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How can you change a typical suburban house in Wollongong into a sustainable, healthy home and organic food garden?


Join us on an adventure to explore the possibilities... 

 


Thursday
May232013

Permablitz the Gong

Building no-dig veggie beds, creating a backyard pond, installing fencing, constructing a banana paw-paw pit, planting fruit trees and roofing the chicken house – it was amazing being part of a ‘Permablitz the Gong’ day at our friends place on the weekend. 

Permablitzes are backyard makeovers permaculture style. Before they happen the facilitators meet a few times with the garden owners to work out exactly what they want and help come up with a permaculture design for the yard. The word is then put out to the local community to come along and lend a hand in blitzing the backyard.

 

There was about 40 people at the ‘Permablitz the Gong’ get together on the weekend. With help and guidance from the fabulously skilled and wonderfully motivating ‘Permablitz the Gong’ organisers, everyone pitched in tasks they were interested in and gained a lot of skills and knowledge as they worked.  

A classic moment was the neighbour popping his head over the fence and his jaw dropping when he saw how many people were helping out with creating a food garden!

Our friends are just so thrilled with what was achieved, and feel it saved them 12 months of work themselves in the garden. It was also wonderfully inspiring for all involved to feel such a sense of community. People who may not have even met before came together to help create a permaculture garden which will help feed it’s owners long into the future.

For more about Permablitz the Gong, check out their website http://permablitzthegong.wordpress.com/. Permablitz Melbourne also has some great stuff happening and fantastic resources others can use to start permablitzes happening in their own neighbourhood.

Tuesday
Feb122013

Local Fruit and Veg Swap jump start event 

We’re really excited that this Sunday 17 Feb from 9am – 12 noon the ‘Waste Not Fruit and Veg’ swap is on again at the North Wollongong community garden.

We always loved popping along to the monthly fruit and veg swaps. There’s such a surprising variety of garden produce and garden goodies to share and swap –fruit, veg, eggs, seeds, seedlings, cuttings and even gardening magazines and books. It’s great to chat with other gardening enthusiasts about what’s been growing in their gardens too. Plus at this swap there will be yummy coffee and nibbles available and entertainment too!

This swap is a ‘jump start’ event after some ever-so-generous volunteers stepped back from years of volunteering to organise the monthly swap.

It’s such a credit to the people who volunteer their time to make these swaps happen, and to the community garden for hosting the event. At this jump start event there’ll be a discussion about volunteering for the ongoing functioning of the swap – a brilliant volunteering activity to be involved in! For more details check out http://thegardennorthgong.blogspot.com.au/2013/02/waste-not-swap-jump-start-17th-feb-2013.html

Saturday
Feb022013

Oh goodness, the vegie beds are bare!

Yes truth be told our vegie beds are not a pretty site at the moment. Between working so hard on our home renovation and learning to live with a new baby, our vegie beds have been totally neglected for months.

Everything has gone to seed.

And at times the poor beds have even been used as a work station for building. 

We miss our abundant vegie beds dearly. After years of growing virtually all of our own veg, it’s a real shock to our systems to be back buying all our fresh produce. Our cooking used to revolve around what came from our daily harvest basket. It was a lovely, rewarding way of growing, harvesting and eating in tune with the seasons.

This time away from vegie gardening has solidified our commitment to growing organic veg at home. Yes it takes time, yes it’s constant work, but food from the shops just isn’t anywhere near as fresh and healthy. We’re passionate about buying organic produce, but the availability of organic produce locally is certainly limited. Although in our region has a few places that sell fresh organic produce (check out our Illawarra Green Directory for details), we’re finding it a challenge to travel to these places regularly with a baby in tow.

Within a couple of months we should be through the last of the hard yards with the renovation and able to revitalise the vegie beds. Vegie beds are forgiving. They’ll welcome us back with welcoming arms. We can’t wait.

Tuesday
Jan152013

Green baby bottoms – using cloth nappies

Using cloth nappies has been a big learning curve for us in our adventure in urban sustainability over the last eleven months with our little bub. Reusable nappies have come a long way since the terry towelling nappies with plastic covers our parents used on us. These days there’s a mind boggling range of modern cloth nappy options out there. Kristin from Cloth My Bot has a good summary of the different options here.

