Category 8

Adventures In Urban Sustainability: Ten Years On

adventures-urban-sustainability

Inspired by their experiences WWOOFING around Australia and volunteering at their local community garden, Alison Mellor and her partner Richard Walter embarked on an urban sustainability adventure. They retrofitted their 1950s suburban house in Wollongong (on NSW’s south coast) and transformed their backyard into a flourishing food garden. Ten years on, they reflect on the design process, the changes they’ve made and the lessons they’ve learned.

In The Beginning

In 2007, we first came across what would become our house and garden. It sat on a north facing 920 m2 suburban block. We saw a blank canvas ripe for creating a flourishing food garden, and plenty of potential to retrofit the small fibro house for sustainability. We spent three months working on the house before we moved in and during this time created the overall design for the food garden.

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Neo-Peasantry: A Way Of Life

neo-peasantry

As a culture we have chosen climate change. We have created it through unbridled desires, our modes of travel, consuming passions and our gluttonous economic form. As a family, on a household income that would be considered below the poverty line, we have chosen another path.

Living With The Seasons

In many ways how we live is a form of neo-peasantry, observing and interacting with the six distinct Jaara seasons (early spring, true spring, early summer, late summer, autumn, winter), drawing on the surviving spirit of the moneyless ecological agrarianism that has existed on Dja Dja Wurrung country, where we live, for millennia.

We spend the autumn preserving food, filling the cellar, collecting fallen wood on foot, and planting alliums, broad beans and brassicas. The winter is a time for collecting mushrooms, dispatching roosters, preparing composts, and drinking plum pip mead and beer made from our hops, honey, dandelion and burdock roots.

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Grow Your Own Bush Foods: A Taste Of The Bush In The Backyard

bush-foods

The fruits and aromatic leaves of the tropical and subtropical rainforests of Eastern Australia provide a whole new palette of spices, fragrances and flavours for the adventurous cook. These uniquely Australian flavours, merged with the creativity stimulated by living in a multicultural society, readily give rise to an endless array of culinary innovations.

It’s surprising how many of these plants are frequently included in regular landscapes, native gardens and public plantings in parks and streetscapes in Sydney and further south; some are quite frost hardy.

Most of our subtropical bush foods come from rainforest understorey environments; sheltered, frost-free microclimates with dappled shade. In the garden these understorey plants will grow successfully under the canopy of taller trees or in protected areas close to the house where they receive some shade throughout the day or are less exposed to frost. It’s also surprising how well many rainforest plants grow in full sun, and more sunshine definitely increases yields of fruiting plants.

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Earthship Ironbank

ironbank

Nestled among gums in South Australia’s Adelaide Hills lies an elegant home, made largely of rubbish – old car tyres, glass bottles and recycled cans. Such unconventional materials are key to constructing an Earthship, the now global ‘radically sustainable’ building technique pioneered by renegade American eco architect Michael Reynolds since the 1970s.

It was a visit to Adelaide by Michael himself that sparked this project at Ironbank, one of the first official Earthships to be built in Australia. Michael had popped by to speak at UniSA in 2009 at the behest of Martin (Marty) Freney, an industrial design lecturer there. Afterwards, the pair headed up to Ironbank with a few students for a hands-on lesson in creating the Earthship’s fundamental building block; tyres ram-packed full of soil, which they casually arranged into a U-shaped wall. In the years that followed, Marty gradually realised he had the makings of his own small Earthship and after gaining council approval he launched the project in earnest.

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Grow Your Own Mulch

grow-mulch

A key objective for the organic farmer is to create a closed-loop system that recycles all of the nutrients and organic matter back into the property from where it came.

Directed by principles such as ‘Catch and Store Energy’ and ‘Use and Value Renewable Resources and Services’, our permaculture properties should also follow this important objective. Growing your own plants to provide mulch becomes a critical design feature to consider if a closed-loop system is the desired outcome.

The focus of this article is on fruiting orchards and food forest systems; to identify the support plants we can grow to achieve the ‘chop and drop’ technique of mulching. Chop and drop refers to those plants we grow which can be cut periodically with the branches and leaves thrown underneath and around our fruiting species as mulch.

