Fruit tree planting in parks and reserves:
September 3rd, 2010
The 131 community fruit trees that council planted with the funding from our local board are in the ground. Now all we have to do is wait until they are big trees and produce fruit. We have now a selection of : Walnut, Nectarine, Peach, Apple Monty’s Surprise, Avocado, Feijoa, Plum, Guava, Pear, Mandarin in our parks. We love our new fruit trees and decided to visit them. Tim, who just joined our fruit tree group, went to visit the fruit trees in Watling, Morvern and Potters park and reported back that all trees look really healthy. You can see some picture of our young community fruit trees below.
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Community Garden
September 2nd, 2010
The Mount Eden Community Garden group has just received the soil test back for the new site in Poronui Street, just behind the Bowling Club. The test is not as bad as the one from the first suggested site, however the site land has enough contamination that we do not want to plant edible plants directly into the soil. So we are going to go ahead with raised beds using a geotextile barrier. Hopefully we will start putting in the raised beds in September.
Michelle has been in touch with Metro Water to get the water back on so we will be able to water the garden during the summer. We are trying to keep the costs down and we have found some stakable wooden sleeves on Trade instead of the more expensive raised garden beds. We intend to buy 16 of them, 1 x 1.2 metres, which will start our garden. There will be a working bee, rubbing in linseed oil into the sleeves to extend their life. After that, we can arrange for the soil to be delivered so we can get the first part of the garden off the ground. Please contact Michele michele@locke.org.nz if you are interested in participating.
Tags: Food Gardens, Gardening
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Grafting workshop
September 1st, 2010
The grafting workshop was a much smaller group and everyone in the group got a chance to graft with Ken Clarks feedback and supervision. We also learned that grafting can causes accidents. Unfortunately one women cut her finger, but luckily it was not too deep and a plaster did the job.
It was wonderful to learn how to graft onto rootstock and being able to get exactly that fruit tree that you want into your garden. In my case, it is a plum tree from a friend of ours that I admired and now I will graft from it.
Tags: Food Gardens, Gardening, Grafting
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Square Foot Gardening wokshop with Ken Clark
August 31st, 2010
This weekend we had Ken Clark, the food garden master from Waiheke, in Mt Eden village to teach us about Square Foot Gardening, Grafting and food production in your own garden.
The Square foot gardening workshop was well attended. The workshop started with a blue sky in our garden but we soon had to relocate into our garage as it was raining cats and dogs. It was great to see that we had so many school teachers attending the SFG workshop, committed to bringing food gardens into schools. I am please to say that Ken agreed to do one more SFG workshop this year, which is on the 3.10.2010
Please find below the contact details for the moon calendar:
Riverton Organic Group, www.sces.org.nz, E: permaculture@sces.org.nz
Tags: food, Gardening, Square Foot Gardening
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Fruit tree pruning with Ken Clark
August 18th, 2010
Ken Clark gave us a good demonstration on how to prune a variety of fruit trees. Thank you for the positive feedback, it helps us to know if the workshops we offer are working for you. Ken is doing two more workshops this year, the Square Foot Gardening workshop and a grafting workshop. Both are on Sunday the 29th of August.
Tags: Fruit trees, Pruning
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Fruit tree planting on Maungawhau
August 16th, 2010
A joint project between the Friends of Maungawhau and the Mount Eden Village People.
What a great turnout for our fruit tree planting day on Mangawhau this Saturday. A rainy day is apparently the best day to plant trees, so this was definitely the perfect day to dig in!
Thank you to everyone involved for taking action in transforming our community into a more sustainable place. This was a team effort to bring free and healthy food into to Mount Eden that will be a nice treat on your walk up Maungawhau.
We would like to see more fruit trees planted in streets and local parks and next to playgrounds to support families to save money on their grocery bill and to educate children on where fruit comes from.
We now have 3 feijoa, 3 lemon, 2 grapefruit and 2 peach trees on our mountain. We also would like to thank Councillor Glenda Fryer from our local community board, who joined us to plant a fruit tree and supports our vision of having these community trees as part of Mount Eden.
We would like to hear what you think about having community fruit trees in our city. Please go to: FB: Fruit trees for Auckland or suggest a site on: http://www.fruittrees.org.nz
Tags: fruit tree planting, Fruit trees, Maungawhau
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Fruit trees for local schools & kindergartens and on Mt Eden:
July 27th, 2010
With the donations made on our website and the money we raised on the market day, we went fruit tree shopping. We bought 21 fruit trees for some of our local schools, play centres, kindergartens and to plant with the Friends of Mangawhau on Mangawhau. These trees will be planted on the 14 of August.
Tags: Fruit Tree, Kindergartens, Planting, Schools
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Transition Town Mount Eden
July 27th, 2010
We are now officially listed as a transition town group. Positive action towards a sustainable future, working together to prepare our community for the changes we all have to face due to peak oil and climate change.
Find out more about the Transition Town movement in New Zealand:
http://www.transitiontowns.org.nz
Tags: Transition Town
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Fruit trees for Auckland
May 31st, 2010
Supermarket food prices have risen 28 per cent in the last year. With GST going up to 15%, once again we have to deal with the fact that food prices will increase further. Planting fruit trees in Auckland can help families save money on their grocery bill and secure free and healthy food for the future.
We are now collecting locations for possible fruit tree planting so we can continue to work together with council in 2011 once our current trial project has finished.
If you would like to have a fruit tree on the grass verge in front of your house or if you can suggest another location in your neighbourhood, please go to our fruit tree website and send us your preferred location details.
Please send us details of potential locations for neighbourhood fruit trees by signing up on our website.
All suggestions will be assessed for suitability before locations are chosen.
or join us on our facebook group to support this trial project:
FRUIT TREES FOR AUCKLAND
Tags: Food Gardens, Fruit trees, healthy food
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Chicken workshop with Gail Batten
May 23rd, 2010
We had a fantastic turnup to the chicken workshop yesterday and it is good to see that so many people are seriously interested in keeping their own chickens.
Gail gave us a good understanding on what is needed to keep chickens in your backyard and her presentation covered everything from feeding, maintenance, hatching, health, organic food and how to trim their wings so they won’t end up in your neighbours garden.
It was great to hear how simple it is to keep your own hens and with having fresh eggs as payment you can easily find a chicken sitter while you are on holiday. Now it is just a matter of time to convince my husband how cool they are and if we should fence them in or instead fence the vegetable garden.
Thank you to Gail who generously contributed all the income of this workshop towards the planting of more fruit trees for our community.
Tags: chicken, healthy food
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