Glenn’s Productive Backyard in Werribee
I cannot really remember the time I got into gardening, but it was through my son. I think it came from spending time outside, and I had a lot of interest in edibles specifically — things like stone fruit, berries and things like that.
Our connection to My Smart Garden came about because we are part of the Werribee Heritage Orchard volunteers. We have been learning a lot through there, and then we saw My Smart Garden advertising and started participating. We have done about five or six online workshops, ranging from raspberries to organic pest management, fruit fly, composting and worm farming. We also did one at Brimbank for pruning fruit trees.
The hands-on face-to-face workshops are brilliant because you can actually get in there and do it yourself or see someone doing it in front of you.
The garden started with the vegetable garden. We have got two large raised beds now, and from there it has just expanded. There are fruit trees, berries, chillies, passionfruit, midyim berries and other things through the garden.
There was not any real plan. It is just that we happened to stumble across things in the nursery. You think about what you might do with the space you have got, but then once you plant it and everything else grows up around it, in the growing season everything just explodes. If I had my time again, I would probably have two trees less in that area, or space it out a bit more. But I do not think I will cut them out. I will just prune them back.
Our son is a really keen gardener, and the opportunity to plant and grow things is important to him. As a family, we encourage that, although sometimes we have to think about how much space there really is.
There is a lot going on in the garden. It would probably scare a few people if they had to maintain it, for sure, but we just do a bit at a time.
We try to use organic pest control or organic fertilisers, so no synthetics. We have also got a worm farm and a compost bin up the back for fruit scraps and vegetable scraps. I am still trying to figure out the worm farm. Maybe I went too big too quick.
I think there is a lot of lack of education out there with what you can actually return back into your garden from what you have consumed on the table. Things like veggie scraps can be composted and put back into your garden beds. There is nothing better, as I have been told.
It is like gold that people are throwing out in their green bins.
We get a lot of butterflies and ladybugs, occasional swarms of bees coming in for the flowers, lacewings, praying mantis, fairy wrens and honeyeaters. We have put in native grasses and things like that, just to diversify it and bring a bit of life back into the soil.
The best bit of the garden for me is being able to come out here all the time. In the afternoons after work, or sometimes during the day if I have some downtime, I will come out and inspect to see what is going on. I will pick some fruit off the berries. It can be anytime, and I can be lost out here for hours.