Our suburban food forests : October 2013

Sunday, October 27, 2013

and with wwoofers Julie and Flori from Hong Kong and France

Some more magic in Helen's front yard, not finished yet!!

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

WWOOFers 2

Part of the business of being good WWOOF hosts is finding time to show the WWOOFers some nice places. The request was for pelicans and kangaroos yesterday. At the tourist information centre, getting maps, we also learned that there were whales in Jervis Bay the day before. We went looking for them late in the afternoon but saw no whale. We saw one pelican, not this one, which I photographed years ago:

We found two large mobs of kangaroos, at least thirty in each.

Here is a little film of one kangaroo mob. filmed roughly from the car:

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

WWOOFers

We have had two French WWOOFers, David and Nicolas, for a few days.

After a day of mulching and tidying at Dennis's garden, we had a weekend at Helen's garden installing three tall narrow water tanks, two to collect from the roof of the house, the third up the hill - pumping up to it to provide gravity delivery to the whole garden: a kitchen sink in the back garden for cleaning fish, a Porcelaine de Paris basin in the front yard and three ordinary garden taps.

We had a lot of fun. Here we celebrate the work:


In the front garden, the French workers, the French porcelain, the happy clients!

... a little more artistic and structural work to be done! And the tap will be lower!

The proud expert installer!!!

The Adoration of the Banana

The view from the front - highway construction

and we had time to go to the sea, five minutes away

and more fortunate in these days than the people in the Blue Mountains, from where David and Nicolas arrived Thursday.

Thursday, October 10, 2013

Climate urgency, micro and macro

I have written a couple of entries recently at my main blog about climate change and the urgency of dealing with it at global, strategic, national, community and individual levels.

My immediate concern in relation to my 'sustainable food forest' is to sustain it through what seems likely to be a hot and perhaps very dry summer. I am pleased to have some tropical plants growing well (at 34 degrees south).

However much people may throw up their hands and say "even if it's true, what can I do?" that fails to address the core individual need to avoid being sucked into a hopeless practical helplessness marching between social media, the supermarket and the fridge. Resourcefulness important, in context of understanding the real world.

No, I'm not expecting to survive on the garden alone, but it is one of an array of ideas and practicalities I am working through and should write about soon.

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Us

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