Costa's Garden Odyssey

Costa travels to Dromana to show us how we can create beautiful and sustainable gardens from fruit and vegetable plants.

Costa travels to Brisbane to visit the Logan Community Food Garden, a unique place bursting with plants usually only found in Africa, to understand how we can effectively use water in our drought-stricken times. He also solves Cathryn Hopson’s challenge to capture and reuse the weekly 4,000 litres of water that is currently wasted from her home haemodialysis machine and finds out from aquaponics expert Murray Hallam how to grow a barramundi on your balcony.

On a pilgrimage to reconnect with his childhood passion for cherries, Costa visits Young, Australia’s cherry capital, during it’s annual cherry festival and investigates why cherries do so well in the region. While visiting cherry orchards, a biological farm, and a beekeeper who produces alternative health products, he discovers that Young is a real land of opportunity, offering the ideal environment for a range of plants and produce.

The Cowra Japanese Garden is a stunning traditional Japanese Garden built to commemorate the Cowra Breakout. Costa explores the features of this calm and tranquil place to find out how to create a balance between trees, rocks and water to create a tranquil sanctuary – something he incorporates into a suburban makeover. While in Cowra, he also finds out the principles of Shinto farming where growing crops is all about releasing the inherent natural power of soil.

Costa explores the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney, a place that has an extremely long history as a community garden that extends back thousands of years. It was a special place for the local Cadigal people and other Indigenous tribes of the Sydney area as the site was abundant with bush tucker – an important aspect of ceremonies, meetings, and socialising. Taking some inspiration from Royal Botanic Gardens, Costa builds a bush tucker garden at Alexandria Park Community School with the help of some of its pupils.

Costa explores Melbourne’s Kevin Heinze Garden Centre where people with disabilities get their hands in the dirt, do something physical and experience the sensory delights of the space. It’s a space where people can see, hear, touch, smell and taste a variety of plants and flowers. The Maidstone Community Centre also wishes to create this type of garden for their members and Costa transforms their overgrown backyard into a sensory haven where people can interact and connect with nature. It’s a philosophy that the Abbott of the Quang Mihn Buddhist Temple endorses – we need to create harmony and balance between the environment and our use of it which is why the Temple has installed a commercial worm farm to recycle the Temple’s waste.

Costa visits Orange to understand why this region is gaining a reputation for growing some of the finest wines in Australia. Through meeting a biodynamic farmer, an organic produce farmer and sampling the local organic wine, Costa discovers that it’s all due to the rich volcanic soil and the cool climate. Even the humble potato is transformed into a truly amazing veggie!

Costa visits Kinglake, an area that was devastated following Victoria’s 2009 bush fires - many people lost their lives and the community was burnt to the ground. But this is a story of hope and rebirth. Costa visits the Kinglake National Park where some of the world’s tallest and oldest eucalypt trees are regenerating and he also helps to install a community garden for the Kinglake residents. Not far away is Moora Moora, a sustainable co-operative community that is also living with the cycles and forces of Mother Nature.

The northwest corner of Tasmania is known as the Island Isle’s food bowl but it is also home to Australia’s only Topiary Town. The community of Railton has made a feature of these living green sculptures and Costa talks to the locals to learn more about topiary and how to trim shrubs into magical shapes. Costa also visits two boutique farmers who have unlocked the horticultural secrets to growing those difficult delicacies, ginseng and truffles.

Costa travels to Far North Queensland to search for exotic plants in the tropical rainforest and to see how a community garden is helping a group of disadvantaged and migrant kids get a fresh start in life. He also visits a hydroponic herb farm to learn the secrets of growing plants and herbs without soil and how easy this can be done at home.

Costa explores how gardens mean different things to different people. For the members of the Cactus and Succulent Society, these prickly and strange plants are habit forming with some members, like Horst Berger, having close to 1,000 plants. For Rita Kelman, she is passionate about growing fresh, chemical free Asian vegetables and herbs for the city-dwellers while the Mizaan volunteers put their Islamic faith behind a bush regeneration project in Sydney’s south west.

Costa travels to central Victoria to find out what type of plants and gardens can withstand extreme temperatures. He discovers which plants work in a garden that hasn't been watered for eight months; then wades through an aromatic lavender farm. At the other end of the spectrum, weeds also thrive in dry climates and are actually some of the best ingredients for salad.

It’s Costa’s last day at the Tembeleski household where he has transformed their backyard into a sustainable and productive space. Sustainability and waste management are central to Costa’s philosophy that gardens should do more than just grow plants. For the Tembeleskis’s not only do they have fresh eggs, fruit and veggies each day, they’ve also saved money and decreased their carbon footprint. Now all that’s left to do is celebrate!