Healthy environment

Key to successful gardening is to understand the needs and properties of the plants you want to grow the environmental factors that make them thrive or stall the properties and life-cycles of potential pests As gardeners we are constantly learning. Finding out why a particular problem occurs grows our skills. Embrace mistake, it’s a chance [more]

Basic pest-control strategy

Insect and fungal pests are a natural part of our ecosystem. We strive to reduce their damaging impact by trying to understand their needs and changing the conditions in our garden to be less inviting to them by tolerating a degree of pest damage to encourage predatory animals to life in our garden. By eating [more]

Crop rotation

In Mort Bay Community Garden we grow a wide variety of crops, which all need a plant-specific set of nutrients and are challenged by different pests. Growing a sequence of different types of crops in any one bed over subsequent seasons is called crop rotation, a strategy already practised by Middle Eastern farmers 8000 years [more]