How to Mulch Your Garden for Free

Welcome to the April newsletter. A sustainable garden aims to provide sustenance and nourishment for minimal time, money and energy.

How can you maintain and support a sustainable garden to meet your needs for a long time? By:

• • Choosing efficient inputs, minimising waste and making as little impact on the earth as possible.
  • Being a good steward of your resources.
  • Using practices that won’t deplete or permanently damage the resources and environment.
  • Working in harmony with nature to create a healthy ecosystem that is self-sustaining.
  • Applying Permaculture principles.

Sustainable Gardening Tips for April

This month I’m sharing tips to garden more sustainably by avoiding food waste.

According to Foodwise.com.au, an estimated 20-40% of fruit and vegetables are rejected even before they reach the shops. This is mostly because they don’t match the consumers’ and supermarkets’ high cosmetic standards for size, colour and shape. Sadly, by expecting all fresh food to look perfect, we contribute to this unsustainable problem.

When food is thrown out, the water, fuel and resources that it took to get it from the paddock to the plate are also wasted. What a huge cost!

So why is so much food wasted? Many people don’t check the fridge or menu plan so end up buying and cooking too much food. Some people don’t know how to use leftovers or throw food out before the use-by or best-before date. Planning and sticking to a shopping list can help this problem.

Permaculture Principles

Permaculture has some practical design guidelines for creating a sustainable garden, particularly when it comes to avoiding waste in its many forms.

‘Produce no waste’ Permaculture Principle:

When it comes to food waste, my goal is to have none. All the food we grow or buy is reused in one form or another to produce a yield. It adds value to our meals or garden in some way. Let’s look at a few ways you can ‘close the loop’ on food waste at home.

• Grow as many crops as you can so there’s no packaging or wasted fruit and vegetables in your fridge. Pick fresh ingredients as you need them.
• Eat all edible parts of the crops you grow. e.g. Beetroot, radish, squash, pumpkin, carrot and brassica leaves can be used fresh in salads or added to soups, stir-fries and cooked meals. Spinach and chard stems are just as tasty and nutritious as the leaves. Edible flowers from your herbs and vegetables add nutrition and flavour to your plate. Roasted pumpkin seeds make a delicious high-protein snack.
• Regrow food from peels, seeds and roots to save money on buying new plants.

In this video, I share a few simple tips on ways to use 100% of your food in the kitchen to save seeds, propagate new plants, cook creatively and compost to close the loop on food ‘waste’. If you need seeds and plants to grow an edible garden, you may be surprised just how easy it is to grow food for free from what you already have in your fridge!

• Learn to cook creatively with leftover ingredients.
• The nutrients and moisture in kitchen food scraps such as peelings, cores, stems, roots and eggshells for example, can be recycled back into the garden. Food waste can be:
  • Composted by earthworms and decomposers in the soil food web to create ‘humus’, the finished product. Humus is a natural fertiliser rich in nutrients and helps stabilise your soil, reducing the need for purchasing inputs. No plastic bags! Compost also creates heat during the decomposition process, which can be used to keep neighbouring plant roots warm.
  • Added to a worm farm to produce worm castings (vermicast) as a solid fertiliser and liquid concentrate to feed plants.
  • Fed to animals like chickens. They convert the nutrients in the food scraps into manure, another valuable money-saving input for your garden. Chickens also produce eggs as a food source.
  • Processed into another form to fertilise your garden. e.g. eggshells can be ground into a fine calcium-rich powder. You can add this product to compost systems, worm farms or potting mix; sprinkle it into the soil; and make it into a liquid fertiliser. Banana peels also make a wonderful free fertiliser.

7 Benefits of Adding Food ‘Waste’ to your Garden

Recycling the nutrients in your food scraps:

1. Improves your soil fertility and structure.
2. Adds moisture to your soil.
3. Feeds the microorganism community and enhances biodiversity.
4. Encourages free self-sown ‘volunteer’ seedlings to germinate from compost, saving time and money.
5. Provides you with free fertilisers.
6. Increases your yields.
7. Avoids landfill with the associated transport and energy required.

Hungry for value from your vegetable garden?

One of the easiest ways to double your harvest from lettuce is to REGROW a second head from the base. Loose-leaf lettuce varieties like this baby Cos (as well as Asian greens, celery and spring onions), will quickly grow new roots and leaves if given the right conditions. In this video, you’ll see how quick and simple it is to encourage new root and leaf growth so you can replant your lettuce and pick a second time! Make every vegetable count and provide you with the maximum harvest possible to save money. When your lettuce finally goes to seed, save them and you’ll never have to buy lettuce ever again! An easy low-cost way to grow good health.

‘Catch and Store Energy’ Permaculture Principle:

Composting captures the energy and nutrients in kitchen and garden waste and converts them into healthy soil. One method is to chop and drop green ‘waste’ as mulch. Layering the nutrients feeds plants and protects the soil from moisture loss and erosion.

Another way to store the energy embodied in our food crops is to preserve it when it’s in season. Sometimes we have a surplus. A lemon tree may have many fruits at once. Preserving them as marmalade or preserved lemons helps reduce potential food waste.

If you have an abundance of fresh herbs, you can dry them for when they are not in season to use in herbal teas, as seasonings and medicine.

I often make a ‘clean out the fridge’ soup with leftovers that are perfectly fine to eat. Download my Free Recipe. You’re welcome to adapt it to whatever ingredients you have on hand.

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These sustainable practices help minimise food waste and build a healthier garden that feeds you for longer.

Resources to Help you Grow Food

These are a few articles to dig into:

• Seed Starting Guide: Quick Tips for Starting Seeds Successfully
• 9 Foods You Can Regrow from Kitchen Scraps
• DIY Fertilisers – How to Use Banana Peels
• How to Use Compost and 7 Benefits of Composting

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What to Plant Now in Subtropical SE QLD

April is a time of transitioning from summer to autumn. We expect cooler days and nights, lower humidity (yay!) and fewer pest insects. Hopefully, perfect growing conditions if we get rain. Download your April Gardening Tips PDF. 

The Vegetables Growing Guide is a reference chart to help you grow 68 of the most popular vegetables in Australia and New Zealand climate zones. Includes information on companion planting, making compost, soil and moon planting. 

What to Plant Now in other Locations

Click here for what to plant and when. Or visit Gardenate.com (USA, UK, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa)

PLANT PROFILE: Spring Onions

(Allium fistulosum) – this vegetable is one of the easiest, most compact and nutritious vegetables to grow. I have them tucked in tight spaces all over my garden. I treat them like chives when young but they can get as thick and tall as leeks as they mature. The flavour is mild and ideal for salads, stir fries, egg dishes and as an onion substitute. Sow regularly for a continuous harvest. Their pretty white pom pom flowers you can see here gift you free seeds.

Spring onions (Allium fistulosum) are a member of the onion family

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