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Rosemary Morrow: A Permaculture Pioneer

rosemary-marrow

Living a committed life of service to humanity and this beautiful planet is natural for Rosemary (Rowe) Morrow. She has been working and supporting people in areas of need for more than four decades through teaching permaculture in places where others don’t go. Without permaculture, the needs of people and the land would be less adequately met.

Her work has helped establish permaculture as a globally relevant, accessible and practical way for addressing pressing planetary problems. Rowe’s career in permaculture has been dedicated to helping people in the greatest need. She has journeyed to meet and learn from farmers and villagers in some of the most challenged places. She seeks to offer information that makes a difference in places affected by worsening climate change, and countries facing the impacts of financial crises.

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Urban Goat Co-Operative

goat-coop

Hibi Farm is nestled on a sprawling suburban block in a quiet court in Melbourne’s not-quite-inner north. You could be forgiven for forgetting you were in the middle of postwar-built suburbia and instead had been transported back in time to the Swiss Alps, Heidi-style.

Chickens peck around the goat pen, which sits at the back of the yard, beyond the extensive fruit and vegetable gardens. Michi Pusswald, a householder at Hibi Farm, scrapes out the straw bedding. His wife Angelica nuzzles Tessie, a bearded Toggenburg milking goat, leading her up onto the milking stand. Michi and Angelica are on the ‘goater’ shift this morning, and that means an early start.

Hibi Farm sits at the centre of the Hood; a loose collective of local households living the good life. Central to the operation of Hibi Farm is the goat co-operative. Milking the goats is a daily ritual undertaken by one of the 15-odd official ‘goaters’ rostered on. This milk is shared between their households and then further afield as currency in bartering arrangements with friends and neighbours.

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Goats In A Permaculture System

goats

Goats are entertaining, intelligent and productive animals and can offer a lot of inputs into a permaculture system.

Due to their varied palate, they can be very useful in managing woody and weedy vegetation, as well as blackberries. In fact, much of their feed can come from excess growth around the garden.

Having fresh milk on hand is also a strong motivator for many potential goat keepers, with homemade goats cheese being a delicacy. Goats can also be kept as a meat source, as well as for their manure, which adds fertility to soil. Unlike larger hooved animals, goats can be kept in urban areas, as long as they are taken out to forage daily.

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In The Garden: July – October

map of aussie

• July: English spinach, peas and broad beans, spring onions and radishes. Divide and share, perennials such as rhubarb, asparagus, Jerusalem artichokes, globe artichokes, chives, garlic chives, horseradish, potato onions and shallots. Propagate cane fruit like raspberries, currants, gooseberries and silvan berries and loganberries.

• August: Potatoes, peas, broad beans, spring onions, Jerusalem artichokes, rhubarb divisions, chive divisions, oca (a tuberous oxalis relative that grows like a potato). And all the leafy greens: lettuce, rocket, Asian greens, celery and English spinach. In raised beds and warm spots start succession sowings of carrot, beetroot and turnips.

• September: Leafy greens, peas and broad beans. Roots like carrots, parsnip, beetroot, turnips and swedes, celery and silverbeet (or rainbow chard), brassicas like broccoli and cabbage, leeks, and the ubiquitous spring onions and radish. Chunky things too like potatoes, Jerusalem artichokes, rhubarb and asparagus crowns. Start planting seeds of summer vegies such as tomatoes, pumpkin, zucchini, capsicum and sweetcorn in pots on a windowsill or greenhouse.

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Save your seeds: Nasturtium

NASTURTIUM

BOTANICAL NAME: Tropaeolum majus – the genus name comes from the Latin word for trophy, an allusion to the likeness of the flowers to the helmets and shields displayed at Roman triumphs.

ORIGIN: Peru’s cool highlands.

DESCRIPTION: An annual which behaves as a perennial in warm climates. The modern breed of nasturtium is bushy with deep red, bright orange or yellow flowers.

CULTIVATION: Nasturtium flourishes in rich soils, although it can tolerate poor soils. Seedlings are difficult to transplant so it’s best to plant the seeds directly.

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