Our suburban food forests : August 2015

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Stick weaving in Helen's garden

It's near the end of winter and we pruned and wove the mulberry just in time before new growth. Some inspiration from seeing Patrick Dougherty's work at the Children's Museum in Portland Oregon, but more modest objectives. From this angle you can see the tree is hard pruned and bare, but you can't see the way the tunnel behind the Queen of Liberty (beanie and wool dress for winter) continues to be shaped up.

Photo below: the vertical sticks of mulberry are hard, last year's prunings. They are fixed to the gate by wire. We needed to lift the height of gates and fence in the front yard to contain our precocious promiscuous poodle.
The lateral sticks of mulberry were pruned two days before these photos and Helen has woven them together. They are at this point flexible, will dry hard.

a work in progress

and another work in progress, by Xiao Ran (Mike) the Beijing WWOOFer.

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