Costa at the Show

Most Aussies would be familiar with the name 'Costa' when they hear it mentioned. For overseas readers, Costa Georgiadis is a popular presenter on the equally popular TV program 'Gardening Australia' and he is often a guest speaker at various gardening events around the country.  He is currently in our city for a few days to speak at our Toowoomba Royal Show so a friend and I headed out to the showgrounds for his presentation.

 He is a very enthusiastic person and loved getting the children involved. He spoke about the benefits of growing your own veggies and also asked if anyone had heard about the 'Draft review of import conditions for brassicaceous crop seeds for sowing into Australia'. Nobody had so he suggested we read about it as submissions to the government have to be in by 19th April.You might like to read his post on the availability of organic seeds in the future and have your say before it is too late.  It is a bit scary!

 

I believe those plants in the background were only planted five weeks ago and were fertilised with Earthlife products hence the extremely vigorous growth. It seems that they are based here in Toowoomba but do take online orders. I had never heard of them before so it is good to know what is available locally. 

After Costa had finished his first gardening presentation then off he went to the kitchen where his off-sider had been preparing some spinach, feta chees and filo pastry to make up something similar to Hortopita which Paul West cooked recently on Gardening Australia.

 

While Costa was talking and his off-sider was cooking, one of the ladies in the audience mentioned that there was a frog in the ladies' toilets as Costa had previously been talking about having frogs in the garden.

Another lady went off to the toilet and brought it back to Costa and showed him how to identify a girl frog. 

Apparently the show organisers didn't want the frog to go back into the toilets....understandably....

....so after a photo....

...and a quick pretend kiss from Costa the little frog was taken to the lake on the showgrounds to spend the day. Costa  had us in fits of laughter! Then off he went to do another gardening presentation.

By this time he was running behind schedule as Paul West from River Cottage Australia  was waiting to start cooking. Firstly Paul found that the avocados that had been brought for him to use were rock hard so it took quite some time to prepare them. Obviously whoever bought them wasn't a cook :-)

He made a sort of guacamole and had some steak in marinade but when he went to cook the steak I think his off-sider had put the frying pan on the heat and forgotten about it because when Paul poured in the oil to begin cooking the pan went on fire!!! He got that out and then it went on fire again so in the end he smothered it with a tea towel! I kept waiting for that tea towel to go on fire but thankfully it didn't but you can see how it ended up in the photo. It wasn't a good start for him with his first presentation of the show but he really enjoyed himself and had lots of laughs.  Paul is now a guest presenter on Gardening Australia.

We had lunch and then wandered around the showgrounds. We came across some ladies cooking and found that they were part of the Mulberry Project which I had never heard off before.  I had a chat to one of the ladies there and it turned out she was Louise Noble, the founder of the Mulberry Project. Louise explains more about the project in the video Stories for Gathering, Healing and Learning Together: Louise Noble.

I picked up one of their brochures and I am sure Louise wouldn't mind me copying some of the contents here:

The Mulberry Project is a pilot social enterprise based in the Toowoomba Region in Queensland enabling social and economic inclusion through Fair Food production.

We transform underutilised farmland into market gardens to create pathways to training and meaningful employment in the farming and food sectors for disadvantaged communities. Our dream is to rethink settlement by developing a model for social and economic inclusion through sustainable food production across the country.

Email: the mulberry project4360@gmail.com

If anyone in our region would like to help The Mulberry Project they welcome sponsors and tax deductible donations to assist in the upscale of their operations:

• Bore drilling and irrigation equipment

• Small machinery and hand tools

• Soil and water testing and farm planning studies

• Shedding, refrigeration and packing supplies

• Fertilisers, mulches, seed raising medium

• PPE-boots, shirts, hats and gloves
 

I think this is an amazing organisation and it is so good to see many of our migrants meeting together and growing food.

This is one of the dahlias that won a prize in the floral section. We actually have this one growing in our garden too as well as the yellow won that won the Grand Champion prize. Perhaps we should have entered our dahlias :-)

It was all very tiring so we decided we had had enough for the day and wandered off to find where on earth we had parked our cars. I knew I had parked mine under a tree but didn't realise there were so many rows of trees until I tried to find my car. Eventually it appeared amongst the hundreds of cars there and I headed for home in time for a Nanna nap. Ha ha!