June Newsletter with new event

News

What is going on in your garden?

I hope you have all had a wonderful time in your gardens or with your pot plants and window boxes. The seasons have certainly changed since the Autumn plant fair. The beauty of where we live, is that we can continue to enjoy gardening year round.  Here are some photos of winter bananas in their pyjamas from Dorrigo, with one optimistic plant prepared to meet the Dorrigo winter head-on with a newly formed bunch.

If you have any tips for extending your growing season or photos from your garden, please send them to news@bellingenseedsavers.com, so that we can include them in our newsletter or blog.

I feel the need... The need for seed We had our best ever plant fair in Autumn, selling out of many types of seeds. As a result our seed stocks need replenishing; here’s a list of the main plant types:   Beans – green and butter bush Basil – sweet Bell Pepper or Bull-horn pepper Bok Choy (white stem, dark green leaves) Broccoli Calendula Chinese Broccoli Borage Carrot – red or orange Corn – sweet Cucumber – any green varieties Dill Eggplant – large purple and long purple Lettuce – any green or red varieties Rockmelon Pigeon Pea Peas – all types Pumpkin – Jarrahdale, Buttercup Squash Tamarillo Tomato – any red or yellow varieties Watermelon Winged Bean Zucchini – any green varieties If you have any of these please bring them to our next seed packing day or contact Jeff by email: seeds@bellingenseedsavers.com Diary Dates Garden visit to Dreamtime multiple occupancy gardens Saturday June 27th, 12:00pm-2:00pm How are things growing at your place? Reaping the benefits of hard work and saving seeds, I hope! BSS have had an 'unprecedented' demand for seeds and plant materials and there's been much enthusiasm for homegrown harvests. To keep the momentum growing, we are planning a small meet up; to exchange seeds, surplus and stories. We also plan to tour a section of the Dreamtime multiple occupancy and see the beauty and bounty some of its members have been busy creating.  Numbers of course will have to be limited, so rsvp to grab a place, then details and directions will be given to succesful respondants. Please keep in mind the concerns of current times for the good of all, and let us lose ourselves to the beauty of the Bellinger River valley.   Coming? RSVP to obtain the address and so we know who’s attending, even if you already know how to get there. Organiser: Leela O'Callaghan gardenvisits@bellingenseedsavers.comor phone 0417 536 490 Seed & Plant Swaps Are you looking for particular seeds or plants? Do you have an abundance of something to give away?  Email in to news@bellingenseedsavers.com for your search or offer to be put in the newsletter in this section. Tom Topfer is looking for passionfruit and lemon grass. He can be contacted by email: ttopfer@nextt.com.au Marc Tonkin is looking for pigeon pea seeds, podded pea seeds and snow pea seeds. He can be contacted by email: matonkin543@gmail.com Can you help? Please contact the person directly. Acknowledgements Thanks to Leela for the garden visit invitation blurbs, and banana photos and to Jeff for the seed request. Prizes At some of our garden visits we have a door prize, randomly chosen. This is on top of the seeds, cuttings and plants that other members generously bring along to donate to others. Additionally there is food brought along to share, sparkling conversation and an opportunity to look at a beautiful and bountiful garden. If you been reluctant to attend our gatherings, please come along and join our group. Congratulations Leela for winning the door prize at our Christmas gathering. She won a copy of the Seedsavers Handbook. SEED SAVING DETAILS  When donating or sharing seeds, please email in the seed information so we know what we have (click the link, the email has the questions ready to fill out) Email: seeds@bellingenseedsavers.com Or fill in this PDF form. You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to fill this out digitally. Remember to save each seed info as a separately named file! Or print it out and fill it in by hand.  Check out the Bellingen Seed Savers blog for recipes, local growing information, Diary Dates and garden visit photos. Bellingen Seed Savers Chatter is our Facebook group where we can talk and talk and talk on all things seed savers and edible gardening. www.BellingenSeedSavers.com is our website.

Copyright © 2020 Bellingen Seed Savers, All rights reserved. You may have signed up at the Seed Savers stall at the Autumn or Spring plant fair in Bellingen, at our website www.bellingenseedsavers.com or at our blog http://bellingenseedsaversunderground.blogspot.com.au Our mailing address is: Bellingen Seed Savers We do not have a public postal mailing address Please email us if you want to post us something Bellingen and surrounding towns, NSW  2454 Australia Add us to your address book You can update your email address or unsubscribe from this list

Newsletter, October 201

News Seed packing

Thank you to Gillian for generously hosting the seed packing for the Spring Plant Fair. A team of 12 happy hard working volunteers made a fun time of packing approximately 600 packets of seed. Thank you to all who donated seed and / or helped clean and pack.