From talking to other parents, it certainly does seem that different nappy styles suit different babies and the only way to find out what suits you and your bub best is to try different kinds. We’ve picked up different nappies that have been new and unused, or only used a couple of times, from the local second hand Baby and Kids markets and Baby Bazzar markets, and also from Ebay. Hiring a nappy pack with different styles is also a great option, like from Ecopatooties, an Illawarra business. A friend of mine has been really happy with her newborn nappy kit from Ecopatooties, and we wish we had hired newborn nappies for when our little one was just born. We’ve always used the adjustable ‘one-size fits from birth to toilet training nappies’, but really they were too big for our tiny girl when she was born, so there was lots of changing clothes as she frequently sprung a leak! 

We’ve been using mostly pocket nappies such as Bum Genius and Bum Cheeks. They have a waterproof cover and a cotton or bamboo insert that slips inside. They fit well, are easy to put on, and do look very cute! For night-time I find the Pea Pod nappies are really absorbent. We even have a reusable Charlie Banana swimmer nappy for trips to the pool.

Though we haven’t tried them, amongst the greenest of green nappies would probably be something like these gorgeous organic flat cotton Disana nappies with wool covers from Woollykins. Well even greener than that would be embracing Elimination Communication where you become so in tune with your baby you can take them to the toilet or put something under them when you know they are going to do something – but we haven’t tried that one either.  

We have about 25 nappies, and use about 6 or 7 a day. Dirty nappies are stored in a big bucket without any water (this is known as dry pailing) and then chucked in the washing machine on heavy duty cycle with ½ a cap of Ecostore washing liquid. We wash a load of nappies every second day. The bamboo inserts take much longer to dry than cotton inserts. Facing the inside of the nappies directly into the sun helps fade any stains. The way nappies are washed and dried has a lot to do with their overall eco footprint. Apart from three occasions, we’ve always line dried our nappies. Our washing machine is also powered by our own solar power system.   

We also use liners on the inside of our nappies. They draw the moisture away from bubs bottom quickly making them more comfortable, and they help protect the nappies from stains. Before our little one started on solid food at 6 months, we used homemade washable polar fleece liners by cutting rectangles of fleece to fit the nappies. Her poos were so little at that stage we just chucked the dirty liners straight in the dirty nappy bucket to be washed.

 

Once our gorgeous girl started on solid foods and her poos became more solid and volumous (and chunkily colourful with bits of food!), we started using biodegradable bamboo liners. They can be flushed down the loo, but as it’s best not to flush too many as they can clog the pipes, we only flush liners that have poo on them. The ones that only have wee, we wash with the nappies once, as we find they can be used twice before the start to fall apart. After they’ve been used twice only for wee, we pop them in the compost. 

We now use the polar fleece liners as reusable wipes, wetting them with water, or a gentle liquid soap if lots of cleaning up is required! 

It’s also handy to have a couple ‘wet-bags’ like this one featured on ‘Nappiness’, another Illawarra based cloth nappy business. They’re quite handy for storing wet nappies in when out and about. 

There’s no doubting that reusable nappies are more work than disposables. They’re also much cheaper than using disposables in the long run. But what motivates us is the thought of leaving between more than 5,000 dirty nappies sitting in landfill for our distant great great great great grandchildren’s world. No one really even knows how long it takes for nappies to break down in landfill. Even nappies made from biodegrable materials can’t break down in landfill as they’re deprived of moisture and oxygen and essentially mummified, so you’d have to compost them all at home to allow them to biodegrade. However, we’re totally non-judgemental about people’s nappy choices. We live in a very hectic world that is not easy for parents, you do what you have to do to survive! We also can’t imagine what it would be like to have two (or more!) little ones in nappies! 

Anyone else got any thoughts or tips on using reusable nappies? There’s some great comments on a different range of nappies at http://www.clothnappyreviews.com.au/.

Sunday
Oct282012

Spring in our suburban food forest garden

Oh spring is such a magic time in the garden!

There’s so much colour about even the chooks seem impressed...

 

Our fruit bowl is full of custard apples and cherimoyas...

And strawberries, mulberries, blueberries and native raspberries are a daily treat...

There’s so much for little hands to explore....

How is spring in your garden?

Monday
Sep102012

The back of the house fell off!

And we’re pretty happy about it! When we bought our 1950’s house 5 years ago, it had an extension on the back that was added in the 80’s by the previous owners. The extension had a huge amount of glass windows and doors facing north and no eaves. It made a fantastic greenhouse, but not a very comfortable space to be in, except during the day in the winter months. It also leaked in the rain, had no insulation, and the floor was essentially a deck, with large gaps between the boards. The stairs leading down to the garden were becoming really unsafe, and underneath the house was a tiny laundry you couldn’t really stand up straight in.

