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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Sunday 24 November 2013

Metaphors for Nature

Nature is always making a come back ... 

Ahh, the importance of language, and how we express our green messages, so I'm trying to be poetic or a little metaphorical in my gardening gabbling, as it's still spring for a few more days and with sore wrist in hand (pardon the pun), one needs some inspiration to get back in the back garden and level it before laying pavers etc. 

What living system can survive without its protection from the sun, its moisture retention, its detoxification, and its food and vitamins.  

We can preach the concept of mulch as the garden’s moisturiser.  

The canopies are the sun-hats for the shade loving plants and local residents which help keep the urban heat island at bay.

The sediment control measures are the detox tablets (keeping the drains and ground water free of contaminants). 

The organic fertiliser and compost are the food and the vitamins!

The drought loving plants are like botanic camels, in their water storing splendour ..... 

Saturday 12 October 2013

Where did the scarecrows go - the future of farming ...

Lately, I haven't been blogging on here much as my spare time has been dedicated to developing a sustainability education page for creative pursuits to get school students fired up and emotionally energised about sustainability, on my converse conserve website.  The Australian Education Magazine should be publishing an interview with me shortly, on this. 

I have written a couple of articles for Urban Times and like to tweet about their articles from time to time. 

Urban Times is a magazine based in the U.K for optimistic and forward thinking in relation to society generally and looking after our planet. They obviously have huge competitors like Grist and Tree Hugger, just to name two, so I like to support them. 

Here is a really interesting article which is all about planting up indoors, and I think it's extremely well researched and written. Well done, Tess! Interesting comment that hydroponics isn't regarded as organic because no soil is involved.  That's crazy!  We can certainly think about the inputs, as well as outputs with regard to hydroponics, as they don't use passive solar, hydration from nature. But with planting slated to be moved indoors more and more, and broad scale farming the prevailing means to generating our produce in the western world, I don't see scarecrows returning to the rural landscape, very soon.

Tuesday 20 August 2013

Urban Noise - Animals are cursing (like) us more than we think!

Birds mating. 
I am attaching a link to an article from 'cracked.com' which isn't about gardening, unless of course you are in the habit of cursing the weeds that are hurting your daphnes and delphiniums .... to err. damnation, (Oh, ... be gone you accursed blackberry bush!) or what have you.

However, I think it's a very interesting article about where our habitats are going, but for those more faint-hearted, do be warned that here you will find some birds swearing - after all an article about swearing has to have some expletives uttered!!

http://www.cracked.com/article_19608_the-6-weirdest-ways-wild-animals-are-having-to-adapt-to-us.html

What is really worrying is that urban sirens, traffic and other noises are making it difficult for birds to make their mating calls, and other cries heard, and the birds are choosing to move away from urban centres in some cases, and as this is a very quick post, I haven't yet had the time to explore this phenomenon in more detail. (What I do find interesting about cracked.com is that its articles use popular language and  humour to expose the naked harsh truths in a clever way that will interest the audience. Sometimes we need to make light of something a little, to drive something home from the head to the heart, as I say on my website converse conserve.com).

The cartoons are great, and I am a real fan of green cartoons as my other website avows.

On the topic of birds mimicking, I once watched a great programme covering birds in the Australian bush and the aussie lyre birds' ability to mimick the sound of car alarm being activated (ga-blip), the sound of a motorised saw, and all manner of other bird calls, etc was astounding!

Tuesday 23 July 2013

Eat More Organic! Four Corners TV programme .. on Dioxins, dangerous chemical crop spraying, in Australia ...

Am watching a vitally important programme on 4 Corners about chemical 2,4-D and its effects on health, our crops and the astounding fact that this well-known dioxin is still being sprayed as a herbicide and I believe as a pesticide in Australia.  Many of us were wrongly of the belief that dioxins had been banned long ago, in this country. Not so, it seems.

The point of the programme is that unsafe chemicals are still being used within our environment without our realising and that we are continuing to imbibe them whether through breathing the air, eating produce grown near where they've been distributed, drinking water seeping through from contaminated groundwater or directly by the people spraying the chemicals and their families who are then exposed to the chemicals as well.

Ten kilometres of chemical drift are occurring on to market gardening properties affecting the sex of the crops, causing two cobs to form and other types of plant deformities. When flowers and fruit form this is a particularly volatile time of impact.

