Our suburban food forests : April 2016

Thursday, April 14, 2016

long after summer

The last post here in August, now April.

An exceptionally hot and challenging summer for the garden, with breaks of cold and wet then rushing back into the high 30s (100 Fahrenhiet for the imperial people) to the confusion and upset of human and plant routines. Fruit trees flowering at wrong times, fruit falling off, trees (espceially tamarillos suddenly frying in the heat. Rampant vegetation generally, not least in mini-rainforest.

In such forceful heat, it has been good to have the house now disappearing under green protection.

We may get relatively few conventional eggs from two hens, but the roots of the passionfruit are under the chook run. The passionfruit continues rampant and productive.

Hens happy

Other routines maintained, Captain Rattleberry grows into his third year and though desexed he imparts a powerful pheromone to his glamorous cuddle companions, who therefore need a bath too.

The garden is full of birds. I've not been very successful at photographing birds in the garden. With branches closing in on the photographer photos in the garden are becoming generally more difficult. Birds remain hidden in the foliage, wary in this suburban environment. But on a trip away, in the Blue Mountains last month, I was pleased to get this photo of an Eastern Spinebill, a very common bird here at home.

Eastern Spinebill, Blackheath NSW, March 2016

First distraction from this blog was action last August-September to prepare wheelchair ramps and paths for a house we had purchased for Helen's sister, 600 metres from my house. With helpers.

Alas all this constructive energy was followed by a mysterious and vicious attack of something called brachial neuritis, the acute phase of which lasted about ten weeks to early February. I continue in the atrophy phase. While it began in my shoulder, it persists especially in my lumbosacral spine and leg. Five months disability is not pleasant at any age, in my 73rd year you get a sense of the clock ticking. I derive some comfort from recognising that most people my age are dead and also noting the diversity of my chronic illnesses -, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, etc - and that the really cute thing about chronic illness is that you have to be alive to have one. :-)

But the photography suffers!

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