Yandina Community Gardens

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Saturday, 17 October 2020, 9-11.30am Splitting your Australian Stingless Beehive with Mel Marx

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Yandina Community Gardens is blessed with a lot of plant resources that assist the Australian Stingless bees to thrive in the gardens. Spend a morning with Mel Marx exploring and understanding Australian Stingless bees, knowing when they are ready to split and caring for them after the split. On the day we will be splitting one of the Australian Stingless beehives on the YCG site.
Tickets are limited and sell out fast, please book here
About the presenter:
Mel Marx is an avid Australian Stingless beekeeper and works with Bob Luttrell to rescue and rehome bee colonies from water meter boxes. She lives on a 100-acre property North of Yandina and is currently creating habitat for the bees by planting native plant and tree species on her property. She hopes to get a Native Stingless bee honey industry up and running working with other beekeepers to make this exceptional honey with its incredible medicinal properties available to more people.

Food Waste Loop – What’s happening in September?

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Yandina Community Gardens Food Waste Loop program has been operating for just over a month and we couldn’t be happier with the impact we’ve had already! We have diverted over 1.25 tonnes of waste, and saved over 2,400kg of C02-e emissions from our beautiful environment.
We have 10 businesses onboard who are happily separating their waste, and redirecting it for a greater purpose! We are so happy we are able to utilise this resource rather than it end up wasted in landfill.
Our hot compost piles are cooking, we are feeding our worms a variety of great scraps, and it’s warming up for the black soldier larvae. Check out a few photos from the past month.

Our compost piles built by are volunteers are hot! 

Inspecting our worm farm!


One of our Food Waste Loop partners, proud to be part of the program!

Project Officer, Emily Boyd, weighing and recording the waste before it’s added to the hot compost pile.

 

Chief compost inspector, Louie-Jay.

To share the journey with us, follow us on Facebook (Yandina Community Gardens), and Instagram (@ycgfoodwasteloop)

Food Waste Loop

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 About the Food Waste Loop project:
Yandina Community Gardens program, Food Waste Loop, diverts food ‘waste’ from Yandina’s food businesses into compost systems.
Yandina Community Gardens have created a localised waste management system. We have partnered with cafes, restaurants, coffee roastery’s, and grocery stores and divert the towns waste into three different compost systems. These are aerobic hot compost, worm farm composting, and black soldier fly larvae composting! We are recording how much of Yandina town waste we are able to process, and evaluating the viability of the Food Waste Loop program to be replicated across Australia.
This program reduces greenhouse gas emissions generated by landfills, whilst creating a valuable, nutrient-rich compost resource. We imagine a future where food ‘waste’ was actually not wasted, and was turned into an amazing resource for the local community to enjoy.
The Australian Government has committed to halve the amount of organic waste sent to landfill for disposal by 2030, as per the National Waste Policy Action Plan. This means a reduction of 2.7 million tonnes of organic waste that is currently thrown out and ends up in landfill. The township of Yandina is playing a direct role in helping meet these targets. We are working towards easing the load on the following issues:
• Eliminating global food waste would save 4.4 million tonnes of C02 a year, the equivalent of taking one in four cars off the road
• If food waste was a country, it would be the third biggest emitter of greenhouse gases after USA and China
• The Government estimates food waste costs the Australian economy $20 billion each year
• Over 5 million tonnes of food ends up as landfill each year, enough to fill 9,000 Olympic sized swimming pools
• Landfill gas contributes 15 million tonnes to Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions.
OzHarvest, 2020
The Food Waste Loop program commenced June 2020. This project received grant funding from the Australian Government’s Communities Environment Program.
To share the journey with us, follow us on Facebook (Yandina Community Gardens), and Instagram (@ycgfoodwasteloop)

Welcome to our new Garden Co-ordinator

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We would like to introduce you to Jane Little, our new Garden Coordinator. Jane is volunteering as the coordinator on Mondays. Jane attended our June volunteer induction and quickly got involved in various projects in the garden. We noticed Jane had a lot of experience with organic gardening and so we quizzed her on her background. Jane shared her resume and it turns out she has been working for several years as the Garden Specialist for the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden at North Arm School. Jane is also involved with and consults to several festivals including Earth Frequency Festival and The Planting. Jane has strong experience coordinating and supporting volunteers, is highly organised and is a skilled communicator.
Jane is also currently learning about soils, systems and regenerative practices. In her 16 years living within Starlight Community Jane has learnt much about designing and planting gardens, permaculture and living sustainably.
Her role at the gardens involves participating in a monthly garden committee meeting, coordinating daily garden activities and allocating volunteers jobs and ensuring our key garden design principles are respected and implemented. Jane will also be working with our team of experienced volunteers to provide training and education to all our new volunteers.
If you’ve been considering volunteering at the gardens we hold inductions every month, our next morning tea for new Volunteers will be on Tuesday 6th October. Why don’t you come along and meet everyone

Saturday 3 October 2020, 9 – 11am, Composting for Kids

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Get your hands dirty again, as you learn how to build super strong compost that will
enrich your garden, fill it with millions of micro-organisms and ancient minerals, and you
can take some home to get you started.
PLEASE NOTE:
 Parents are welcome to attend, but parent involvement is not necessary as teachers
are qualified and numbers are restricted to cater for this.
 As a hands-on activity, and for maximum learning ability, numbers are capped for
this session so BOOKINGS ARE ESSENTIAL. Please BOOK HERE
About the Presenters:
The Living Classroom Project is an outdoor learning program that has been functioning for over 17 years in schools across NSW and Queensland.  Using experiential, hands- on learning, the programs are tailored to primary and secondary school students, introducing them to the principles and practices of permaculture design, to build and plant organic vegetable gardens, at both home and school.
Living Classroom is different from other gardening progams in that we create seating circles, bed designs, 4 seasons vegetable gardens tied in with water harvesting via swales, food forestry to improve micro-climate of playgrounds, and cafeteria composting – lunch to soil. All teachers have degrees in Education, the Principal is a qualified landscape architect, and 2 of the educators are PDC qualified.
The principles demonstrated in all Living Classroom programs support disaster prevention and crisis management.

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beekeeping biochar compost composting Cover crops edible leaves edible rhizomes Event events fruit Garden Tour Good Health Hive splitting Kids event Kids program know your plants Learning Living sustainably management committee members medicinal plants member event Morag Gamble native stingless bees nursery Nutrient Dense Food Open garden visit Permaculture Permaculture in action Plant Plant of the month plants plastic free Recipe Recipes Sustainable Building sustainable living volunteer water plant Wax-wrap making wax-wraps Workshop workshops Worm Farming Yandina Community Garden Yandina community Gardens

Our Supporters

Rockcote (cob oven)
Nutritech Solutions
Yandina Feed Barn
Permaculture Noosa
Jeffers Wholesome Foods  

Permaculture People

Elizabeth Fekonia - Permaculture Real Food
Morag Gamble - Our Permaculture Life
Dee Humphreys - Eatin Garden Edible Garden Tours

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