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Chill House Mini Farm, Cowes

An urban permaculture experience with some ‘bad bees’

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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!

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • Fruits and nuts include peaches, kiwifruit, bananas, passionfruit, feijoas, Davidson plums, cherry guava, finger lime, pepino and macadamias

  • 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.

Address

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Our supporters

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A heartfelt thank you to Angelica Quiceno and Sharon Willcox for their creative input in crafting the videos, and to the many contributors who provided stunning photos. Special thanks to Sharon Willcox, Krista Mountford, Paul & Fran Kirkpatrick, Catherine Watson, and others for capturing and sharing the essence of our beautiful gardens.

Bass Coast Edible Gardens respectfully acknowledges the traditional Custodians of the land, the Bunurong and Boon Wurrung peoples, We now share and recognise their continuing connection to land, water and community, and we pay our respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.

©2025 by Bass Coast Edible Gardens

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