Visit Alan 15 November 2015

On Sunday 15 November the Food Garden Group visited Alan and Lois's garden at Lauderdale:


After a week of cool and sometimes rainy weather (not complaining) it was amazing to see that on the day of this food garden visit skies were blue and it was a nice warm spring day.

Alan and Lois welcomed us and explained that their lush green garden was 'an empty canvas' when they bought their house 8 years ago. Alan had a slide presentation set up in the living room to show how bare it all once looked. Their soil was sandy and when you dug a hole you would find brackish water not too deep down.

Their garden is now lush and green, but that is after a drastic re-design, adding up to 500 bags of manure, planting new trees, bushes and flowers, installing a drip-line irrigation system and a lot of hard work.

We admired the long espaliered wall of apple and stone fruit trees.

Their warmest north-facing area has raised beds with strawberries.

An unusual place for spuds, but they are obviously happy.

Every bit of space is used.

Their compost bays in the shade of their Northern fence.

People brought many wonderful things for the produce table. Thank you!

Morning tea was delicious, as always. That hummingbird cake ....


Many thanks to Alan and Lois for hosting this visit at short notice and everyone for coming and bringing 'good stuff'.


We all enjoyed Alan and Lois's lush great looking garden and had a wonderful time socialising, exchanging info and learning from each other.

This text was previously published on the Food Garden Group blog. It was written by Max Bee.