How The Garden Came To Be

Starting the garden – Ground work done in 2010

Stanthorpe Community Garden was created in 2010 by a group of Stanthorpe residents wanting to share their love of gardening and promote organic gardening principles and water-wise gardening practices.

A lot of work was done by volunteers to get the garden up and going.

First, we made many piles of compost. Thanks to Sarah for your guidance.

A drop-off bays was constructed and are now full of manure/compost, mulch, tree prunings (ready to be mulched with our new mulcher – it is super-dooper!!!) and grass clippings delivered by our regular local lawn mowing man who drops off clippings weekly. He is as happy for the depot service as we are for the clippings.

The greenhouse is filling up with new plant deliveries weekly. Here we spend some quite time propagating and dividing. The Two bins at the front of the picture contain our brewing comfrey tea – thanks for the supply Julie and Kim.

The two raised beds for people with disabilities have been constructed from ironbark timber sleepers and filled using the ‘no-dig gardening method.’ We filled the beds half way with soil and then layered newspaper, lucerne, soy bean mulch and compost and applied a decent amount of blood & bone in between each layer. One of the beds has already been planted out with some winter veggies that are just powering on.

The herb garden is now complete and the retaining wall has been mulched and secured with some wire (mesh) and old railway sleepers. A beautiful granite rock has been exposed (cleaned and polished) at the end of the retaining wall. These features have added a wonderful new dimension to the site.

The area surrounding the raised beds has been compacted and had a setting agent applied to create hardened paths that can be easily accessed by all members of the community.

We constructed a variety of garden bed allotments to demonstrate to the community the different materials and resources that can be utilised by the home gardener to help make gardening cost effective using local and recyclable materials. Such materials include the timber sleepers (as represented above), corrugrated iron or colour bond and rammed earth constructions.

Water-wise gardening techniques are being experimented with and one exciting style of garden bed is the wicking bed. The wicking bed operates

To see what the garden looks like now, come and visit us at the garden on any Wednesday or Sunday morning.

Join Our Online Forum

The community garden website now has a link to an online forum – here you can discuss anything related to the community garden – current issues/meetings/future plans or any interesting ideas………. Whatever you like!

To join the forum, simply click on the forum link on the community garden website. Once the forum page appears, you will be required to login in order to participate in discussions (this will require you to submit a username and password). You may join in on current discussions, or post a new thread for discussion.