Bayswater

In early 2010 we started the process of building a garden at Environment House’s new premises in King William St, Bayswater. A part of the inspiration for the move to King William St from Eighth Ave, Maylands was to have more space for demonstration gardens — a native garden and a food garden.

We had the pleasure, with the assistance of the volunteers of Environment House, of building the food garden and then running organic gardening and some permaculture-related workshops from the garden.

As you will see from the images on the right, we had the opportunity to see this garden project through from a fairly weedy yard to quite an advanced and productive stage.

We were able to use the resources on site (such as locking pavers to construct the borders of the key-hole gardens beds) for most of the job, though we did import some high quality soil for the vegetable beds. Even still, we started these off with some green manure just to stabilise some of the soluble nutrients. It became a bit of a joke that we were ‘growing weeds’ in the vegetable beds. These ‘weeds’ made for a more stable ecology for growing the veggies that came afterwards.

Having got the veggie beds sorted, we began to focus on the borders. There were already a few citrus trees in the yard and a rather derelict pomegranite. The pomegranite came out and we planted out the areas surrounding the citrus trees and the borders of the vegetable beds with culinary and medicinal herbs, beneficial insect habitat and pollinator food plants as well as plants which confuse pests with their scent or shape.

One of the fun projects we did as part of this job was the espalier apple and pear fence, or, as Brenda put it, ‘apples and pears holding hands’. Espalier just means training — its a way of manipulating the shape of plants to fit particular spaces or designs. In this case, we pruned them into a fence. We also planted out the base of these trees with the same kinds of herbs and insectary plants. It just goes to show that you can have ecosystem complexity even in a very small space. We picked off the first crop of apples to let the trees develop and the next ones came on just as I, Harry, was off to the UK but I hear they were very good.

With all these things set up we were then able to run workshops from the garden. We ran a range of monthly and weekly workshops on organic gardening and permaculture themes. Bonnie is now running these garden workshops as well as some food related workshops.

It is a great pleasure to have a long-term involvement with a garden, to see it progress and to be able to make all the little changes that gardens require to flourish.