May 2008

Plants sustain life in many ways, providing food, clothing, housing and medicine. The backyard Vegie Patch is a long-standing Aussie tradition, but how many people now have a vegetable garden? At the Geelong Botanic Gardens we encourage you to not be daunted by the lack of time in thier day to day lives, lack of water available to water a garden, living with smaller backyards or any other negative you might come up with! We'd like to invite you to come on a journey with us to discover how to grow your own food.

The Edible Garden is being established in the Central Lawn of the Botanic Gardens. During the late 1800's this area boasted an impressive Fernery made of wooden slats. How times have changed!

The Chilean Wine Palm, Jubaea chilensis, shown here used to grow under the roofline and is now a magnificent specimen. In its' native Chile the sap was used to make Palm Wine, unfortunately this use meant the death of the tree and it is now a threatened species. The palm also produces fruit and the soft centres can be eaten, we choose to keep them for seed to grown more palms.

The Edible Garden has a strong foundation in sustainable principles and we have been busy finding recycled materials from local places.

	A starting point Rethink As you can see this area of the garden has lots of potential.
	Setting the base Recycle The base of the garden is crushed recycled house bricks. We have trialled this material over summer to mulch a formal garden bed and looks good, drains well and suppresses weeds. It can be purchased from Regional Recyclers.
	Bed edges Re-use Just like any householder the City of Greater Geelong hoards materials which might come in handy one day. We have found the brick and timber edging for the garden beds lurking in our local depot and put them to good use.