Commonwealth Bank donates a $500 cheque to Woodend Community Garden

The Woodend Community Garden is a productive garden where we employ ecologically-friendly, sustainable practises. The garden design and ethos are intentionally built upon the domestic model; the inclusion of the food we need and love, animals, wildlife, perennials, and local input reliance. From a strictly gardening perspective we focus on enhancing soil health, explicitly structure as well as content.

Our prime aim in this public arena is to learn about the vegetables we love, discover new ones, and trial different ways of growing them. Each year, we plan a wide variety of interesting projects designed to increase our ability to grow our own food. We do not want vegetable gardening to be boring or low value; we want people to get the most out of their garden that they can. 

Ensuring that the garden is sufficiently watered is the biggest obstacle that we face. We have in place two water tanks, with around 30kL capacity that store rainfall directed from the Woodend Neighbourhood House. With approximately 20 trees and 25m2+ of intensive vegetable growing we require approximately 1000L./week in summer.

Thanks to the generous cheque from the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, we shall be in a position to install drip irrigation to make the watering use and activity more efficient over the summer months. We intend to purchase locally the hardware supplies for approximately 100m of dripline with associated header line, connectors, and filters. We shall also be installing an automatic timer and protection for some of the fruit trees. We are hoping to complete this project in a workshop format so that others can benefit from observing the different stages of this project.

Our aim is to show that an average home-sized backyard can produce abundant, varied and vital food crops, and that doing this can be a fascinating, fun, and rewarding experience.

Sara Gormley-O'Brien

Permaculture Garden action group leader

permaculture@mrsg.org.au

Sara Gormley-O’Brien (MRSG), Patrick Hocking (WNH), and Carolyn Sproat (Commonwealth Bank)