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Permaculture Day’s Gold Coast Permaculture Workshop

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Seed Raising Workshop with Sarah and Dan in Dan’s Nursery

On Saturday 5 May, Gold Coast Permaculture (GCP) held its second major workshop day for 2012.  Following a successful day on 17 March on Essential Gardening Skills and Bee Keeping and Warre Hive Building, Gold Coast Permaculture repeated this workshop series substituting the composting workshop with worm farming by Wormtec’s Greg Plevey.  The morning workshops included seed raising with Sarah Hudson and Daniel Smith, worm farming with Greg and then followed by lime sulphur making and no-dig gardening.

The afternoon workshop was again bee keeping and bee hive building but this time, we built a horizontal top bar hive (HTBH) which is based on the internal dimensions of a Warre hive.  We had Graeme Rollo, a volunteer and carpenter (a true tradesman) come in and show us how to go about building the HTBH. This is an expandable hive from the centre and will take up to 36-40 top bars or the equivalent of 4 box Warre stack.

Essential Gardening Skills

The morning workshop was particularly popular and some 24 members of the community including a couple of our community gardeners turned up on a beautiful Gold Coast autumn morning to start at 0900. We were running only 10 minutes ate before launching into the seed raising workshop.

A new section of this workshop was brought to us by Daniel Smith who is a long-term volunteer at GCP and who now runs the organisation’s herb section and nursery.  Dan is the feature on this page and this was his first workshop presentation.  This is a great effort for someone whose obsession with herbs is a fairly recent phenomena  dating only back to late 2011 and who, has never previously given a presentation to the public.  We are pretty proud of this guy actually.  He has taken the nursery from nothing to one that is now producing hundreds of different medicinal and culinary herbs and is apparently having a wonderful time doing it.

A no-dig garden was also prepared to enable participants to see exactly how the gardens at 270 are built.Special thanks to Justin Sharman Selvidge the developer of this hybridized system of layer gardening,these beds are made completely from local resources,water weeds feature heavily as do specially developed microbial applications.These garden form the basis of the farm,and have taken many years to develop, we are fortunate to have someone of Justin’s caliber,leading the push of urban ag in South East Queensland.He is currently working in Brasil on humanitarian projects and will return soon.

No-Dig Garden Showing All the Different Layers Used

Wormtec

Greg Plevey from Wormtec had the rapt attention of the audience for a full hour plus and if we had allowed it, I think both the audience and Greg would have been happy for it to go on for another hour, replacing the final workshop.  It would have been fine for this to happen but for the fact that we were boiling up the water for the lime sulphur production and it had taken a mighty effort to dry and get the fire going after all the rain we have had.  Also, there had to be some justification for the fact that Greg’s audience were almost smoked out of their seats in the process.  We had to produce the lime sulphur or we really would have lost face.

Greg also provided a range of products including kelp concentrate, kelp and worm concentrate and worm extract biology concentrate.  We utilise these products to improve our soil at GCP, especially the worm tea biology.  This is essentially a replacement for compost tea but has a shelf life of at least 12 months while compost tea must be used within six hours.  This makes it easy for Jill and Joe Gardeners to enjoy the same benefits of creating a wonderful mix of soil biology in their gardens as a broad acre farmer might do with compost tea without going to the expense of having to make their own or get it from somewhere else, usually somewhere too far from the Gold Coast.

Greg Plevey’s Worm and Composting Workshop

Top Bar Hive Building

The bee keeping and hive building workshop was a smidge quieter in terms of numbers but what it lacked in that department it made up for in terms of enthusiasm. We covered the basics of the bee life-cycle, life in the hive and swarming before being given a thorough grounding in how to build a HTBH by Graeme Rollo. In no time at all, probably because it had been pre-cut, Graeme knocked up a hive to the delight of the participants. It was very much an audience participation exercise with much comment and question going to the presenter who was ably assisted by Derek Reinecke, originally from Sth Africa where he also kept bees.  Those bees are a little more aggressive than the very friendly European honey bees at GCP. The workshop finished with an observation of our GCP bees by class participants. Unfortunately we were unable to open up a hive as there was a distinct lack of protective gear for such an exercise. Friendly or otherwise, not many of us take kindly to alien entry into our homes. Bees are not much different and some basic OH&S precautions must be taken.

Malfoy’s Gold

We would recommend all aspiring bee keepers consider taking a much  more thorough course in bee keeping along the lines of that provided by Tim Malfoy from Malfoy’s Gold.  Also, there is a Warre forum for new and experienced bee keepers and a Warre Australia Facebook page. Tim provides a course over two days.  We do hope that we might have Tim up in Queensland sometime this year to provide perhaps a condensed version over a full day or if possible, depending upon expressions of interest/bookings at the time, even the full Monty.  We would love to have him come and share his very extensive knowledge with us instead of keeping it south of the border. Finally, contacting your local bee keeping organisation is always a big help, especially in sourcing bees.

The tea and bickies provided for morning and afternoon tea were a big hit and three large family packets of biscuits were demolished. The participants, particularly in the afternoon workshop, were obviously not just hungry for knowledge!


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