Raise Your Glass for Mulching Vineyards & Community Gardens

Amid nationwide calls for thousands of hectares of vineyards to be uprooted to resolve the wine glut, some Canberra district wineries are turning to carbon sequestration in the hope they’ll not only help save the planet, but improve the quality of their grapes, while growing vegetables is a way of life for many city gardeners who want to produce healthy food, combat high prices and reduce their carbon footprint, so in Melbourne community gardens are starting to meet the need.

Agriculture’s backyard revolution rolls on in the city

Denise Gadd for The Land (24 January 2010):

GROWING vegetables is a way of life for many city gardeners who want to produce healthy food, combat high prices and reduce their carbon footprint.

But not everyone has the room to grow vegies, so people turn to allotments or community gardens – popular in England, and now flourishing in Melbourne – to create their potagers (kitchen gardens).

Traditionally, these plots were the domain of retirees who filled their days pottering around and chatting with their greenthumb neighbours.

Today, though, growing vegetables is more serious gardening business as people come together to share their food and culture in an organic and chemical-free environment.

Age is no barrier. At the Ringwood Community Garden, which celebrates its 30th year in March, the youngest member is nine and the oldest an octogenarian.

Laura Bermingham is a grade 4 student at Great Ryrie Primary in Heathmont. Like her father, Bryan, she is a member of the Ringwood Community Garden and has had her own plot for two years, growing produce including potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes and flowers.

She visits weekly on her allotted watering day and enjoys swapping excess produce with her fellow gardeners and participating in a gardening program as part of her curriculum.

Bill Lynch, who lives in a unit, does not have room to grow vegetables, so he joined the club three years ago. A retired fireman, at 80 he is the oldest member and his produce tends to be whatever is in season. At the moment, that’s tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers and beetroot. If he has a glut of anything, it gets left on a communal bench for people to help themselves.

Why does he prefer to grow his own? ”Because they’re better for you.”

Vic Jeynes, 80, had an allotment in England before coming to Australia. Now a member of the local Probus gardening club, which has two plots at Ringwood, he and 12 others dug out the potatoes last week and this week will dig up half the plots to make way for winter greens.

Sharing the harvest is also part of Mr Jeynes’ philosophy. ”We take some of the goodies and leave the rest for others,” he said.

Member secretary Ralph Powell said: ”A virtual United Nations exists within the garden. On any given day it is possible to hear Italian, Greek, German and Chinese accents mixing with the Irish, British and Anglo-Australian members.”

The club has 102 plots that are leased for a one-off joining fee of $30 and an annual rent of $40.

A sensory garden for disability support groups runs along the front fence and there are three donated water tanks providing a supplementary water supply. An honour system prevails.

Ringwood Community Garden will open on the weekend of January 30-31 as part of the Australian Open Garden Scheme.

Source: www.theland.farmonline.com.au

District wineries raise their glasses to super mulch

By Aurora Daniels for Canberra Times (25 January 2010):

Amid nationwide calls for thousands of hectares of vineyards to be uprooted to resolve the wine glut, some Canberra district wineries are turning to carbon sequestration in the hope they’ll not only help save the planet, but improve the quality of their grapes.

Canberra District Wine Industry Association president Anne Caine said that as long as wine was of a high enough quality, there would always be buyers.

As part-owner of Lerida Estate, her and husband Jim Lumbers stopped the tradition of burning the vine offcuts about two years ago, and now uses the by-products to mulch under the vines, making the vineyard carbon neutral.

Mr Lumbers said, ”We use the waste, which usually releases CO2, and we spread the mulch under the vines so carbon is locked into the soil by worms and micro-organisms.

”We add lime and do other things with the mulch but basically it is left stewing away and breaking down in piles, it ferments getting hot and killing the weeds and then we break it all up with the tractor.”

The 20 tonnes of wood from the vines used to create about 40 tonnes of CO2 annually, now it helped improve soil and vines and, hopefully, the end product.

The result was obvious with thicker foliage, something he wasn’t seeing when using bought products.

Yarrh Wines’ Neil McGregor has taken the process one step further, turning those leftovers into a super mulch and also trying to go organic to increase the help of microbial life.

”I wasn’t seeing the improvements in the vines that I wanted. With traditional farming we’ve depleted the carbon and humus complex in the soil so now we’ve got to replace it,” he said.

He adds straw, manure, soil, winery waste and uses a large compost turner to add oxygen and lots of water to his 100 tonnes of compost. Already this season he has noticed more bees during flowering and fungus breaking down the slashed grass under the vines.

Dionysus Winery has started to mulch the by-products as well.

For Lark Hill Winery, this is all old news. It has been a biodynamic farm since 2003. Composting and mulching and using milk sprays instead of poisonous fungicides.

Shaw Vineyard Estate has also been mulching and using turkey manure on the vines for about seven years, so to improve sales in the tougher times it is now sending wine further afield hitting Vietnam, Singapore and Europe, as well as Queensland, Victoria and hopefully soon Western Australia.

Source: www.canberratimes.com.au