One company had announced it was going to review the use of the chemical back in 1995 but as still taking action on the matter 11 years later.  The stories of Australian men back in the 1970s spraying  both 2,4-D and agent orange (that was banned) on to crops and weeds without protective masks, footwear and clothing who are deceased or dying from dioxin poisoning still all theses decades later are horribly shocking but must be seen, to convince us of the power of the chemicals industry and how we are still today so compliant in their every day administration.

Am watching this programme whilst typing, therefore some details need to be verified by watching the programme back on I View (given that I'm typing this in somewhat of a hurry).

http://www.abc.net.au/iview/?series=2303988#/series/2303988.

One really insidious aspect is the lack of information about the source of 2,4-D and insufficient testing and regulation abut the presence of dioxin, and the fact that toxicity can be minimised with enough care and attention.  What is astonishing is that the substances supplied by China, and being tested by 4 Corners representatives are allegedly of higher toxicity levels than were being used 20 years ago!

Go to the ABC - 4 Corners link above to watch back this compelling and shocking story.

If this is not sufficient food for thought to get more of us growing our own, or eating organic food, I don't know what is.

Monday 1 July 2013

At CERES making sustainability fun

T'was a gorgeous mid winter day at CERES today, (for those who don't know it's the local centre for energy research and environmental studies) having lunch with some people.  I learned it's possible to get sun-burnt even in the winter. My friend was clever enough to remember the sunscreen but not I. Was reminded that I must post another blog on to my bloomingandbold blogspot, as it's been a while!

Learning welsh, work,  plus house maintenance (an 80 year old house does keep you occupied keeping everything opening and shutting) plus family commitments mean that one has to scratch a few extra minutes to write on my Converse Conserve.com website and of course here.  Having a firm interest in the ways we share our green messages, I was reading the Age and discovered a band who are off to the Glastonbury festival, who refer to themselves as Eco Minstrels.

They are called the Formidable Vegetable Sound System  (see You tube video) and theirs is a very unique way of promoting permaculture in the form of vegie growing antics, swing, acid jazz and funk.  They speak about their sound and presentation as yet another way of making sustainability fun.  And I think it works! Speaking of home grown produce, tried some persimmons today from a friend's garden - they are very tasty but leave a strange sensation in the mouth.



Thursday 23 May 2013

Bee Sustainable

As my opening lines on this blog are .... without the buzzards and bees where would we all bee .... seems fitting to mention this great shop in 500 Lygon St Brunswick East. called Bee Sustainable, owned by Robert Redpath.

Stocks all manner of bee keeping equipment, products of the hive including a wide array of honeys,  and equipment for domestic food production, plus a plethora of home sustainability books, and gifts. With all the aromatherapy oils in home made soap, and the scent of the beeswax candles you feel like you've left the Garden of Eden, as you exit. They also run workshops concerned with domestic sustainability such as the art of bee keeping, and sourdough bread making.

At that top end of Lygon St precinct there are other seemingly top establishments concerned with sustainability including a couple of organic grocers, a yoga lab, and a vegan meals destination - Vege To Go, Melbourne Food Ingredient depot, plus a vintage bazaar. This strip of shops would rival other shopping strips for having the most shopping options concerned with sustainability, by a long shot!

Best in Show Chelsea Garden Show - Well Done Australian representatives!

Been a while since I posted anything on here.

Congrats are in order for Wes Fleming, and Phillip Johnson who I had the pleasure of meeting at one of our site visits (as part of my Sustainable Landscaping course) on their immense win at the Chelsea Garden show - Best in Show recently.

I remember hearing Wes Fleming on the radio being interviewed and they seemed to be putting weeks of work in to the installations of a garden that is effectively a billabong.

The footage I saw on the above link and at Google Images for the Best In Show garden look interesting - but don't seem to do full justice to the details of the garden itself - they probably need to show more photographs so that the public can fully appreciate the native garden aspects (I believe Western Australian natives were used) and wild-flowers which create wonderful pollination plants. I'm hankering for a close up of the wildflowers.

I take it the boulders are in true Phillip Johnson style going to be reused so that fresh froggy habitats may be created in new locations - but we all need to be mindful of the carbon footprint in transporting these huge boulders.



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). 










