By KATH GANNAWAY
WOORI Community House manager, Sonya Mazar, has a simple criteria for the success of their community vegetable gardens.
“I just love it when I see schoolkids walking past pick a couple of snow peas, or tomatoes and just eat them fresh from the garden,” she says.
The garden is a series of crates between the car park and the footpath, planted out with vegetables and herbs.
It’s a permanent display of the innovative approach the house has to sustainable gardening for everyone that includes a zero waste, minimal water and maximum input from nature’s helpers – the worms, chewing insects, microbes and aerobic bacteria.
Their secret weapon in establishing the model is local inventor and garden guru, Mike Morrison.
His integrated life-cycle food management system includes recycling cardboard packaging and coffee grounds (remember all those cafes in the Yarra Valley!), repurposing cardboard and plastic coffee cups and composting right next to the plants with a re-usable ‘compost hive’.
At Woori, the gardens thrive on ‘donations’ from the local shops and businesses who feed their food scraps, teabags and paper into the hives.
The hive, and the gardens themselves are mulched with the mix of ground-up cardboard and coffee grounds creating a slow-release nitrogen garden/compost additive.
“When used to make compost, it balances the carbon nitrogen ratio for good composting, reduces odour and prevents rodents and flies attacking the compost,” Mike explained.
On a larger scale, with a major restaurant chain interested in the system, co-grinding food waste and cardboard in the Aximill Processor designed and patented by Mike, has huge potential for the environment.
Mike Morrison will demonstrate the gardening system at the Woori Community House Open day on Saturday, 30 April from 10am to 2pm.