So we’ve been dreaming for years about rebuilding this area – and it’s started with the back of the house being dismantled!

We took apart the back of the house with much care, so as many materials as possible could be reused or recycled. It didn’t literally fall off – but it sure looks like it did!

In the new build we’ll be reusing the flooring, joists and bearers from the original extension. The metal and concrete from the area was taken to local recyclers. We were really pleased to only have a small amount of material that had to go to the local tip. We did have some asbestos though, which had to be carefully and painstakingly removed, sealed up and taken to a special waste facility, at the cost of $350 for a ute load.

To help us design the rebuild we’ve engaged local architect Morgen Figgis from Barnacle Studios. With his creativity and passion for sustainability, Morgen has helped us come up with a plan that we just love. The biggest changes will be moving the kitchen and our main living area to the new northern space, creating an outdoor deck and having a proper height laundry and storage areas underneath. We’ll feel so much more connected to the garden and the magical Illawarra escarpment in our new space!

Eco-friendly features of the new extension will include:

-          Solar passive design

-          Reverse block veneer construction

-          Low-e glazed windows

-          Use of recycled materials

-          Use of local sustainably hardwood timber and FSC certified timber

-          Natural sealers and paints

-          Water tanks connected to the new and old house  

Let the next chapter in our adventure in urban sustainability begin!

Sunday
Aug052012

Giveaway – City Permaculture v2 book (now closed)

From keeping bees on rooftops in Melbourne’s CBD to growing food plants in a bathtub in the backyard, Earth Garden’s new book City Permaculture volume 2 is packed with ideas and inspiration for growing food in the cities.

As we’re really passionate about growing delicious and uncommon fruit trees in the ‘burbs, we’ve contributed a story about doing just that.

We’ve got a copy of this great new book to share with one of our readers. To be in the draw to win just leave a comment on this post by the end of Saturday 18 August. Due to postage costs we’re limiting entry to people in Australia only (sorry overseas readers!). Only one comment per reader please, and we’ll randomly select a winner on Sunday 19 August – so be sure to check back in then!

19 August update – Wow, fantastic to see so keen beans put their hat in the ring for this giveaway. We used a random number generator to select the winner....and it’s Jayne, who commented ‘Have recently started my little window box, inspired by a kids' craft book! I love kids' books because they make everything so simple and possible. Would love your book to guide me into the adult world of permaculture!’ Congratulations Jayne! Thanks so much to everyone for showing your enthusiasm for this book – perhaps you could request your local library order a copy, that way lots of people could enjoy it!

Saturday
Jul142012

Adventures at the local poultry show

From monster roosters that looked like they were half eagle, to sweet bantams chooks with outrageous hairdos, chickens and ducks of all kinds were out and about today at the Dapto Poultry Club annual show.

The blue eggs of araucana chooks turned many heads...

As did the impressive ‘hats’ gracing some ducks...

 

What a fantastic glimpse into the amazing diversity of our feathered friends. We’ll definitely be heading back next year!

Sunday
Jun242012

Five year birthday celebrations and giveaway!

Goodness, this June marks five years since we embarked on our adventure in urban sustainability and set about transforming a typical house and lawn into a healthy, eco friendly home with a flourishing food garden.

And what an adventure it’s been! In the early days up went the solar panels and the solar hot water, and we got busy doing some green renovations with  non-toxic paint, natural floors, ceiling and wall insulation, rainwater tanks and greywater systems.

Then oh the dreaming for a delicious garden – it began! We spent about three months working out the landscape design, figuring out where each and every fruit tree and garden element would be best placed. Then with a vengeance we turf-cut the entire block in October 2007, flipped the lawn on its head and sowed green manure crops to improve the soil. Out went the swimming pool and in went the veggie patch. Our huge concrete driveway was ripped up to make way for a citrus grove, with the concrete painstakingly recycled into a mosaic style garden path that meanders through our food forest. Over time we’ve put in over 100 fruiting trees, shrubs and vines, over 50 different species with everything from avocado to white sapote.

Chickens have joined us, and we relocated a swarm of bees to make home in our top bar bee hive. After creating a garden pond, frogs quickly came to join our garden too.  

Our garden and home have woven themselves into our souls in even more magical ways – we celebrated our marriage in the veggie patch, and birthed our beautiful little girl right here at home.