Sunday 24 March 2013

March Mayhem pests and weeds

Egad, with our Eco Creative Exhibition last month, and working hours extending, it's been remiss of me to leave this blog a little bit unattended for well over a month! I am spending what spare time I have on my other website converseconserve.com and learning of all things WELSH! It's a beautiful language, and I just seem to have an affinity with this culture, the people, and their love of excessive uses of consonants (d, w in particular), and sing-songy, tongue-twistery way of expressing themselves. It's no surprise that this country is famous for singing, poetry and performance competitions in the form of the Eisteddfods. (Hope I spelt that right, with the right number of consonants, and not too many vowells!)

Have been doing some scouring of the internet to find groups who are active on environmental weeds in Melbourne and haven't really stumbled on anything specific. There are groups that are active on the outskirts of the urban corridor, and in terms of our green wedges, but am eager to join up with people active in relation to suburban weeds. I am on the Futures' Committee of Sustainable Gardening Australia but haven't really wanted to admit to my own ignorance on this point about local networks. There are produce gardening groups galore, but weeds seems to be less of a focus group topic. I have now girded my loins and written an email to the President asking for his help.

Speaking of SGA, here is a page from their section on 'pests and diseases' written by the talented Helen Tuton. Very funny way of combining information with a jocular style of writing. Their Footprint Flicks videos are well worth a viewing.  This is eco-creativity to the max! I have a philoteca that is not doing well, and am afraid I will have to pull it out, so will need to bone up on my diseases knowledge more. With record summer temperatures all March long, am looking forward to get back in the garden and start planning some very resilient plants which I will mention in coming blogs.  So far I have some grevilleas, a leptospermum continentale, ficinia nodosas, and some woollly bushes (adenanthos sericeus) which are divine.




Tuesday 12 February 2013

Nature Strip planting mindfulness


Noticing where I live more people are planting up their nature strips (they might be called verge gardens also), well ... we call them nature strips in Australia. We are using these strips as a place to get down and a little dirty (or not) and becoming very mindful about how we use these spaces.

The nature strip for those reading from overseas, is the kerbed area between your house and the footpath (or sidewalk) that is usually green but in many cases is becoming a rainbow mix, with shrubs, grasses, vegies, fruit trees, herbaceous perennials, etc.  In Australia we are lucky to have so much space, that many of us have front lawns, and gardens, unless of course we live in flats or units or built up areas.


Well, there are a few design and sustainability issues that need to be remembered with planting up your verge or nature strip: hmm .... well don't many of us forget that lawns sequester carbon emissions.  Yes, they do! So we can expend energy on mowing them (I personally persist with an old hand mower), and if you plant a slow growing lawn, on balance the lawn will kick in more of a carbon sink than you think!

So think about what lawn you are going to have (how thirsty, how durable, how fast growing) and if ever in doubt ask the people at your local nursery.

Secondly, if you are going to have a verge planted up with shrubs -  be mindful about maximum height. Shrubs on a nature strip can cause vision hazards. Ideally they shouldn't get much taller than a metre, for any taller than this, they can be a bit tricky to see over when backing out on to the roadway.  An ideal plant in Australia is the  spreading wattle with bright green foliage - Acacia cognata mini cog and smallish grevillea shrubs.

Thirdly, another matter to remember is the mulch that you put down on your nature strip, assuming you are planting it up, can end up in the drains, as can the soil (if you don't use mulch). Now some people don't realise that the organic matter (along with all the other stuff: hydrocarbons, fertilisers, pathogens) we allow to filch in to our drains can cause an imbalance as it ends up in our waterways, as the aerobic - anaerobic what za doodles get all out of whack.  I didn't do well at biology so readers might like to go away and research this. It has a lot to do with the plants and aquatic species getting the incorrect amount of oxygen, because there is a build-up of toxins in the water. Take it from those who did a sustainable landscape design diploma - to prove to herself she isn't a biological dunces - that it doth matter what we putteth down our draineth. Those readers who did actually get a pass for biology, and any other design matters, please do feel free to add your comment.

So this is yet another reason why I extol the virtues of maintaining a lawn and using a manual mower on the nature strip.  Because there is less organics getting blown and washed away.  Lawns are very nifty when it comes to keeping the substrate all nicely tucked in. If you do plant up the nature strip, we do recommend the mulch be sourced from a reclaimed timber industry source, but the mulch will have to be replenished from time to time.






