John Campbell with his Tesla Charger and LG Chem Battery “Alexa, play ‘Golden Brown’ by The Stranglers.” I’m visiting John Campbell, the President of the Rotary Club of Blackheath, and it’s my first time experiencing what’s described as a ‘smart home’. From the music John asks Alexa to play on demand, to the changing coloured lights in the lounge room, …

Photo: Kamil Sustiak   Rock climber Tom O’Halloran came to Blackheath to climb. He discovered here a sense of freedom and inner calm which has propelled him to the top of international Sport Climbing and to selection in the Australian team for the Tokyo Olympic Games. Tom and Oceana Mackenzie will represent Australia when the sport makes its debut in …

  When you first meet Sherlie McMillan you’re instantly bowled over by her disarming warmth, infectious laughter and wicked sense of humour.   During the last Covid restrictions, when only 10 were allowed into the Rotary meeting room at the Blackheath Golf and Community Club, Sherlie’s laughter rang out from ‘the naughty table’ that met outside in the dining room. …

  In March this year, Japanese journalist Harumi Hayakawa wrote a piece for the Japanese publication Asahi Weekly in which she explained why the terrifying Australian fires of December 2019 actually made her like the Blue Mountains even more.     In her article she described the many ways the community came together during and after the fires and how, …

  In May 2020, in the early months of the pandemic, I spent time with Bob Burnett in his home at Mount Victoria. He and Peter Buckwell, his neighbour, were nightly companions and supporting each other through the Lockdown. As we’ve seen over the last few years, life has a way of up-ending everyone’s plans. As it turned out, by …

Phil Hopkins Nineteen years ago we moved to Cleopatra St in Blackheath with our young twin boys. We couldn’t believe our luck when we discovered Santa lived just around the corner on Hat Hill Rd. Every festive season our children joined the throngs to check out his Christmas lights display and to collect a bag of lollies! We’ve since moved, …

To grow a long-term productive and abundant veggie garden you need to make sure your soil is rich and alive and continually fed and replenished. This supports plant growth and allows for repeated cropping within a healthy ecosystem. One way to do this is to encourage more worms to be part of that system. Charles Darwin said: “It may be …

As soon as you solve one problem in gardening, you’ll undoubtedly come up against another. Last week we were really excited because we read on the Gardening Australia website that land cress is poisonous to the Cabbage White Butterfly caterpillar. We were thrilled, as something had started to eat our tiny kale at Blackheath Community Farm and this seemed like …

While we have onion seedlings on the way in the Blackheath Community Farm Greenhouse, ever since our first day at the Farm we’ve had green onions or scallions growing in our allium bed. We always cut them off and leave the root in the soil and, without fail, they  just keep coming back and growing more. If you’d like to …

  Winter is a wonderful time for growing greens and brassicas in Blackheath. On Sunday at Blackheath Community Farm we harvested cauliflower, kale, land cress, rocket, radish greens, a variety of lettuces and silverbeet. As well as being delicious raw, they can all be cooked as well.   Check out our recipe for Orechiette with cauliflower and walnut brown-butter pesto …