Our local community has flourished in exciting ways over the last five years, with the passion and determination of many wonderful people. The Flame Tree Community Food Co-op and the ‘Waste-not fruit and veg swap’ were born, and community gardens are continuing to grow. Through the Illawarra Biodiversity and Local Food Strategy for Climate Change project, involving Wollongong, Kiama and Shellharbour councils with funding support from the NSW Environmental Trust, we helped create the Illawarra Edible Garden Guide and community fruit tree groves.  

We’ve put down roots in this little piece of paradise reclaimed, and in our community. We can’t wait to see what the next five years, and fifty years here will bring.

It’s been wonderful sharing our adventures with you through this website over the past half a decade, and we look forward to sharing many more years together.

For our fifth birthday celebrations we’re giving away a copy of the new ABC Organic Gardener Essential Guide, issue 5 which is all about creating a great food garden.  To be the lucky winner, just leave a comment on this post letting us know what you’d like to hear more about on this blog. We’ll randomly select the winner in two weeks on 8 July, so check back in then! Good luck!

8 July update - Thanks so much to everyone for all your lovely comments and fantastic suggestions for furture blog posts! It is this wonderful feedback that keeps us blogging away, and we'll try our best to post about the suggested topics down the track. The lucky randomly selected winner was "Mandy" - congratulations and we hope you enjoy the Organic Gardener Guide! 

Saturday
May262012

Planting community fruit tree groves

Imagine pockets of fruit trees dotting public parks in the suburbs, looked after by the local community, and there for all to enjoy and harvest. Well imagine no more! Exciting news is that Wollongong City Council, supported with funding from the NSW Environmental Trust through the Illawarra Biodiversity and Local Food Strategy for Climate Change project is creating three public fruit tree groves. The goal is for these sites to demonstrate how edible plants can be integrated into public land, and bring good food into our suburbs. We’ve played a key role in designing these food gardens, and have included a range of different trees from citrus, to macadamias, longans and avocados.

On Tuesday the first fruit tree grove was planted out in the park at the back of Unanderra Community Centre, with the help of interested community members. Wollongong Councils Lord Mayor Gordon Bradbury was on hand to help with the planting, and had much enthusiasm for the project, which was wonderful to see!

Community planting days will also be held in June to help create fruit tree groves at Guest Park in Fairy Meadow, and Bulli Park in Bulli. Later there will also be workshops about establishing and maintaining free trees, which will be free for Wollongong Council residents. So if you’re a local and would like to get involved, just call Vanessa John in the Environment team at Wollongong City Council on 4227 7111.

Has anyone else heard about other public fruit tree plantings happening around Oz? We’d love to hear about them!

Monday
May212012

Finger limes – tasty bush tucker

With fruits bursting with tiny pockets of limey goodness that look like caviar, finger limes are uniquely Australian and native to the coastal rainforests of south east Queensland and northern NSW. 

Our four year old finger lime shrub had a bumper crop this year, and has been dripping with the small, elongated fruits.

Finger limes can be used in similar ways to other limes, and are said to be good in jams and sauces and as an accompaniment to seafood. We’re just starting to experiment with using our finger limes, and made a nice banana and lime cake with them the other day. A friend of ours enjoys eating them fresh, though they’re a bit too tart for us that way! There are some good suggestions of how to use them at: 

 Have you ever tried finger limes? We'd love to hear any suggestions about how to use them! If you're interested in growing finger lime, check out our finger lime profile. 

Saturday
Apr282012

Permablitz the Gong – National Permaculture Day

We’ve learned so much from the ethics and principles of permaculture, and it’s really inspired the way we garden and live our lives as ‘sustainability in action.’ Next Sunday 6 May is International Permaculture Day, a day for celebrating permaculture with a blitz of permaculture activities and events! There’s a great website at http://www.permacultureday.info/ which has all the details about what’s happening across Oz.

Here in Wollongong, a group of local Permaculture enthusiasts (fondly known as ’permies’) will be using national permaculture day to launch ‘Permablitz the Gong.’ A permablitz is a sustainable garden makeover where a group of people (including at least one permaculture designer) create or add to gardens in backyards and nature strips, turning lawns into edible landscapes.  If participants come to three or so permablitzes they’re then eligible for one at their own house as the permablitz network is based on reciprocal volunteer support! This first Permablitz will be in West Wollongong, and all are welcome – check out  http://permablitzthegong.wordpress.com/    and  http://www.facebook.com/permablitzthegong for details!

