Karana Downs and Surrounds Community Garden Hub Inc

03/06/2026

The Community Garden are looking for donations of unused worm farms.
Unfortunately ours have been stolen and we are looking to replace them in a secure area.
Please message us to arrange donation
We greatly appreciate community support🌱

18/05/2026

Hi All, we will shortly be having an undercover area to sit and have tea, there are lots more improvements we need eg toilets, better parking etc, please drop us a line and let us know what you would like to see happening at your community garden.

18/05/2026

You can tell a lot about a suburb by the little things people do for each other 🌱

Not the shopping centres or the fancy entrances. I mean the real community stuff.

That’s the kind of stuff that actually makes a place feel alive.

Ipswich is full of these little people-powered community assets that often fly under the radar, and honestly they deserve more attention.

So I’m curious

📍 What suburb are you in?

📚 Do you have a street library nearby?

🍯 Someone selling local honey or eggs from their yard?

🪴 Free plants or cuttings?

🥬 A community garden or veggie patch?

🌻 A neighbour doing something wholesome for the community?

Drop them in the comments and photos welcome too.

Would be awesome to build a big list of all the good little community things happening around Ipswich ❤️

04/05/2026

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=122108203838692692&id=61570780787506

Headline: We’ve Normalised Dead Space. That’s the Weird Part. 🌿

Most of us think we know what a “normal”street looks like. Short grass. A couple of trees (if you’re lucky). Maybe the odd bird.

Seems fine.
But here’s the thing, If you dropped someone from 50 years ago into that same street, they’d probably think something was wrong.

And they wouldn’t be imagining it. Across the Ipswich region, large-scale clearing and fragmentation of native habitat has reshaped what survives here.

Ipswich still holds over 2,000 recorded native plant and animal species, but much of this is now concentrated in fragmented pockets of habitat rather than continuous landscape.

Roughly only ~62% of the city retains vegetation cover, with the rest heavily modified or cleared.

Queensland as a whole continues to clear hundreds of thousands of hectares of woody vegetation annually, ranking it among the highest rates in Australia

That change doesn’t announce itself. It just removes things quietly. Fewer insects in the lights at night. Fewer ground birds moving through grass. Fewer reptiles on warm concrete edges.

Not extinct in a headline sense. Just gone from here.

Species under pressure or locally absent in parts of this region now include animals like:

Koalas (now reliant on fragmented habitat corridors)

Greater gliders (highly sensitive to canopy loss)

Powerful owls (needing large hunting territories)

Brush-tailed rock wallabies (restricted to isolated escarpments)

These aren’t rare “museum species.”

They were part of the everyday landscape not long ago. And because it all happened slowly…
we stopped noticing.

That’s how it works. Every empty verge. Every patch of sterile lawn.

It all reinforces the idea that this is just how things are. But it’s not. We’ve just normalised dead space.

And the easiest way to prove that?
Change one strip.
Not your whole yard. Not a full makeover

Just the verge.
Add a few natives. Let it loosen up a bit.
Give it time, and watch what comes back.
Because once you see life return to a space that used to do nothing, you start noticing how much of it we’ve accepted as “normal.”

03/05/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1CKUD8CJ92/?mibextid=wwXIfr

This was here before your street existed.

The Grass Tree (Xanthorrhoea johnsonii) doesn’t look like something that belongs in a suburban verge.

That’s because it doesn’t.

It belongs to a much older landscape. With its blackened trunk and exploding crown of leaves, it carries a prehistoric presence, like a living relic from a time before roads, fences, and housing estates.

Some specimens grow so slowly that their height can reflect decades, sometimes centuries of life.

This isn’t just a plant.
It’s time, made visible.

For thousands of years, Grass Trees have held deep cultural significance for Aboriginal peoples.

They’ve been used for resin, tools, and fire shaped by and responding to the Australian landscape in ways most suburban environments have long forgotten.

They’re not just native.

They’re indigenous to this place, part of a story that predates everything built around them.

Today, Grass Trees are recognised as one of Australia’s most iconic and globally unique plants. They don’t exist naturally anywhere else on Earth.

And because of past overharvesting and their extremely slow growth, they are now protected in the wild, a reminder that something so resilient can still be vulnerable.

When they flower, they send up a towering spear that becomes a magnet for life:

Native bees and pollinators

Beetles and insects

Nectar-feeding birds like honeyeaters

Even the dense skirt at their base creates shelter for small creatures, rebuilding the kind of habitat that’s largely disappeared from suburban spaces.

A verge will never be untouched bushland.

But it doesn’t have to be empty. Sometimes, a single plant like this can change how a space feels, not just greener, but older, deeper, more connected to what was always here.

⚠️ Disclaimer (read before planting):

Grass Trees are extremely slow-growing (growth measured in decades)

Always source from licensed, reputable growers, wild collection is illegal and harmful

Require excellent drainage (heavy Ipswich clay soils may need preparation)

Sensitive to disturbance and overwatering

May not suit every verge due to size, cost, and long-term care

If nothing else, let it be a reminder:

Some parts of this landscape aren’t gone.
They’re just rarely seen anymore

23/04/2026

Great work actually getting done by one of our great Community Garden Supporters!

Update: we are currently out at Esk creating habitat hollows for the Greater Glider 🌿 This work is all about restoring vital shelter in living trees, helping support a species that depends on these natural hollows to survive. Watch this space, as we will be sharing a few updates along the way.
Thank you for your patience while we are on this project, and we will get to all enquiries as soon as possible.

22/04/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/17VGjr757R/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Whilst this page is still in its infancy I ask if you can like and share this page to other community groups around town and hopefully we can gain enough steam to start some meaningful change 😁

Verge gardens turn boring strips of grass into cooler, greener, wildlife-friendly spaces and by adding shade, reducing heat, and bringing birds, bees and life back to our streets. 🌿

In Ipswich, the tree canopy coverage sits around ~36%, compare that to Brisbane, where the canopy cover is closer to 44–49% across the city.

That’s a big gap and a huge opportunity for locals to make a difference right outside their homes.

👉 Drop a photo of your verge (nature strip) below

👉 Or tell us what you’d love to create there—native garden, food patch, wildflowers, shade trees?

Let’s green Ipswich, one verge at a time 🌱

19/04/2026

A fabulous day to open the Lions Food Forest gardens, the sky was a picture as was the gardens, thankyou to all who made this day possible.

19/04/2026

Come along to contribute your ideas to your community!

18/04/2026

Come along to Karana Downs community garden for a free sausage, the opening of the Lions Food Forest and tours of the gardens. 9.30-11.30am today
Lions Brisbane West