Tag Issue 5 Premium

Designing An Urban Sanctuary

designing-urban-sanctuary

Designer: Taj Scicluna, in collaboration with Linton Cummins

Client: Lordy Dannaoui

Location: Yarraville, Victoria

Aim: To design an urban sanctuary of edible and medical plants.

Background: The property is in a region with a history of industrial use, close to the city of Melbourne and the estuary of the Yarra River. One person and three cats currently reside on the property, which is 960 square metres, consisting of a fairly flat and open area.

Fair Food – Time For A Change

fair-food

Many people speak of our current era as the time of the Great Turning, or the Great Transition. We are at a point in our journey as humanity where, as the philosopher Thomas Berry puts it, we must move from a ‘period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner’. The ways in which we produce, distribute and consume food lie at the heart of this transition. Many of us in Australia’s emerging food movement speak of this as a transition to a ‘Fair Food’ system.

WHAT IS FAIR FOOD?

Fair Food is food produced, distributed and consumed in ways that are ecologically sustainable, ethically sound and socially just. Fair Food is the Australian interpretation of the international concept of food sovereignty, which was launched in the mid-1990s by leaders of the global family farmers’ movement, La Via Campesina (or the farmers’ way).

Double-Digging A Garden Bed The Biointensive Way

double-digging

There are many ways to start a garden bed: no-dig to double-dig. Each suits different situations, people and budgets; how you do it is up to you. Double-digging – the biointensive growing technique – is excellent for anyone wanting to grow a large quantity of organic vegetables in a small space, in a small timeframe. But you need to work for it.

This method is all about building beautiful deep, friable topsoil that can grow an intensive amount of good food, quickly. But to do this you need to create that soil structure yourself rather than waiting for the roots of well-chosen and tended plants, and the soil food web, to do that for you.

Connecting With Nature For A Positive World

positive-world

Connecting with the earth and nature gives me a very different perspective on which to base my environmental endeavours. Feeling a deep connection with nature, and experiencing myself as part of our living, breathing planet – not separate from it – supports me in acting for positive change, and earth care, in a natural and passionate way.

I’m motivated and I act because of the love, respect and connection I feel for nature; not because I’m fearful that, as humans, we’re trashing the planet and we’re all going to die.

I have felt this way since I was a young person, exploring my grandparents’ garden. Simply spending periods of time in nature, especially forests, supported me to deepen this sense of connection with all of nature: to sense myself as a part of our beautiful blue-green planet earth.

Retrosuburbia: A Downshifter’s Guide To A Resilient Future

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Over the last two decades I have explored permaculture as a set of thinking tools for the energy-descent future and outlined a nuanced and over-the-horizon view of the diverse ways in which that energy-descent future might unfold. Since then ‘resilience’ has displaced ‘sustainability’ as the buzzword about the future, while ‘energy-descent’ still lurks on the conceptual fringe.

My soon to be released book– ‘RetroSuburbia’ (due to be published late 2016) – focuses on residential landscapes, backyards and behaviours in suburbia, where most Australians live or were raised. Less theoretical and dense than some of my previous work, ‘RetroSuburbia’ builds on my ‘Aussie Street’ presentations, showing how ordinary Australians can downshift and retrofit their houses, gardens and lifestyles to be more sustainable and resilient; to survive and thrive.

With this energy-descent future looming, the ‘lucky country’ is likely to get a big shake-up, with: the bursting of the property bubble; the ongoing collapse of prices for Australian exports; more extreme weather events; and geopolitical crises. We don’t have time – decades – to redesign and rebuild our cities, so we have to retrofit our suburbs to cope with a future where we might have more time, but far less capital and fewer resources.

Permaculture Animal: Australian Settler Geese

geese

Australian settler geese (previously ‘pilgrim geese’) were developed for Australian conditions. They are hardy medium sized geese. Males are born white, and females grey.

The breed is becoming rare: it has lost popularity to larger exhibition breeds and slender Chinese geese. It has also been crossed with other breeds, so establishing a pure flock may take a few generations. As geese can live for over twenty years, you may be lucky enough to find an old generation living on a family farm somewhere.

HABITS AND PERSONALITY

Geese are not for the faint hearted: they are noisy, poo a lot and need plenty of fresh water, particularly during summer. They have razor sharp teeth, sharp claws and very strong wings.

Borja Valls – Market Gardener

borja

Common2us is made up of a small team of young farmers from Spain and Australia who are passionate and driven to produce fresh, local, sustainable organic food for their Sydney community. They focus on producing highest quality food for their community and believe that ‘healthy’ food is grown and distributed in ways that benefit not just human health, but the health of the environment, the community and the producers who’ve grown it.

Describe what you do at Common2us?

Common2us is an urban market garden in a residential suburb, only thirty kilometres from the centre of Sydney. We are as close as you can get to the city and have a two hectare lot. We grow a wide variety of fruits and vegies throughout the year, and sell directly to customers.

Folk Creating A Fair Food Future

fiona

Buena Vista Farm is a small family farm growing food (primarily pastured meat chickens, and a market garden with laying hens, bees, ducks, pigs and cattle), making delicious fermented foods, and teaching homesteading skills, in particular ‘from-scratch’ cooking (e.g. sourdough and sauerkraut).

We’re on eighteen acres of what was dairy farm that’s been in my family since the 1850s; I grew up here. Our plan was to grow coffee, and maybe put in a café, but we got excited about Joel Salatin’s ideas for stacked agriculture, self-sufficient (or inter-sufficient) and economically viable small farming.

It’s a tiny space to make an agricultural living, but with additional enterprises it’s possible. Our best investment was a commercial kitchen. We spend a fair bit of time running around after our three small children, but we love living and working here.

Biochar

biochar-benefits

“Biochar may represent the single most important initiative for humanity’s environmental future. The biochar approach provides a uniquely powerful solution, for it allows us to address food security, the fuel crisis, and the climate problem, and all in an immensely practical manner”. Prof. Tim Flannery 2007 Australian of the Year

Biochar is made by a process called pyrolysis, which means burning organic material with minimal oxygen. When woody biomass (dried, not green) is pyrolysed, all of the volatile components burn away and leave behind a carbon skeleton in a very stable, hard carbon form. This creates charcoal that has a pore structure which provides its near-magical potency in the garden.

In the soil, this hard structure serves as a kind of ‘coral reef’ for microbial life. Bacteria move in, paint the walls with their exudates and invite some fungi over for tea. Myceloid pathways are followed by hungry nematodes and microarthropods of all shapes and descriptions. The ‘reef’ begins to resemble a Star Wars cafe: all these busy soil creatures sharing grog and stories and, by the way, mentioning that the plant whose roots are just outside the front door is asking for some calcium or phosphorus, and that the plant would be happy to exchange those things for sugars and information.

Ten Ways To Create A Fairer Food System

ten-ways

A fair food system begins with you. These three contributors walk their talk. They are actively raising public awareness of things you can do to make our food system fairer. Here are their top tips.

1. Learn to cook. It changes everything: you can make what you want, and avoid packaging and food miles.

2. Spend most of your money outside of the big supermarkets. This is a direct snub to the monopolisation of corporate control over the supply chain. For a guide for people starting out, see ‘7 steps to quit supermarkets’ at the Beyond The Trolley website (see www.beyondthetrolley.com).