Are you doing anything to celebrate National Permaculture Day? 

Thursday
Apr192012

Tales of chicken rescue

There’s a feisty new chook on the block around here – little miss Chelsea. Recently our neighbour down the street woke up to find seven chooks in her backyard! Six of them wandered back home, wherever that was, but one of them stayed, so she kindly fed her and gave her water. A month later she was still there! Worried about her not having a proper shelter and being vulnerable to foxes, our neighbour asked if we would adopt little Chelsea.

A lone chook introduced into a flock can get a hard time from the existing birds as they work out the pecking order. As our gorgeous silkies Gruma and Charma are pretty chilled gals, we thought Chelsea should be okay. Turns out it was the poor silkies we needed to worry about, as this tiny little pocket rocket chook initially lashed out, unprovoked by the silkies! That took us all by suprise!  Thankful after a day she settled down. The three girls are getting along just fine and Chelsea has laid three beautiful white tiny eggs already.

On a sad note, our lovely chook Rosie, passed away a couple of weeks ago. Rosie was a sweet little chook, who rescued herself by jumping over a high fence into our yard, while the neighbours new dog tragically killed her three companions.

We happily adopted her, and she got along with our silkies like a dream right from the word go. We’re not sure why she died, whether it was old age or maybe something she picked up from the wild birds as she free ranged in the yard, but we’re glad she came and joined us here at Happy Earth.

Thursday
Apr122012

Blissing out on homestyle dehydrated bananas

With another bumper crop of over 150 homegrown bananas on our hands, it was time to experiment with our new Excalibur dehydrator!

We sliced some of the bananas about ½cm thick, as the booklet that came with the dehydrator recommended...

And 11 hours later they had been transformed into yummy super sweet treats!

We love to be able to really sink our teeth into scrumptious dried bananas, so we also cut quite a lot into quarters...

And they 24 hours later they were ready for enjoying! The only problem is they taste sooo good, it’s going to be hard to make them last more than 24 hours on the shelf!

Friday
Mar232012

Growing Gorgeous Borlotti Beans

With gorgeous bright pink and white streaked pods, Borlotti beans look stunning growing in the garden.

This summer we planted our first crop of borlotti beans, and are already reaping the harvest. The beans can be cooked fresh when the pods are still streaked pink, or if you want to dry and store them for a while, you can let the pods fully dry out and turn brown.

The beans inside the pods are a beautiful white with maroon streaks and flecks. They do loose their markings when cooked though, which is a bit of a shame!

We found there was an average of 6 beans per pod. Thirty pods gave us about 1 cup or 150g of beans.

As well as being a yummy food, beans are great to grow in the veggie patch over summer as they put nitrogen into the soil. Have you grown any pulses in your patch? Or do you know of a yummy recipe for Borlotti beans? We have lots more on the way! 

Thursday
Mar152012

Celebrating the arrival of our little 'Happy Earthling'

A month ago today, our gorgeous little girl made her appearance into the world, born in her bedroom right here at home, looking out into the garden!

She might be smaller than some of the zucchini marrows in our garden, but she is certainly keeping us on our toes!

Tuesday
Mar132012

Basil and macadamia pesto

Summer is the time for basil, and a good pesto is one of summer’s true delights!

We just found a brilliant recipe  for a scrumptious basil and macadamia pesto, shared by NSW macadamia farmer Martin Brook:

  • 1/3 cup of roasted and salted macadamias (we used raw unsalted macadamias)
  • 1 cup of loosely packed basil leaves
  • 2 cloves of garlic crushed
  • 1/4 cup of good parmesan
  • 1/4 cup of macadamia oil (if you didn’t have this you could use olive oil – but the maca oil is delicious!)
  • 1 tbs of fresh lemon juice

Simply pop all the ingredients into a food processor and blend. We also added a bit of salt and pepper at the end after tasting. It was delicious mixed through pasta and makes about 1 cup of pesto, enough for about 4 servings, depending on how much pesto you like on your pasta!

As we enjoyed this recipe so much, we went on to made a big batch! Some we stored in jars in the fridge (with a layer of olive oil on top to help prevent browning) for use over the next couple of weeks. For longer term storage we popped some into ice cube trays in the freezer.

Do you have a favourite pesto recipe, or way to enjoy basil?

