Volunteers have created two gardens filled with fruit and vegetables.

Gardeners are volunteers from within the UOW community.

The group meet on Fridays at 1pm to plant, weed, water and harvest.

The garden is bursting with oranges, limes, strawberries, tomatoes, b...

Garden gets (green) thumbs up

The fruits of volunteer labour were on show this week when students and staff celebrated the opening of a patio garden filled with delicious delights.

The garden is made up of six individual raised corrugated iron beds and two wine barrel beds filled with limes, oranges, strawberries, blueberries, leafy greens, tomatoes, beans and herbs.

Located on the patio of the Creative Arts building (building 25), the garden was created by a group from the Happy Bellies Food Co-op, the Enviro Collective as well as staff from the Faculty of Creative Arts, Faculty of Education and Environmental and Sustainability Initiatives (ESI) Unit.

David Toll, from the Faculty of Creative Arts, spoke of how the community garden has reinvigorated what was previously an under-utilised space.

“The Faculty is looking forward to seeing more people visiting and enjoying the area in the future,” he said.

The group have also created a second garden space between the Creative Arts and Education Faculty buildings which contains three no-dig garden beds planted out with pumpkins, cucumber, tomatoes, herbs, artichokes, beetroot, mint and chives.

The resources to set up the gardens were provided by the ESI unit and Faculty of Creative Arts.

The gardeners meet every Friday at 1pm for an hour of planting, weeding, watering and harvesting. They recently held their first food swap where people brought along excess produce from their home gardens and swapped them for the produce grown by others.

Environmental Project Officer Alexandra McPaul said she was pleased to see the enthusiastic participation of the university community in the initiative.

“It’s two months since the first working bee in the garden. We all love spending time getting out at lunch and getting our hands dirty in the veggie patch and are very excited about growing our community here at UOW,” she said.

“Everyone is welcome to become involved in the garden and share its produce.”