Our suburban food forests : Mosaics in sand, work of wwoofer Mike

Wednesday, July 1, 2015

Mosaics in sand, work of wwoofer Mike

Everyone with a house will have some corner garden, under a roof line, where it is difficult to get anything to grow.

Helen had two next spaces like that. Also Helen was concerned not to have wet garden growth up against the house, encouraging pests including termites.

So with a plan, we assembled our collected tiles and broken plates and we entrusted the project to Xiao Ran (Mike), wwoofer from Beijing, after some basic training in mosaic work.

We knew Mike was clever, we knew he had never done a project like this before. The results are wonderful.

Mosaic work is interesting because it allows you to play with shapes and forms. It allows you to smash plates. You shift into a creative mind-space. As design develops, you begin to see more and more what is possible. And Mike's creative mind ran and ran. Imagination! Discipline. Hard work too. Place pieces, step back, look, have a coffee, look again, pick up most of it, rearrange, and then again...

This work is not concreted in. Earth and weeds were removed to a depth of about 75mm (3in), cloth put down flat on the ground as a weed barrier, then sand... and the mosaic pieces laid on top. Rain will alter this, as will wind, birds and lizards. Really part of the garden, subject to change.

Thanks Mike!

click on any photo to enlarge all

We used a lot of tiles but we still have some more.

in the middle, a few harvested passionfruit and macadamia nuts.

Photography offers some opportunities like mosaic work, assembling forms.

3 comments:

UnknownJuly 1, 2015 at 9:15 PM
Gracias, Señor Dennis, para la oportunidad de creatividad, salud : D
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UnknownJuly 1, 2015 at 9:18 PM
Gracias, Señor Dennis, para la oportunidad de creatividad, salud : D
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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