Friday
Mar022012

Growing mushrooms

Inspired by Milkwood Permaculture and GreenChange we’ve embarked on our first edible mushroom growing adventure. With all this wet weather we’ve been having, it seemed like the perfect time to get fungus flourishing! We couldn’t resist the novelty of growing King Stropharia giant mushrooms that can get up to 30cm in diameter and so we ordered a bucket of spawn from http://www.fungi.net.au. Before we knew it, we had an exciting delivery from the postie – one very big bucket filled with wood chips, giant mushroom spawn (sealed in the plastic bag) and an instruction sheet.

So we took our bucket of mushroom-making magic down to a shady, out of the way spot on the mulch path at the back of our food forest garden. We’re hoping the mushies will eventually spread all through this mulched area, and started by clearing two 25cm by 25cm patches in the path for them.

We then added half a litre of water to the mulch supplied in the bucket and mixed it around...

Placed half the moistened mulch at the bottom of the patches...

Opened the packet of spawn and spread it out...

Covered our mushroom babes over with the rest of the mulch...

Then gave them a good watering and staked them out so we remember where they are!

So hopefully in 4 to 12 months we’ll have some giant mushies popping up, and producing for several years! Have you had any experience growing mushies before?

Wednesday
Feb222012

Garden friend – Black Flower Wasps

With iridescent blue wings and a black body, Black Flower wasps are native insects that are great to have about in the garden. The adults enjoy feasting on nectar and help pollinate native plants, while the larvae prey on curl grubs which live under the ground and eat the roots of plants.

You generally only spot one of these beautiful wasps at a time, as they’re solitary creatures and don’t build communal nests like paper wasps. But in the summer months a number can cluster together in an area that takes their fancy. This summer we’ve had an explosion of black flower wasps on our nature strip, which is planted with lots of native grasses and has a wood chip path. At times there has been about two dozen wasps zipping up and down the nature strip! We love watching them, but need to reassure family and friends that they’re really passive and not at all aggressive or likely to sting you! Sometimes you see the female wasps crawling into the mulch to lay their eggs.

Our native insects truly are fascinating, yet we often know so little about them. We find the CSIRO website has some interesting info about native insects, as does the website Brisbane insects which is run by a nature-loving family of insect enthusiasts!

Monday
Feb132012

Bunya Nuts – Enjoying this wonderful bushtucker

Bunya nut trees are majestic, towering pines that produce huge cones filled with tasty nuts that are sweet and starchy when cooked, rather like a deliciously nutty flavoured potato, or chestnuts. Growing naturally in pockets of rainforest in Queensland, they have special significance to Aboriginal people, who would have special gathering at the times when Bunya nuts were in abundance.

These slow growing trees were sometimes planted by early settlers, and old trees can be found at various places in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. The other week we were lucky to have a friend show us a magical stand of old Bunya trees that had been growing on a property on the far south coast of NSW for many, many decades.  

Every few years mature Bunya Nut pines fruit prolifically between December and March, and luckily for us it was fruiting time! Bunya nut cones are huge, covered in spikes, can weigh up to 10kg, and fall from dizzying heights – meaning they could be quite lethal and not the kind of tree you’d want to plant in a suburban garden! You really don’t want to hang around under Bunya Nuts trees when they’re fruiting. It’s safest to collect cones that have fallen to the ground and rolled out from under the trees. Otherwise make your harvesting run under the trees very swift, not when the wind is blowing, and preferably with a hard hat! Slow Food Australia suggests that cones should be harvested and processed within a week of the cones falling.

The easiest way to break open the cones is with an axe.

Each nut is encased in an individual fibrous packaging that then needs to be peeled off.

Then you’re down to the nut in the shell. We found about 50 nuts in our cone, but there can be up to 100 depending on the size of the cone. There’s different ways to process the nuts, and we went with the method of boiling for about half an hour, and then splitting them open with pillars to reveal the yummy nut inside.

It is quite difficult to pry out the nut this way though, and if we have the chance to enjoy Bunya nuts again we’d try Patricia Gardener’s technique of splitting the tips open with a hammer first, then roasting them for half an hour and cracking them with a hammer.

We enjoyed snacking on our boiled Bunya nuts on their own – they really do have a delicious flavour and texture, like nutty potato. They were also a treat ontop of a veggie pasta dish.

Bunya nuts can also be turned into pesto or blended with honey to make a nice spread for toast. Have you ever seen a Bunya nut tree, or had the chance to enjoy the nuts?