John and Carol's food forest

Fourteen people visited John and Carol's garden in Fernmount, including some new faces (welcome and we hope to see you again). We started with some chit chat before starting on the best lunch in town. The hosts had prepared a couple of beautiful curries with rice and the guests supplemented those with a range of savoury and sweet dishes.

After lunch John took us on a tour of their well established food forest. We started at the front of the house with it's well established large shrubs. At the side of the house we passed some garden beds mainly used for perennial vegetables. The property was well screened from the neighbouring house with some big stands of various. Next we went on a loop walk through the main food forest at the back of the house. There were a large variety of exotic trees and more common fruit trees, plus lower layers. As we toured the garden there were many stop and try points, where we sampled the produce. Examples of tasting included, sweet leaf, cape gooseberries, Australian sweet limes and some herbs. John showed how he has handled drainage on their fairly steep block. There was a mountain of citrus waiting to be harvested. The garden was obviously attractive to fruit eaters based on us finding a flying fox sheltering in one of the trees. At the end of the tour there was plenty of stuff to be taken from the sharing table. John and Carol also generously offered people could take grapefruit, mandarins or sweet limes. Thanks for hosting a very enjoyable afternoon.

Seed labelling

After the enjoyable stroll around the food forest, everyone decided to stay on to label the 600 packets of seeds ready for the plant fair. Many hands made light work and the time passed quickly with plenty of chatter around each table. For those people unfamiliar with the seed packing and seed labelling in preparation for the plant fair, there is a good reason that they are done on separate days. At the seed packing day, we start with a collection of seeds and many others arrive on the day. The seeds are then cleaned and packed into sale size lots in ziplock bags. At the start of the day we do not know all of the seed varieties we will get, let alone how many packets of each. Enter Jeff! After the seed packing day, Jeff takes away all of the packed seeds and compares them to our inventory and previous sale records and decides how many of each seed lot we are likely to sell. Next he prints out several hundred labels and gets everything well organised, so that on the labelling datings run like clockwork. Thanks to Carol and John for hosting the seed labelling, Jeff for organising and the volunteers.

Spring plant fair

Pleasant weather contributed to a very busy and successful plant fair. We distributed our entire range of plant material, over half of our stock of seed packets and a bundle of Seed Savers books. Our range of perennial herbs, fruits and vegetables were very popular, including: Yacon (thanks to the tasting samples), Okinawa & Longevity spinach, Chaya spinach tree, Surinam spinach, Hibiscus spinach tree, Aloe Vera, red sugar cane, strawberries, lemon grass, pomelo and ginger. Popular seed packets included: sweet basil, Thai basil, butter beans, various types of snake bean, coriander, climbing spinach (Basella), true-gold sweet corn, echinacea, elderberry, Florence fennel, pineapple gooseberry, African marigolds, Italian parsley, New Guinea gourd, red & blue popcorn, pumpkin (5 varieties), rockmelon, rosella, tamarillo, tarragon, Lemon-drop tomato, Thai pink tomato, and 3 varieties of watermelon.

As always, an event such as this can-not go ahead without a huge amount of work by volunteers. I'm sure I'll miss some people, but the list of volunteers includes Jeff for overseeing all of the work getting our seeds together (he does a lot of the work as well). The people who donated seed, cutting and seedlings. The people who attended the seed packing and labelling sessions. Gillian for hosting the seed packing session and coordinating the plant fair. John and Carol for hosting the seed labelling session. Finally, the volunteers who set up,  worked on and packed up the plant fair stall: Tim, John, Gillian, Susan, Jeff, Leela, Debbie, Chris, Gabi, Nick, Fran and Barbara.

Diary Dates

Garden visit to Debbie's in Brierfield SATURDAY 26th of October, 9:30 am - 12:00pm Remember to seek out the sign-in sheet on arrival.  Please bring a snack plate to contribute to our quick shared brunch If you have them: Please bring seeds or cuttings to share. The Wild Pollinator Count (WPC) https://wildpollinatorcount.com/ is coming up next month (10-17 November) and is a citizen science project run out of the University of New England. The aims of the WPC are to collect information on which native insects are important pollinators in crops and gardens around the country.  Everyone has seen the European Honey Bee in action, however many native insects also contribute to pollination services. Research is lacking on the identification of native pollinators, their habits and how they are affected by human activities.  The WPC provides an opportunity to contribute to the conservation of wild pollinating insects in Australia. In order to encourage participation in the WPC by Bellingen Seed Saver (BSS) members we will be having a “dry run” on the identification and counting of native pollinators in our area.  This will involve a visit to member (and entomologist) Debbie Kent’s property at Brierfield on the morning of Saturday 26th October.  We will be hoping for a fine sunny morning to learn about the project by observation in Debbie’s native garden, vegetable and orchard areas. Coming? please click here to RSVP, to obtain the address and so we know who’s attending. Please RSVP even if you already know how to get there. Organiser: Lisa O'Callaghan / gardenvisits@bellingenseedsavers.comor phone 0417 536 490

