Down in the Garden: Fabulous Fast Fixes for Your Garden
Maybe you have decided to sell your home due to the current favourable market conditions or perhaps you have a rental inspection looming. Then again, you might need these tips…
gardening
Down in the Garden: Create a Zen-inspired Garden Oasis
The concept of ‘Zen’ gardening probably conjures up visions of monks exercising vows of silence while sitting in crossed-legged meditation or crystal windchimes dancing amongst wafts of incense but stay…
Down in the Garden: Growing Chooks
One of my happiest childhood memories is of my mother’s bantam collection. I say ‘collection’ because this flock of birds must have featured just about every variant available at the…
Down in the Garden: Crops in Pots
You might have limited space or be renting but still want a lush and productive edible garden. One solution to consider is growing your veggie garden in pots. Other reasons…
Down in the Garden: Let’s Go Nuts!
An addition to your garden that you may not have considered is nuts. There are a few tree nuts that are easily grown in temperate areas, including the Central Coast…
Down in the Garden: How to Grow Healthy Citrus
Everyone should have a lemon tree but not everyone is always successful at growing said citrus tree. Let’s explore ways to help you master the art of the juicy fruits!…
Down in the Garden: How Not to Kill an Orchid
Your gardening writer is not an avid orchid collector and grower, but I am slowly coming around to them as I begin to understand the passion and seducing attraction of…
Down in the Garden: It’s Coming Up Roses
Walk into any nursery or gardening section on the Central Coast right now and you will be greeted with what appears to bags filled with sticks. These are the much…
Down in the Garden: It’s Harvest Time
As the leaves fall, turn red, gold and amber and the cold quickly descend on us, this weekend we celebrate ‘The Central Coast Harvest Festival’. In your garden, you may…
Down in the Garden: Cover up with Screening Plants
If you can’t stand living with that heat reflecting metal panel fence, the windows of your neighbours blinking into your home or the view of the local shops, then screening…
Down in the Garden: The Perfect Pots
No matter how or where you garden, or if you barely garden at all, I’m pretty sure that nearly all of us have a plant living in a pot somewhere…
Down in the Garden: Marvellous Mushrooms
Just as gardening has had a huge jump in popularity of late, so have other plant-based interests including mushroom foraging and growing. Autumn is the time for this peaceful nature-based…
Down in the Garden: A Native Bee-Friendly Garden
Bees have enjoyed celebrity status the past couple of years and rightly so. They even have a day dedicated to them with Thursday 20th May now declared World Bee Day….
Down in the garden: Its got to be garlic
It is garlic planting time on the Coast and across temperate areas of Australia right now. Good news is, they are one of the easiest plants to grow and home-grown…
Down in the Garden: Pet Safe Gardens
It can be hard to create a beautiful, bountiful garden filled with all the things our heart desires when we share our homes with curious cats and digging dogs, but…
Down in the Garden: Australian Native Orchids
One of the most often asked questions about flowers that I have received over the years is whether or not there are any Australian Orchids. With over 800 species and…
Down in the Garden: Growing Onions
Now that tomato season has left us, one crop you can pop in and successfully grow after this heavy feeder is onion (Allium cepa). The best time to plant onions…
Down in the Garden: Brilliant Brassicas
It’s time! Time to get those cabbages and cauliflowers planted for a winter harvest. I am addicted to broccoli fresh from the garden, alright, anything fresh from the garden, but…
Down in the Garden: Grow, Preserve & Create with Dried Flowers
Some of us may remember the last time dried flowers were ‘a thing’. It was the late 1970’s and into the early 80’s and from my memory, the fascination with…
Down in the Garden: How to Create a Fragrant Native Garden
When many of us think of a perfumed garden, it is easy for the imagination to drift to the introduced cottage flower staples of roses, gardenias, frangipanis and lavender. These…