This is where the produce is left for neighbours to share! Fantastic!
One design tip - is to plant up the nature strip fully so that there is less chance of organics being distributed on to the road and in to drains. You will need a more built up area for where you pass to get in to your car (pavers, gravel etc), and park the rubbish bins etc. Why not have a book exchange box or share your vegies box on your nature strip, too!
Book exchange box several suburbs away 

We also need to be mindful ( we learnt to be perpetually and perennially mindful in our sustainable landscaing diploma) about weeds self-seeding along our verges and front gardens .... don't get me started on Aganpanthus praecox subspecies! Plants are like children; it pays to do a head count every now and then!

Oh and I almost forgot to add that you will probably have to register your intention to 'refurbish' your nature strip with your local council or municipal government authority, as the case may be, as the nature strip is really public property.

Here's two little rhyming sequences from a while back to compensate for this being a very all over the place blogpost, and because a few of us are gearing up for the Get Eco-Creative Exhibition at the Sustainable Living Festival coming up in Melbourne, here is one attempt at eco-creativity to tempt you, to come along.


Remember our platypuses
Think of our cranes, 
Take care with the slop
You put down your drains!


Ahh, drains, how do I love thee
Let me count all the types
Let us count the wildlife
At the end of our pipes ....


Tuesday 29 January 2013

Weeds are boring and the media don't seem to be interested


  1. There is a glitch in this post and I don't know why paragraph numbers are appearing! So to keep it consistent will now keep it numbered! Very odd. 
  2. Well, as one travels around Melbourne, one sees a lot of weeds which are not being dead-headed, pulled out, dealt with by more benign weed-killers etc'. This leads to invasive species encroaching on the plants that were often providing food for birds, and pollination for insects and birds. Effects on bio-diversity are all pretty obvious to the reader, I would think. 
  3. Stumbled on this campaign media alert in Tasmania (Tamar Natural Resource Management) where the aim is to make weeds sexy. This is totally apt, as in our busy, multi-tasking lives one isn't going to be so interested in a stray tree or shrub which has popped up in the wrong place. So I though in order to draw attention to weeds, there will need to be something that surprises or intrigues us.  
  4. The lack of communication on weeds is a grandiose problem.  The problem is partly a lack of knowledge on the part of members of the public, but also the fact that people lack time to investigate which plants are a menace and which ones aren't. I have tried writing to the local media and they just don't seem to be interested.  So an idea came to me that these weeds need to be tagged in some way. It sprung to mind that there would be stickers or streamers that are visible by day and glow at night (preferably biodegradable ones) or removable pegs which would alert people in cities to their weedy status. The name for the campaign could be Code Name - 'Little Weed' a little bit inspired by the character in the Flower Pot Men children's show for those old enough to remember.  Ironically we need to make the object of our eradication campaign likeable, cute, or a little bit glamorous to draw attention to the fact it needs to be eliminated. I wonder if there are any groups doing this - time to investigate.
My interest in making our environmental campaigns a little bit creative and inventive is discussed on my other website Converse Conserve.com.  We have an Exhibition coming up later in February, as part of the Sustainable Living Festival, which is a topic on the left-hand drop down bar.

Wednesday 2 January 2013

Agapanthus Aggression

Now you may be a fan of electric blue - but the writer of this blog certainly is not.  The highly weedy Agies (agapanthus praecox spp orientalis) of the blue or white variety for years now have been popping up all over the place publicly speaking and also making a bee-line for your backyard.  Be mindful there is the much daintier variety that is not weedy that you can buy from the nursery, but the ones I'm talking about are tall plants and very invasive little trouble-makers.

This is my annual reminder to people to watch for those sprouting little blighters which take over in no uncertain terms and are wreaking havoc where native plants should be thriving.  For a long time they have been converging on your road verges, nature strips, native planting plots and,  it is getting to that time of year where the seeds are going to set themselves adrift along all manner of locations across Melbourne and coastal Victoria and replant themselves.

So the trick is to dead head them, well before the end of the flowering season. (I say, jump on the plant and give it a damn good thrashing, but I'm a touch biased. The plant can be tricky to pull out, as I found out on a landscaping job last summer. )

Here is a picture of what they look like sprouting up as a very young plant, and this is the time to remove them.



And here it is as a full blown flower in its crowning glory, but looks are deceiving!