Seed & Plant Swaps

Are you looking for particular seeds or plants? Do you have an abundance of something to give away?  Email in to news@bellingenseedsavers.com for your search or offer to be put in the newsletter in this section.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Jeff for the photos and plant fair writeup. Thanks to Leela for assistance with content and newsletter outline.

SEED SAVING DETAILS  When donating or sharing seeds, please email in the seed information so we know what we have (click the link, the email has the questions ready to fill out) Email: seeds@bellingenseedsavers.com Or fill in this PDF form. You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to fill this out digitally. Remember to save each seed info as a separately named file! Or print it out and fill it in by hand.

Check out the Bellingen Seed Savers blog for recipes, local growing information, Diary Dates and garden visit photos.

Bellingen Seed Savers Chatter is our Facebook group where we can talk and talk and talk on all things seed savers and edible gardening.

www.BellingenSeedSavers.com is our website.

Irene's November Newsletter

Hi Seed Savers

It's almost Summer and we are galloping towards the end of the year but we can still look forward to our  December Gathering at Bec's home in Bonville from 1pm on Thursday 1st.  This will be our first time in that direction and this should please those of you who have to travel along the Highway from the north or the south.  I'm sure we will have a great time at Bec's and hope you can come.

The weather was kind to us for our last Gathering  in Fernmount and everyone was in awe of what John and Carol have achieved and there are some photos on the blog.  Many thanks to John and Carol for their lovely hospitality and for sharing their beautiful garden with us.

  

We had a particularly interesting mix of seeds* and plant material to share with one another we welcomed lots of new people attending their first Gathering. It was lovely to welcome Dean and Teal, from the Bellingen High School garden and, on behalf of BSS,  I presented them with a copy of The Seedsavers' Handbook.  This book is invaluable and I still have a few copies available for $22 for BSS people.

How we have grown in the three years since five people attended the very first Gathering - from 5 to 208 on our mailing list!  There are a couple of points that I would like to highlight - the first is that we had no idea that we would experience this sort of growth.  The level of interest that we receive from people at plant fairs and other events has risen with each one - it was overwhelming at the Spring Plant Fair this year.  Our main aim is to ensure future food  security in our community and we do this by saving the seeds from our best plants and sharing them around. We have a wide variety of micro-climates in our individual gardens and if someone experiences a failure of a valued crop in their garden, we need to be in a position to provide replacement seeds.   The more varieties of resilient seeds we have available, the better.  Many of the old heritage varieties have disappeared.  We notice that seed suppliers' lists of offerings develop gaps.

In addition to our gatherings, we distribute large quantities of seeds and plant materials at our stalls.  The higher the level of interest from the public, the greater the quantity and varieties we need to be able to offer and this is where we rely on our members to play their part.  We have founding members, who have been saving and sharing seeds for the last three years (some for many more), and we also have new people constantly  joining us, who have enormously varied backgrounds and experience in gardening and seed saving.  We are delighted to welcome everyone.  It takes a little while to get into the swing of seed saving but it is so rewarding.

We are all volunteers and we all enjoy our garden visits, where we can learn from one another.  For the first time this year we were very happy to have Jude and Michel Fanton, the Founders of The Seedsavers' Network, spend a week-end with us, sharing their expertise.  This was very successful and this event and future presenters are funded by our activities at plant fairs and other events.  We work very hard to ensure that we have an attractive, informative stall laden with packets of seeds, plant materials and all sorts of goodies from our gardens.   We are totally self-funded.  Obviously, the more people who contribute, the more it spreads the load - and the joy.

*Labelling of seeds and plant materials.

The bigger our 'membership' becomes, the more important it is that the seeds and plant materials we share at Gatherings are labelled (see attachment).   If you do this before setting out to a Gathering, it saves confusion as the share table is often very crowded.  It is so easy to arrive home and find yourself with anonymous packages - so frustrating!  If you include details of your name as well as the seeds, their origin, plus any specific information needed to raise them successfully, we can all keep track.  I am attaching the label that you can complete (as far as you are able). You will see that one of the questions asks whether you are willing to 'adopt a seed'.  This means you are willing to ensure that you grow sufficient numbers of the variety and can ensure that they are protected from cross fertilisation, so that when we label the package we can be reasonably sure that it contains what it says.

