Our suburban food forests : Northey Street City Farm, Brisbane

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Northey Street City Farm, Brisbane

Susan and Stephen took us to this permaculture demonstration farm, slap bang amid the heavy urban infrastructure north west of the Brisbane CBD on 13 May 2013.

A little hard to believe coming from far away and looking at the map that this garden was under water in floods several months ago.

The photos show how hard it is to photograph gardens. Not least on a glarey overcast day. Not least by me. Black and white photos by Stephen. Some of the colour photos by Helen. The colour photos show a sort of flood-weary look, less evident to the direct eye.

We were there on a Monday, missing all the lively crowds, cafe and instruction of the weekend and some other days.

The garden was established in 1994. So I have a bit of time to catch up at home!

Later, photos of our hosts, over coffee at Mt Cootha, glare of the day behind.

I am carrying two cameras, Olympus EP-L1 with fixed 14mm (equivalent to 28mm on 35mm camera) and Panasonic LX3 with zoom, set to black and white and square images. Helen with EP-L1 with zoom.

My photo of my eldest, Susan

Helen's photo of Stephen

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Looking forward to your thoughts, write as much as you wish, ask questions. Comments do not appear until moderated. I will try to do that quickly. Thanks for looking and thinking!!

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