Visit Loes 24 September 2017

On Sunday 24 September the Food Garden Group visited Loes's garden at Coningham:
Dark clouds followed by rain on the way to Loes's garden made me think we might only have a small number of people at the first food garden visit of the season. But then the weather did what it has done so often on mornings of food garden visits: the rain stopped, the skies cleared and more than forty people turned up. Wow!

Here Loes (on the right) welcomes us

Our group had visited Loes's garden a few years ago, but she is an energetic person who always come up with a new idea, and many things had changed.

A very effective new veggie garden cage

The veggie garden enclosure does not look new, but it certainly wasn't here last time we visited.

Inside the veggie cage

Adjacent to the house (and benefiting from its brick wall for heat) is a hothouse 'under construction' made with recycled windows. Loes can't wait for that to be finished.

Throughout the garden are many fruit trees (apples, pears, stone fruit and lemons). Some of them had been pruned severely because they had suffered from disease last season.

Around the tree in the photo Loes put four plumbing pipes in the lawn (a helpful foot in the photo points to one of them). When netting is needed to protect fruit, Loes puts four star pickets in the holes and connects them via fat irrigation pipes, so she has a good structure for the net. I was surprised how far the holes need to be away from the tree.

The photo above shows a young espaliered Comice pear.

Jan R (red jumper on the right) explained the basics of propagating.

And Max K (middle of photo) showed how to graft a tomato onto another tomato.

I hope to use Jan and Max's expertise to create a blog post on the subject in the next few weeks.

Also in the two photos above there are wooden walls in the right corner of the galvanised iron shed. This is 'the Hilton' Loes created for her chooks. Below is a photo of the exit from the shed into their run. You can also see the layer of wood shavings she has on the floor.

In spite of it being very early in the season there was an amazing variety and quantity on the produce table, and the many and varied contributions for morning tea were also yummy.

Thank you, everyone who came and contributed. All of us together made this into a very nice and informative morning. And a special thanks to Loes, Pauline and Dirk, who were perfect hosts!

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