Stories From: Gardening

As a child, Beth Healy loved reading The Secret Garden. When she became a mum, Beth created her own outdoor treasure trove at her Blaxland home. 'Dirt Mum' is passionate about spreading her love of nature and its bounties to her 9 and 11-year-old daughters and Lower Mountains school children.

Inspired by Japanese Zen Buddhism, Anne Mellor has designed her Springwood home, in a Flame Zone, around water.

Joe and his partner Jo are the cogs behind Urbavore Micro Farm. They sell veggies, quail eggs and mushrooms from their suburban Springwood block.

While Blue Mountains residents are all too familiar with the more visible impacts of climate change such as floods, droughts and fires, another lesser known impact of extreme weather is urban forest decline and tree death.

Blue Mountains Bushland Nursery Incentive is Blue Mountains City Council’s free accreditation scheme to prevent the sale of invasive priority weeds within our Local Government Area and is supported by the Nursery & Garden Industry NSW & ACT.

Gabriel Foxx, a participant in the first Permaculture course run by the Pluriversity at the Lithgow Transformation Hub, recalls his experience.

  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, …

Hamish Dunlop interviews Deborah Wells in the Blackheath Campbell Rhododendron Gardens. She shares how a group of passionate and dedicated volunteers have created a community space that is a haven for all species, and how they've helped it recover from drought, fire, flood and pandemic.

The Blue Mountains Pluriversity and its Permaculture Institute are offering free permaculture classes for young people (aged 16-24) in Lithgow.

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 …