Chill House Mini Farm, Cowes
An urban permaculture experience with some ‘bad bees’
Veggies 🥦 Fruits 🍋 Nuts 🌰 Bees 🐝 Chickens 🐔
Meet the gardeners and their garden
Paul, the self-proclaimed ‘bad bee’, manages a large number of bee hives, producing honey with the bad bees label as well as flavoured meads. He is also responsible for the food gardens which range over the whole of the front garden, the nature strip and along the north-facing garden beds and pots in this very sunny property. Curl, an artist, has painted the brightly decorated 2-storey north-facing wall, along which grow some plants more suited to tropical climates including a banana palm and passionfruit vines.
Come to see, learn and be inspired!
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Paul has adopted a self-seeding approach to much of the vegetable garden, with the front garden vegetable patches including a wide variety of edibles that have become localised
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As you walk along the front of his unfenced garden, the chooks in their run will come running to be fed; a feeding hatch on the street encourages neighbours to drop off any food scraps for the chickens
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Paul really focuses on building up good soil through a mixture of compost, chicken manure and crops left to provide a green manure cover; the vegetable garden on the nature strip has lovely healthy chocolate soil nourishing an olive tree and many types of leafy greens
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Fruits and nuts include peaches, kiwifruit, bananas, passionfruit, feijoas, Davidson plums, cherry guava, finger lime, pepino and macadamias
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Enjoy tasting some of the flavoured meads or buy some of the free-flowing honey coming from bees in this Cowes garden and also from hives at Ventnor
Parking and accessibility
Parking in the court and adjacent streets. This is a relatively flat garden with a few steps (optional) to walk through the vegetable garden or onto a deck. Please exercise caution around the bee hives.
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