Tilly's Garden

30/05/2026

Check out the awesome fungus that have been popping up around the garden after all that rain 🥰

I love diverse fungi in the garden, it’s shows me I have good soil and that means tastier more nutritious food for the family!

14/05/2026

It was so great speaking at Redlands Organic Growers Inc last night. We covered sufficiency and how to create and track nutrient density in our food crop.

If you haven’t started growing food, now is a perfect time to start.

Easy crops are radishes, lettuce (loose leaf varieties like salad bowl are great for Brisbane) and cherry tomatoes. Best thing is you can interplant them in your garden around other plants. And they grow well in pots so are renter and sunny balcony friendly.

Other great crops to grow is sweet potato, taro, arrowroot and yams. These are fantastic calorie dense crops that do well in Brisbane.
Also peanuts, grow well in pots and grow pretty well most of the year. And are great for cooking oil!

08/05/2026

Well, it’s been 3 weeks since we laid the grass and with a week of desert rain in the second week, it’s grown really well.
So we decided to let the Guinea pigs help trim it down a little, while the shade was tracking across.
This part of our lawn stays in shade until midday in winter months

08/05/2026

So all this material (6 cubic meters of forest mulch and 9 cubic metres of enriched compost) has been delivered and moved over the last week and a bit. CSG Landscape Supplies & Garden Centre has been helpful in keeping us topped up in all our garden needs this month (total of 12m enriched compost, 8m compost fines and 6m of forest mulch has been ordered in this year so far, maybe more to order)
We have topped up all our gardens, as we only managed to produce 1cubic m of our own compost a year so we needed a bit of help.

The 6 m of the forest mulch became the base in our raised beds (fast hugelkulture)
6 m of the compost has been mixed with rock minerals and compost extract and laid into the top of the beds.
And the last 3 m has finished off the side front terraces and filled some of our growbags for our extra fruit trees.

So we didn’t need a gym membership this month to get stronger. Just a few ton of soil

19/04/2026

Just some harvest snaps from this week.
I have to get back into the habit of recording every single harvest for the upcoming permaculture 90m challenge
Hosted by Permaculture Australia and Savour Soil Permaculture

Going back to recording everything I do in my garden from 3rd May 2026 until 2nd May 2027. I will be interesting to compare it to my past records 2022/2023/2024 I didn’t record in 2025 as I had a good sense of my averages and the garden was producing a little more then previous.
Though, I have to make sure I have my information going into my correct spreadsheets 😅
I have one for my garden as a whole, one for the 90m challenge, and one for the zero cost garden too for the 90m challenge. Though the zero cost garden isn’t up to 90m active space yet, it will come the next year. And I will be cool to see the difference.

So I hope I can show case my best harvests of the week, and also share my monthly breakdowns here

17/04/2026

We have our new lawn patch.
4-6 weeks and the ducks, chooks, Guinea pigs and small child wil have grass to play on again. (Not all at the same time 😅)
Brisbane turf supplies (also Brisbane soils) at Capalaba helped us pick varieties based of what requirements we had.
It was tricky with all the different uses we have for the grass area

We went with 2 types, winter green for most of the area, with shade tuff in the area close to the house, as this only gets 3-4hrs sun max in winter.
Wintergreen is also a high fertiliser requirement…and what do we have heaps of?POOP! With the chooks, ducks and Guinea pigs all having use of the space, there will be plenty of nitrogen rich fertiliser going directly in the grass.
Wintergreen is also a good choice as it grows as both runners and also from nodes, so if the chooks get to vigorous with scratching, it can grow back from the root nodes or from the runners.

Our usage plan is to run the chooks from sunrise to breakfast time (about 1-2hrs) each day, except Wednesday’s and Sundays
And the ducks from 4-5pm until sunset, (about 1-2hrs) each day except Wednesday and Sunday
The Guinea pigs will get to go out on the Wednesday and Sunday for grass time in a little movable tractor. After we have hosed the p**p in.

But we have to wait until the grass has established itself before that happens 🥰

15/04/2026

Found a little legless lizard. Well i found a nest, so there was around 5 that I spotted as the rest ducked for cover. Each time i turn the banana leaf mulch pile in the zero cost garden i seem to disturb these little ones.

So this time I am going to leave a small section in place and leave it undisturbed. And I hope they choose that to be their home in future, so I stop disturbing them. (some how I think they will always pick my pile I need to turn)

02/04/2026

Check out Brooks visit to my garden! She’s showcased the space so well.

Can you really homestead on a standard suburban block? Join us as we tour Chantelle’s (Tilly’s) incredible 600sqm suburban homestead, where she has transform...

16/03/2026

How much pollen can these ladies try and cram onto their pollinated pants?

They are full, but they keep trying to add more

16/03/2026

Well, one bunch down, 5 more to go 😅 we will be making and baking lots of banana products in the next few months