green gardens

Build your own garden pond — your own (edible) mini-wetland. The pond was complete now, and when he saw the tall, sleek heron standing there he thought how good it was that his garden pond was starting to attract birdlife. Suddenly, the tall wading bird dipped its head towards ...

THIS MORNING, I thought I would go and visit the Permaculture Interpretive Garden (better known by its acronym, the PIG) at the sustainability hub to see what had survived the hot weather and what hadn't. 

So along I went, down the path and into the garden. The ...

Jaboticaba, cherimoya, miracle fruit... you would be wrong to say that planting these and many other fruits was a PIG of a day, but you would be right to say it was a day in the PIG (Permaculture Interpretive Garden)

A fine day of blue skies and high ...

The mission: Establish a food forest at the Permaculture Interpretive Garden, one of the components that make up the Randwick Sustainability Hub.

The difficulty: Hard work (though maybe not all that hard) in the warm Spring sunshine.

The process: Identify needs > produce a plan for the forest garden ...

Bananas might not be what you think of as street trees, but three of them have just gone into the Foragers' footpath garden outside Barrett House, the sustainability demonstration house of the 3-Council Ecofootprint program in Sydney's Eastern Suburbs. 

There, the bananas join the small, fruiting lemon ...

The trend towards re-establishing backyard edible gardens and community gardens can be seen as a reaction to the global demise of the small farmer and the growth of giant food production centres that operate more like factories than farms. True, these farms produce higher volumes of food. But ...

Steve summed it up nicely: "We've got food growing in the garden, we've got food growing along the fence, we've got food growing on the footpath… and now we've got food growing on the wall".

What he was referring to was the vertical gardens ...

Randwick's PIG (Permaculture Interpretive Garden) was one of three gardens that received awards at July’s Keep Australia Beautiful annual award presentation. The other gardens were Mosman and Riverwood community gardens. Mosman is a new community garden while Riverwood, a social housing garden, has been established for ...

This week we put Steve Batley landscape architect, Permaculture designer and educator under the sustainability spotlight and ask him about his experiences, his chooks and his Top 5 garden tips for winter..

When did you first think .. I have to get into landscape design?

After I left school ...

AT THE Permaculture Interpretive Garden—the PIG—we’re progressively establishing a forest garden that will eventually yield fruits, nuts, selected vegetables and herbs. It’s a long term project but we’ve made a good start.

It will be the outcome of a process that started with ...