THE Sydney media has been having a field day making fun of Lord Mayor Clover Moore’s latest crazy scheme of setting up a community farm in the middle of the city complete with fruit trees, vegetable gardens, chicken hutches, stingless bees and a bee hotel.
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Her council has set aside $1.65 million to get the venture going that she predicts will provide safe, affordable and accessible food as well as having educational, cultural and social values.
But, hey, the yuppies’ farm mightn’t be as silly as it seems and Orange could get in on the act and turn our garden beds into community vegetable gardens.
We’ve got lots of suitable land that’s going to waste.
What about the roundabouts for starters?
The council could rip out all those flowers and shrubs that block your vision and instead plant lettuces, cauliflowers, carrots and spring onions.
Cook Park is highly suitable to run chickens while the car parks like Woolworths, K-mart and Summer Centre could be turned into revenue raisers with cabbage, corn, pumpkin and celery plots.
The old C F Williams building in Peisley St bought by the council is a ready-made greenhouse to grow herbs, tomatoes, capsicums, cucumbers and eggplants.
That’s a far better idea than just sitting there empty.
And there’s dozens of kilometres of grass verges in the front of houses that could be used to plant things like spuds, corn and spinach.
So Old McClover’s Farm idea could be a winner here.
IT’S that time again when the State of Origin takes over our lives for a few weeks, but is it really state against state?
It’s supposed to be NSW versus Queensland yet the Queensland team comprises four players who come from Victoria, four from NSW, one from Canberra and one from New Zealand.
The NSW team has one player from Queensland and one from New Zealand.
The Queensland captain comes from Victoria while a jersey sponsor for NSW is the Victorian beer VB.
And one of this year’s games will be played in Melbourne.
State versus state, they say.
ROADS Minister Duncan Gay says the government won’t turn on its average speed cameras to sting cars as well as trucks and that’s good news.
The cameras are springing up everywhere thicker than trees, and there’s no doubt they’ll eventually be used on cars, making a trip sort of like a timed rally where you have to average a certain speed over a distance.
The cameras work by measuring the time it takes to drive between two points and then calculating the average speed of the vehicle. If that’s higher than the speed limit for the length of road, the driver will cop a bluey in the mail for speeding.
But, taking the cameras just out of Bathurst between Raglan and Meadow Flat on the Great Western Highway as an example, 30 seconds is the difference between being booked for speeding or getting through on time.
The cameras are about 25km apart and with an average of 100km/h, which is the speed limit on that section of road, the time allowed would be 15 minutes.
If your elapsed time is only 30 seconds quicker, taking 14 minutes 30 seconds, your average speed jumps up to nearly 104km/h and you’re busted.
Cover the distance 30 seconds slower in 15 minutes 30 seconds and your average drops back to a smidgen over 96km/h, meaning you’re safe. Sixty seconds slower and your average drops to 94k/mh.
So if these fool things are switched on to cars, can you imagine heading off to Sydney with a clipboard and stopwatch or maybe a rally computer to make sure you don’t bust your average speed.
ORANGE grandparents are well and truly into the new trend of having their grandchildren call them by cooler names.
Grandma and grandpa apparently are old hat so they’re happier with names the kids come up with like Mim, G-ma, Grammy, Grams, Wampa, Ne-ma, Mu Mu, Mamey and Pippa.
Oma and Opa, Nonna and Nonno and YiaYia and Papu are also popular but are names grandparents have selected themselves.
Some grandparents believe the names grandma and grandpa make them feel too old.
THE Sunday Telegraph this week ran what it billed as an ‘exclusive’ on the popularity of people eating insects.
Ho hum. You read that in this column back on January 22 when it was suggested the likes of chilli crickets, battered beetles, fried locusts, fromage frais cockroaches and caterpillar pate would be a hit for Orange Food Week.
Exclusive? Could have fooled us.
WHAT do you Orange gardeners do with snails you find chomping away on your favourite plants?
If you’re like lots of gardeners, you’ll hoick them over your neighbour’s fence, according to a horticultural society poll.
It’s not very neighbourly but 22 per cent of gardeners polled admitted to getting rid of snails that way.
Another 30 per cent said they had thrown them over the fence in the past.
Tch tch.
A KANGAROO walks into a bar and orders a beer.
The barman pulls one and says: “That will be $8 please. By the way we don’t get many kangaroos in here.”
The kangaroo: “At $8 a beer, it’s not surprising.”