And what a great day it was, with a wide diversity of activities being presented to a large number of local years 5&6 school children from around the Shire.
Fantastic interactive display of Australian native birds to entertain kids and adults alike!
We decided to:
a) Build a Beneficial Bug Motel that the kids could take back to school and put into the school garden to create habitat for predatory and pollinating insects. The main benefit is that kids can understand that there is no need to spray pesticides when there are natural means of pest control like this.
A proud group of years 5&6 display their newly made beneficial bug motel.
b) Build a worm tower and discuss the benefits of keeping worms in your backyard to help with soil fertility in your garden whilst recycling amazing amounts of diverse organic materials that are often seen as waste and sent off site.
All set for the Build a Worm Tower activity
What a great surprise when Costa Georgiadis turned up on the Day and inspired the kids (and the adults) with his enthusiastic pep talk on the role of the kids in the protection and enhancement of our local environment!
Costa Georgiadis captured the attention of the school kids with his enthusiastic approach to the environment.
It was an enjoyable, educational and well-executed event which will hopefully be repeated in the years to come. Here is one of the groups of students proudly displaying their newly-completed Beneficial Bug Motel.