Blooming and Bold


Without the buzzards and bees

Where would we bee?


A blog by Nicolle Kuna

A blog about sustainable landscaping and some eco-humour and eco-creativity.

Inside this blog we look at everything that is encroaching in to our natural urban landscapes – outdoor rooms (errchkem), weeds, urban noise, excess nutrientsThere’s a bit of art to add extra colour and inspiration. We believe in making sustainability fun - more gaming, less shaming.

Also see website on social marketing for greenies

To contact us – go to the contact us page http://www.converseconserve.com as the contact facility on this blog has been giving us mischief.

Attribution for above garden design goes to

Andrew Jones, talented artist and designer.

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Thursday 11 April 2013

Green vegetables, vitamin K, candida, vegetarian diets and the need for a professional opinion

This blog isn't usually about diets and our eating habits, but as I am on a paleo/anti candida diet for the forseeable future, I thought I should share my experiences detoxing and with the foods I have been avoiding. As one who has had a deep vein thrombosis (DVT) I feel a duty to share what I know, as I could have died, and I do know someone who died from a DVT at a young age. The problem with the internet is we are all saturated with information which we need to go away and digest (pardon the pun!) and should not necessarily assume that the information applies to all of us. At least you can take away from this post a warning for readers to go and get dietary advice before launching blindly in to a new lifelong diet.

As good little greenies and dieters we are constantly being reminded to eat our vegies and our greens - for lunch and dinner, and how for good health, we just can't get enough of them.  Some of these diets recommend having breakfast with eggs and spinach, salads with tuna, and skin free chook with broccoli for dinner.

Well, my experience with eating loads of leafy greens, broccoli raw, soy foods, and spinach salads is that by the next day I feel very sluggish - so going on to vegie detox will usually make my legs feel 'woody' and that I can't move as quickly as usual. In short I feel like rubbish, and it's different from other detox (flu) symptoms, in that I just feel that blood isn't flowing properly in my body. For someone who likes to keep ultra fit, feeling ordinary and sluggish is always something to be avoided.  So the warning here is that some diets are encouraging us to eat high volumes of green vegetables as well as other foods which are high in Vitamin K. But what people don't realise is that these foods are blood coagulating foods, and therefore if we eat amounts that are higher than the recommend daily allowance, we are possibly contributing to blood clotting issues, especially if we lead a sedentary existence, which in turn can lead to a higher incidence of strokes, dangerous blood clotting and heart attacks. That's why professional advice from a dietician or other professional is so important before switching to any new diet.

The last couple of weeks I had forgotten this mantra and had resumed eating the high 'green' diet that I love as you are not allowed to eat the usual range of foods on this diet and you need something to fill you up apart from salads, fish and meat. Having now researched again that three times the daily allowance for vitamin K can be consumed by having as little as one cup of certain vegetables, I have now adjusted my paleo/candida diet and only having one meal of mixed vegetables per day (whereas previously I was having at least two).   I'm sad to say I'm opting to avoid spinach, broccoli, cabbage and stir-fryable greens. Even one cup of coleslaw is around the recommended daily allowance of vitamin K for women which is 90 micrograms. It is around 120 micrograms for men.  Just a few tablespoons of tabouli (made with parsley) will send you right over the allowance recommended. Egad I love coleslaw and tabouli.  So on this diet I'm temporarily staying off most dairy, bread, most fermented foods, deep fried foods, sweets, cakes, most biscuits and so the list goes on, I also have to give up my favourite vegies!

Here's a link which is mostly written for people taking blood thinning medication but really is something every one consuming a high amount of vegies should be aware of and should do further research about.

Saturday 6 April 2013

Green Roof Basics - beginners classes have arrived

Andrew Ioannidis (architect/builder) and I, Nicolle Kuna (Sustainable landscaping consultant) are planning to run Do It Yourself Build a Roof Garden classes for beginners in coming weeks/months depending on the level of interest. We would anticipate having 6-8 people per class, so not a large group.  It's a great time of year to be thinking of planting up a green roof or roof garden (as it's also known) now that the harsh summer has past.

The contact us feature on this blog doesn't seem to be working so it's best to click on to this contact us address connected with the converseconserve website, for those who are interested. The cost of the classes will be around $12 per hour per person, and the workshops will probably run over 4-5 hours on a Saturday, so we will try to keep the cost to about $60 per person.  The aim of the class is for participants to go away with the basics of building a small roof garden, the materials required, where to buy them, and also a step by step approach to practicing building a green roof. The classes will probably be held in Doncaster East, Melbourne.

The trick with building a green roof is to ensure that you build on to a small surface which no one (dear to you!) is going to be sleeping under, owing to the high chance of leakage! Then once you have constructed your first impermeable roofing layer, and tested it out for water-tightness, perhaps have more than one go at it, and only then consider retrofitting a roof which is intended for human habitation.  The intention of these workshops is to get people familiar with the basics of building a practice green roof.


It's a lot of fun, and in fact the one below only cost around $100 including all materials, but we took care of the labour ourselves.  One tip is to consider creating your first small green roof on a low-lying/ fairly ordinary looking structure where the roof will be visible so you can pretty it up with plants.

This blog comes with a serious warning! Before you can even think of building a green roof on to an existing dwelling in Melbourne,  the roof will need to be retrofitted to bear the weight of the media plus equipped with extremely effective waterproofing layers normally constructed by professionals. Therefore beginners are advised to start with a smaller outdoor structure - and in my case my first green roof was built on to a shed, or another option would be to create a green roof over a sturdy garage. Here are some photos from a green roof which we created on the chicken shed, planted up with a variety of sedums, which are ideal for green roof planting in Australia.

This is how two layers looked: the frame encasing the waterproofing layer and drainage layer.





Here is the green roof with the substrate added on top. Then the next photos show us planting up the green roof and shows you a close-up of the sub-strate (consisting of scoria, sand and organic matter).