One of the activities the young people can participate in at A Taste of Paradise Farm is the production of native plants. We plant seeds, often harvested from the local area, then grow the resulting seedling in our hothouse before transferring them to the shade house and finally transferring them to the hardening up area. We are very grateful to community members and groups who contributed in the past to the provision of the hot house, seed bed, shade house and potting shed. These are in constant use and enable us to be more efficient and productive in our plant growing while giving us some shelter to work in hot or rainy conditions.
We work in partnership with Landcare, who purchase some of our native plants for their projects. We also sell them to other buyers and use some of the plants on the farm, especially in our conservation area.
Our volunteers are integral to this activity as the young people are not always available for all the steps of the activity. Our volunteers also mix up our organic seed raising and organic potting mix using our own recipe.
We can utilize the production of native plants as a teaching opportunity for the young people in our environmental program. This program also includes the construction and placing of bird, bat and possum boxes, which the young people help us build. Some of the native plants are grown as bush tucker too. This makes for an interesting food tasting experience for those game enough to try something unfamiliar.
