Our suburban food forests : October 2019

Friday, October 18, 2019

spring 2019

A little update. (all photos can be enlarged by clicking one one)

From Helen's garden. Where we arrive often to startlements, as this, going out the back door... wasn't there a week ago!

The lion not functioning as fountain but water for birds. Passionfruit planted just a few months ago.

This next from just up steps from that last photo. Behind the lemongrass, below the sink, below the bananas, is a hidden pond. In the middle of the day large lizards come through, across the steps, heading for a drink, like metro trains, one after the other.

This next is of the last custard apple of the season. Massive fruit from one bush for many months, now in leaf bud after winter. It has helped this bush to have a compost bin as neighbour.

Fennel abounds in that picture above as here next from same spot, looking to the right. Sage is spectacular, in the garden and kitchen. Behind the sage is perennial basil, which flowers over many months, sustains bee populations.

Fennel and basil reach the kitchen of course, but here is a classy breakfast: "three sage omelette".

Pomegranate in flower, but it's hard to get the fruit to stay. It prefers drier and reportedly likes isolation, not available in Helen's garden.

We travel of course with Ralph, who has been to the groomer and turned from spoodle to sausage dog this week.

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