From little things, big ideas grow. When Gerard was growing up, he loved watching his father in the garden. When he had the opportunity to have his own garden, he jumped at the chance. It was1984, and he and and his new wife, Sue, moved into a rented unit in Blackburn. Gerard loved relaxing and pottering around in the garden. He got cuttings of fushias and away he went, But he really wanted to grow vegetables. The soil was not good, and being a rental, he felt he shouldn’t destroy the backyard. So Gerard got creative.
He bought the best soil, the fertiliser the guy at the nursery told him he needed and lots of vegetable seedlings. He managed to use his charm to get a stack of plastic buckets (“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know”-.one of Gerard’s favourite sayings) at no cost and the rest is history. Ugly as it looked, the harvest was good and the hounds- Pindara and Tuppence- couldn’t reach the delicious smelling soil to dig the plants out.
Gerard’s creativity in the garden began there in Blackburn and has grown into the fabulous Food Forest project at VASS