Margie Maccoll
Dressed like a garden gnome, everyone’s favourite gardening celebrity Costa Georgiadis came to the Queensland Garden Expo at Nambour last weekend to entertain as well as educate and the audience lapped it up.
“Composting is the centre of the world. There is no life without death,“ Costa told a packed crowd at one of the expo’s more than 120 presentations, and within minutes he had the audience swaying with their arms in the air as they pretended to be sponges sucking in dead leaves to become humus in the composting process.
Costa was one of more than 40 speakers at the three-day expo at Nambour Showgrounds where its seven hectare facility had been transformed into a gardener’s paradise showcasing the wares of more than 360 exhibitors and conducting 60,000 daily plant sales.
Across the three days, the show’s 40,000 attendees wandered the grounds to view displays, marvelled at the floral art, ate at the food court and attended the program of talks delivered by experts across eight stages.
ABC Gardening Australia presenters were there in force.
On the Poinciana stage Claire Bickle spoke about the benefits of having a bush tucker garden, giving examples of a variety of species that could be added to the diet including locally grown ground covers pig face (a totally edible plant), sea purslane with its “lovely tasting“ foliage and Warrigal greens.
At the Jacaranda stage Jerry Coleby-Williams told attendees about his success in turning his 300sqm suburban garden into an “unconventional food forest“ that provided him with food security, year-round fruit and vegetable produce and a surplus of seeds, plants and fruit that he trades for items he doesn’t produce such as jam and eggs.
Jerry said he was not self-sufficient but his food forest was an extension of sustainable living based on science that included maintaining a soil pH between 6.5 and 7 with the addition of required nutrients, and the British Dig for Victory model, used to encourage people to grow their own food during WWII shortages.
Jerry searched the recipes of his favourite vegetarian cookbook and planted most of the basic ingredients he needed to create the dishes.
With only a small space of land his key to success was in planting highly productive crops such as Manning Pride corn, cassava, papaw, plantain and jackfruit and being creative in its cooking. For instance, jackfruit can be eaten raw, dried or after boiling sliced into lasagna sheets and the uncased seeds are rich in protein, he said.
Sauces made from an array of herbs including basil, tarragon, fennel, mint, cinnamon and lemongrass and chillies can alleviate the monotony, he said.
Among the exhibitors at the Kitchen Garden display was Permaculture Noosa and onsite Saturday Noosa councillor Tom Wegener talked to visitors about the importance of sustainable living and the benefits to gardens and the community of using mulch produced from recycled green waste from the Noosa Landfill and Recovery Centre.
Expo manager Marion Beazley said every indication was that the event was a huge success.
“The queues at the gates on Friday morning indicated the appetite for this event and with more people turning to gardening than ever before over the course of the pandemic, the demand for plants, information and all things gardening is at an absolute premium,“ she said.
“The Queensland Garden Expo is somewhat of a gardening reunion for our speakers and exhibitors as they all share a passion for gardening and love getting face-to-face with the public and the end-users of their products.“
The Expo also provided a healthy injection into the local economy.
“The economic impact of this event is estimated to be more than $10 million so we were thrilled that the event was able to be back in full swing this year after Covid restrictions impacted the Expo last year and forced us to cancel the year before,” Ms Beazley said.
For more on the annual event held each July visit qldgardenexpo.com.au
