Our suburban food forests : climate

Thursday, October 10, 2013

Climate urgency, micro and macro

I have written a couple of entries recently at my main blog about climate change and the urgency of dealing with it at global, strategic, national, community and individual levels.

My immediate concern in relation to my 'sustainable food forest' is to sustain it through what seems likely to be a hot and perhaps very dry summer. I am pleased to have some tropical plants growing well (at 34 degrees south).

However much people may throw up their hands and say "even if it's true, what can I do?" that fails to address the core individual need to avoid being sucked into a hopeless practical helplessness marching between social media, the supermarket and the fridge. Resourcefulness important, in context of understanding the real world.

No, I'm not expecting to survive on the garden alone, but it is one of an array of ideas and practicalities I am working through and should write about soon.

Thursday, September 26, 2013

September winds

In this part of the southeastern coast of Australia, September is notoriously windy. This year no exception, except that the winds began in July, initially chilly, now quite hot and dry, from the inland. Drying out everything.

We at least have had good recent rains. Inland, grain and pastures crops may be struggling to survive if they have this happening now.

The little movie below I made early this morning. Winds got worse during the day, causing some damage here, but not as much as in some other places today... And as we head towards no climate policy, we do still have climate. Some are blind.

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