Walyo Yerto Community Garden celebrates first harvest, Winter Solstice 2010
Last Saturday Walyo Yerta Community Garden held its first-ever Harvest Festival – the Gathering of the Gardeners – at the Adelaide South West Community Centre. Numbers weren’t huge – not surprising, really, for such a cold and rainy night. Those who turned up through – a great mix of ages and nationalities – had a wonderful time. The tables were decorated with large broccoli heads, herbs, chilies, and flowers, the food was abundant and delicious, the wine, generously supplied by David of Temple Bruer Winery, was magnificent, and the company, conversations, and music all combined to make it a great evening.
The Gilles Street Primary School classes who are active in the garden put together a wonderful basket of gardening goodies as first prize in the raffle. This was won by Greg Martin, Thursday Bokashi monitor and stalwart. Von and Joan won the other prizes.
At the end of the evening, everyone went home with food picked fresh from the garden – lots of salad greens, those decorative broccoli heads, kale, herbs, and slices of a magnificent pumpkin donated by local gardener Ken Gutte.
Although the main aim was to get together with others to celebrate the Winter Solstice, the garden took over $100 in wine and raffle ticket sales. And there’s a few dozen bottles of wine leftover for the next event. Judged on the success of the evening, such celebrations will become regular events on the Walyo Yerta calendar.
Heather Wardle
16/07/2010 at 6:32 amI want to determine how much water a vegetable garden in the Adelaide area might require, to calculate a preferred tank size. Of course I would use mulch. Do you have records on the size of your plot, the amount of mains water, the number of rainwater tanks and roof area for collection? Thanks.
claire
18/07/2010 at 12:40 amIf one assumed Adelaide has 500mm rainfall and there is a roof of 500 sq metres you’d need a tank of about 8000 litres. A place with a roof of only 250 sq metres would need storage of about 16000 litres. The garden consumption would have to be superimposed on that.
Now I’m just thinking aloud here…I’m no physicist……In theory one could simply calculate the total water required over a year to irrigate a square metre and store it all for the garden in advance. In Adelaide that would be about 700mm of irrigation, so a ten square metre garden (3.3m X 3.3m) would use a total of 0.7 X 10 = 7 cubic metres or 7000 litres (mulch and drip irrigation may reduce that by more than half so we could perhaps say 3000 litres). But that ignores the relativities of capture and use of the rainwater over the seasons (much more water used in summer and much less rain falling) which have been built into the SA Water graphs.
My feeling is that it would mean having storage of about 20000 litres for a home and very small garden provided the roof area was about 250sq m
To be able to have a bigger garden the graphs show that increasing roof catchment is much more important than increasing storage size…if it is possible
I’ll be very interested to hear how Heather goes and whether she gets some good tools for these calculations
Cheers
Graham brookman
claire
18/07/2010 at 12:41 amHi Heather, Graham and all,
An interesting book discussing the water use and from big picture to garden is “Out of the Scientist’s garden” CSIRO scientist and home gardener Richard Stirzaker, from Canberra.
http://www.publish.csiro.au/pid/6181.htm
A great and informative read.
Cheers
Colin