With both warm and cool days and the amount of rain we've had lately the army of snails, slugs, earwigs, slaters and their hungry friends on the march and they're probably headed right to your seedlings and growing vegies! You don't need to use harmful synthetic chemical pesticides, in fact our Growers are required to sign a Growers' Charter which can be found HERE to agree that they will not use synthetic pesticides in the production of the food grown for Grow Lightly. So ho

I recently visited Garry, a local Grower in Loch who kindly gave me a tour of his vegie patch and as we wandered up and down the rows, he gave a tour describing what he was growing at the moment and his plans for future crops. We enjoyed talking about growing different varieties, success from past seasonal crops, the local growing conditions, rainfall, gum trees and their impact on different neighbouring plants, and all the different flavours of citrus fruit he has. Speaking

Apples are an abundant autumnal seasonal food, some varieties can be grown throughout different times of year but for the majority of varieties, the fruit is harvested in Autumn. One way of ensuring your abundance doesn't get wasted is to first protect the crop from birds and insect pests like coddling moth, and once harvested, to use safe food preservation methods, such as dehydrating. Julie recently shared these photos, dehydrating the beautiful Red love Apples. Dehydrating

Those that attended the Foster Agricultural Show back on the 28th February and took home a kit from the Bass Coast South Gippsland Food System Alliance to conduct the citizen science project for Healthy Soil, Healthy People initiative called, "SOIL YOUR UNDIES" will be almost ready to start digging up their undies to see the results, make sure to post a photo of your results to the Cotton Info Map, found via this link HERE . Did your soil eat away at the cotton undies and alm

Chestnuts can be a lot of work to prepare if you don't know the easy air fryer method! Chestnut season begins in April and peaks in May in South Gippsland, our region has many large established trees dotted along the fence lines of paddocks and in people's gardens. Chestnuts have a spiky outer shell, which needs to be removed, and around 2 or 3 nuts can be found inside each one. Use gloves, garden tools or even your shoe to help to separate them from their spiky chambers. Sto

Fertiliser is a hot topic at the moment, with the many situations in the world and some of the Aussie farmers saying they're expecting to reduce their crops by up to 40%-60% this season due to rising fuel and fertiliser costs, it's the perfect time to be proactive and start growing, or grow more of your own food for you and your family, and selling to your community, through local enterprises like Grow Lightly. One of the simplest ways to make a zero cost or low cost fertilis

Recently a member of the Korumburra Permaculture group showed the group around her property (we'll call her M) with a key focus on worm farming and the methods she uses. In a beautiful greenhouse, in South Gippsland, is a haven for worms. The best worm restaurant in town! Because M doesn't just feed her worms any old scraps from the kitchen, she's set up an insinkerator that she travelled to Melbourne to buy, in her greenhouse to create a special wet food pulp for her worms,

Worms are one of the most important creatures in our soil and gardens, not only do they eat organic material such as old fallen leaves and turn them into new soil, they add air and fluff up the soil as they move around in it, creating a healthier, and better environment for their microbe friends who also live in the soil. Recently we discovered a new Melbourne based company called Wormly , who make worm hotels for small and large gardens. With sustainability in mind, their mi

Grow Lightly founder Gil Freeman sadly passed away after a short illness. We are very sad to share this news with our community, we are taking this time to reflect on the positive changes Gil made to our community and the moments we shared together. We are proud to have known him and honoured to continue his legacy. We pass on this message from Gil's family as published in The Age - Obituaries: On the 25th of March, we lost our beloved husband, father, father-in-law, grandfat

Grower Site Visit- Dumbalk On Sunday 29th March, Grow Lightly hosted a sold out event, a site visit to Julie's property in Dumbalk to see how she grows fruit and vegetables which are available in the Grow Lightly weekly online shop; And at the monthly Farmer's Market stall held at Coal Creek on the 2nd Saturday of each month where Julie and the team sell directly to Grow Lightly customers. Julie moved to the property in late 2020, the site was very overgrown and only a few es

Locals sometimes ask us about our produce, and the organic status of the items available. We've been asked "how do you know it's organic though?", or "what about people using chemicals and sprays?", to that we can refer them to the implementation of our Growers' Charter which can be found over on our website, link HERE. To become a Grower or Producer for Grow Lightly, a Growers' Charter must be signed and followed. All growers of fresh produce for Grow Lightly are committed t

Grow Lightly has long been known to support the use of sustainable packaging in our processes, which for us means finding alternatives to using single use plastics whenever possible. We pack our orders in cardboard boxes and paper or re-useable bags, these can be returned to Grow Lightly for re-use, just tear off your order label. Order labels are printed on paper, which can be recycled or added to your worm farm or compost bin. Many of our orders contain bunches of small pr

The BCSGFSA has four projects currently being developed, rolled out and underway and one of which being "The Mobile Grocer" , project managed by Grow Lightly and the Food System Alliance team. VicHealth awarded the Alliance grant funding to undertake the four proposed projects over a 3 year period. The second hand electric van was gifted for this project by a generous donor. The "Mobile Grocer" is an electric van that will be utilised to take locally grown Certified Organ

The Bass Coast South Gippsland Food System Alliance attended the Bass Coast Sustainability Festival hosted by Bass Coast Shire Council last weekend, to showcase the "Mobile Grocer" electric van and continue the launch of the #SoilYourUndies project for our Healthy Soils Healthy People initiative. Thank you to everyone who attended and for those not able to attend on the day we hope you enjoy this recap as a way of promoting inclusivity in capturing the event. check out the

Korumburra recently hosted the annual Garlic Festival once again and with the last of the warm summer weather, visitors enjoyed all that was on offer for the festival, some brave enough to try popsicle ice creams flavoured with black garlic, either loving or loathing the taste. A highlight of the festival was a presentation at "The Garlic University" by Vele Civijovski from Garlic Kingdom which is located in the Cooma area of NSW with his presentation called " A starters gu

If you're interested in growing great fruit and veggies then you should be interested in growing healthy soil too! To find out the composition of your soil, a simple Soil Jar Test is a great way to learn what percentages of materials make up your soil, what the composition of these is referred to and how to then improve your soil or at least work with what you have in the meantime. Give it a go and let us know in the comments what kind of soil you have!

One of the exhibitors attending the Foster Agricultural Show was the local Nyora seed company Atlantic Seeds. If you're keen to grow... and grow... and grow, then you might be interested in checking out their website HERE.

Grow Lightly attended the Foster Agricultural Show with partners of the Bass Coast Food System Alliance on 28th February 2026. The BCSGFSA team held a stall along the "Beeline", a free family friendly showbag treasure hunt. The event was the launch date of the Healthy Soil, Healthy People's citizen scientist project called "Soil Your Undies" and kits with instructions were made available to those who attended and wanted to learn about soil health and perform the experiment in

Soil your undies! CottonInfo's soil health initiative has a video over on YouTube to explain the project and how you can test your soil. Click the LINK HERE to be re-directed to the video.

Launching the BCSGFSA Healthy Soil, Healthy People, citizen science project “Soil your undies”. The Bass Coast South Gippsland Food System Alliance (BCSGFSA) team launched a citizen science project called “Soil your undies” at the Foster show on the 28th March 2026. The experiment will help to test how active and healthy your soil is, and work on how to improve it, if your results show that it is inactive and needs some work to help feed those wriggly worms and organisms.