2012 Gatherings

I would love to hear from anyone who would like to offer their garden for a Gathering next year.  We enjoy all sorts of gardens - and they don't have to be immaculate.  We all live in different settings and no two are the same -  and there is so much to learn from experiencing them all.  We can bring everything we need (cups, food, chairs, etc.) and some of us are happy to offer to help with some gardening while we are there.

I am just re-reading a favourite book by Margaret Simons called 'Resurrection in a Bucket - the Rich and Fertile Story of Compost".  I love this quote she uses by Simon Schama:  'The sum of our pasts, generation laid over generation, like the slow mould of the seasons, forms the compost of our future'.  Ah, compost - to be treasured.

Please ensure that you let me know if you are coming to the next Gathering in Bonville on Thursday 1st December - by Monday 28 November, so that I can send you all the directions in good time (I received 14 enquiries in the last day or so before the last gathering.  I think it is only fair to let the host know how many people to expect in good time.

Looking forward to seeing you at our end-of-year Gathering.

Cheers

Irene

bellingenseedsaversunderground.blogspot.com/ 

Irene's Newsletter

Hi Seed Savers

We had a wonderful visit to Carol's garden last week and were all delighted by the design, the collection of orchids, bromeliads, succulents, irises and the excellent use of groundcovers - and much, much more.  If you go to the blog you will find that John has posted many photos of this picturesque garden.  A big thank you to Carol for inviting us and many congratulations for the years of dedication that she has put into the garden.

We were lucky that the rain held off until after our tour of the garden and we then enjoyed tea and conversation,  a debriefing on the recent events and a lively Q&A session.  I was happy to share the news that, despite some reasonably large expenses recently, our bank balance remains very healthy.  All the donations received at the Plant Fair, etc. and the expenses of the Fantons' visit balanced out very well.  

It was agreed that we benefitted greatly from the Fantons' input and a  few suggestions were made as to other experts who might be willing to share their knowledge with Bellingen Seed Savers next year, e.g. Jackie French, Jerry Coleby-Williams, Isobel Shepherd, a local edible weed expert, etc.  If you would like to suggest others or specific topics you would like covered, please let me know.    I will start making enquiries.

Q & A sessions have become a regular part of our Gatherings and give us an opportunity to pick up some useful practical tips from one another.  I sometimes receive cries for help between Gatherings too and here are a couple of recent ones which were discussed last week:

1. Q  from Rhonda - After one of the gatherings I struck some elderberry pieces and they are now planted in the garden.  However I did not check how big they grow and may have put them in the wrong spot.  Not sure who bought the plant to the meeting but if you have time and think about it could you ask the group via email, how big it grows, I’d much prefer to transplant it now than later. 

 A from Elaine -

The Elder, ( Sambucus nigra )...has more Folklore attatched to it, than any other European plant.....and can grow to 10 metres depending on conditions.

 I like to cut them back to just above a metre, and keep pruning the tips, to produce more flowers and berries, and allowing them to grow to just over 2 metres, makes harvesting easier.    However I like to leave some, for support for the aerial potato, and creating a micro climate, for underplanting, to protect plants from extreme conditions of heat and cold.  Pruned they also make a fast growing wind-break.

The FLOWERS treat, all Respiratory and inflammatory conditions, colds, sore throats, hayfever, feverish illnesses, arthritis and are a mild laxative.

The Berries, are rich in Vitamin C and flavenoids, with antiviral and immune enhancing actions.  Strengthen the eyes and improve night vision.

 Both Fruit and Flowers have been traditionally used in TEAS Cordials Jams and Jellies Wines and Anti -  ageing formulas...hence the name ELDER.

 ELDER FLOWERS AND OR BERRIES  with yoghurt,  make an excellent addition to the morning MUESLI. 

 A brew of the leaves is a good insecticide.

2. Q from Lesley -" I've always had good success with dwarf beans but this year something is eating my seeds as they're emerging from the ground. Those that come up at all have brown edged holes in the cotyledons and don't make it to becoming a plant. Do you know what's doing it? More to the point, what can I do about it?"

 A from group - a number of protection methods were suggested - a piece of polypipe or an upturned drink bottle, pushed into the ground around the seedling.

Causes suggested - birds, slugs/snails, 4-legged creatures......

3. Q  from someone in the group - a Brazil Cherry - flowers but no fruit

    A  Could have been the period of wet weather

If you have a query about something you are growing, please send it in and I will circulate it.