Our suburban food forests : August 2013

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

turmeric harvest

I'm very pleased to have just harvested turmeric. It may be a spice plant of tropical south and southeast Asia, but I have a nice crop here at 35 degrees south.

A member of the ginger family but very distinctive foliage. It has grown well in the chook pen, near the overflow corner of the buried bath they have as a large drinking water supply.

Here is a photo taken last February, through the wire of the hens' run, broad leaves, white flowers. The plant died back completely with the arrival of winter.

Here is a photo of the rhizomes as were when digging them up. Looking rather like Jerusalem artichokes.

and a photo of the rhizomes washed. Now to consider best ways to eat and and store them. Currently drying on outdoor sink bench. Their medicinal value may help with recovery from pleurisy (June-July) and current Golden Staph infection.

And I will have to plant in more locations! Running out of locations!!

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

the human interface

I have found increasingly as I crowd my suburban garden that there is more space or more spaces with different meanings and uses.

One of the difficult areas has been an eastern end of house which has tree cover, wonderful in summer, but has been very difficult to access and thus neglected. It was like this a couple of months ago:

Several things came together to make change possible. I have now achieved that change by installing French doors in place of those nearest windows, removed that fence, formed a recreational space, screened against neighbours and will next work soildly (nice mistype) on what is workable sunny garden space for several metres to the left of that photo above.

We work with the scrounged and found. Or ebayed. As were the French doors. Some assistance with cutting out the windows. Then detailing by me, including making sculptable pillars from stack of Hebel blocks beside the doors, a step-out landing, some paving, etc. A slice of ancient tree trunk vomitted by the creek onto our now-sold block off the Tuross in a 2010 flood.

And viewed from the guest bedroom, inside that door, provision of light and air...

and escape to the outdoors, still a construction site:

... where I have brought together an array of materials, some found years ago, one acquired in the 1960s, badly damaged but perhaps 800 years old. She who stands guard out there, been round here and there since the 1990s, variously painted and adapted, now clad for once... who is she? Isis [see footnote ***]

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Far from finished... perhaps it will never be finished, there is enough nature around and within it to ensure evolution. The modern metallic sculptural flows are the way it happened to alloy wheels and engine block of a burned out car we discovered in May. Now inset into routed slab of paulownia harvested from former farm, in turn fixed to the front of a latticed panel of Douglas fir from the Berry tip. The mirror, edges to be painted, alters and increases light and space. The paving is 10 degrees or so off from square with the building, so rectangularity is denied conformity; unsquare. The square pavers will diminish in form as herbs grow, so far just scavengings of mint, yarrow and marjoram from other corners of the garden. All adjacent to the rhubarb mixed with iris, tree fern and birds nest fern, adding edible colour and dis-regimentation and avoidance of silly segregations. The stained glass window (farm shed/garage sale, Foxground 2010) is a rectangle making the case against rectangularity too. It catches the morning winter light; in summer the young quince tree, bare sticks in this pic above, will grow up to cast shade over and part swallow it.

To look down is important, achieving contrasting forms... also note that the Pistacea chinensis is already in this windy spring casting down its delightful oval contribution of leaf litter.
Peaking out to the right of the violets is a false tobacco bush seedling S. mauritianum
which I removed from roof gutter above, potentially bushman's toilet paper :-)

and in this photo another mirror has crept in... and morning sunlight adds more geometry

*** Regarding Isis: a very significant addition to my back yard:

...at a comparatively early period in Egyptian history Isis had absorbed the attributes of all the great primitive goddesses, and of all the local goddesses such as Nekhebet, Uatchet, Net, Bast, Hathor, etc., and she was even identified as the female counterpart of the primeval abyss of water from which sprang all life. From what has been said above it is manifestly impossible to limit the attributes of Isis, for we have seen that she possesses the powers of a water goddess, an earth goddess, a corn goddess, a star goddess, a queen of the Underworld, and a woman, and that she united in herself one or more of the attributes of all the goddesses of Egypt known to us. Source here

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With Ceres in the front garden, this omnideity Isis seems well placed in this evolving mix of built and natural out the back.

Dennis Argall, the writer here, is a retired ambassador etc who has also been custodian of a small certified organic orchard and who obtained a Permaculture Designer's Certificate in 1993. Now applying skills and happy hopes to discover just how much life can be loaded into a town block.

Dennis's partner Helen Backhouse is a social policy activist and regional manager for a non-clinical mental health services organisation who has a long term passion for planning and growing a garden and getting dirty in it... and whose garden displays art as well as plant life.

Having two gardens means we can enthusiastically support each other's vision and efforts rather than squabble over one. :-)

Dennis began writing the blog in his garden, but Helen's has often been much more interesting!

some guiding thoughts...

These three quotes from an old site of mine:

The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops,
but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.
Masanobu Fukuoka

The richness of our lives depends on our surroundings and what we fill them with.
Jackie French

That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology,
but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.
That land yields a cultural harvest is a fact long-known, but latterly often forgotten.
Aldo Leopold

And borrowing from Todd's Big Blog of Gardening:

"Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed.

Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is.

We lose our health — and create profitable diseases and dependencies — by failing to see the direct connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving.

In gardening, for instance, one works with the body to feed the body. The work, if it is knowledgeable, makes for excellent food. And it makes one hungry. The work thus makes eating both nourishing and joyful, not consumptive, and keeps the eater from getting fat and weak.

This is health, wholeness, a source of delight. And such a solution, unlike the typical industrial solution, does not cause problems.

The ‘drudgery’ of growing one’s own food, then, is not drudgery at all. (If we make the growing of food a drudgery, which is what ‘agribusiness’ does make of it, then we also make a drudgery of eating and living.) It is — in addition to being the appropriate fulfillment of a practical need — a sacrament, as eating is also, by which we enact and understand our oneness with the Creation, the conviviality of one body with all bodies.”

Wendell Berry