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Nature Kids: Education For Sustainable Living

nature-kids

There is something so absolutely delightful about seeing children play outside in nature, creating worlds and games together, using just the things they can find around them – branches, sticks, feathers, rocks, water – and being totally enthralled for hours.

Ask my children where their favourite place is: ‘The river!’, always the river. We often venture down to the river after school with a little picnic, or some things to cook up on a campfire. Our spot is in the upper Mary River – shallow, rocky, shady, cool – a peaceful place in the restored riparian zone of Crystal Waters Eco Village.

The children skim stones, rock hop, find bridges and islands, float sticks and leaves, search for fish and yabbies, make harbours, swim, splash in mud pits and smear themselves from head to toe, climb trees, build cubbies and create complex games. I hear their constant chatter and laughter, and sometimes songs. I notice how intensely productive they are in making ‘things’ for their games. There is real meaning, purpose, creativity and collaboration happening. Deep learning takes place in this play time. They love it so much they even ask for their birthday parties at the river.

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Eat Your Weeds: Black Nightshade

nightshade

Black nightshade (or blackberry nightshade) Solanum nigrum is a highly adaptable plant, and a common weed across Australia, from the south to the tropical north. The species can look quite different from region to region. It produces small edible fruits throughout the year (depending on the region.) Black nightshade has often been confused with deadly nightshade Atropa belladonna: although the berries look similar, those of black nightshade bunch, while deadly nightshade has single berries along its branches. Deadly nightshade contains very toxic tropane alkaloids; it hasn’t naturalised in Australia.

As with many nightshades, eating too much of the unripened fruit can cause stomach upset. And as with nightshades (such as potatoes, eggplants, kangaroo apples and tomatoes), there have been questions about edibility by humans: tomatoes were considered toxic up until the 18th century. But despite all the concern, black nightshade produces forageable berries (when ripe) and leaves (when cooked) which have been, and are still, used in many parts of the world for a variety of culinary and medicinal purposes (although no longer for internal use in western medicine because of variable chemistry and toxicity).

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Bioregions: Our Spirit Of Place

bioregions

A bioregion is a geographic area with boundaries defined by natural features such as catchments, soil types, geographic features or vegetation types. Bioregions create a sense of place; where people can identify with their location; in which people can create some form of community self-reliance, producing and trading within those boundaries.

The idea of bioregions appeared in the 1970s, along with permaculture and, like permaculture, bioregions are a way of describing things that already exist but seeing them differently. Bioregions are more easily identified in rural areas, but even in cities, catchments such as the Yarra or the Hawkesbury have distinct bioregional characteristics, as do many suburbs.

‘Transition Towns’ has emerged over the last decade as a global movement full of practical actions to build resilience in a world threatened by peak oil and climate change. When combined with permaculture principles and the art of reading the landscape, Transition Towns have empowered communities to produce ‘energy descent action plans’, detailed permaculture designs for whole bioregions, not just for a farm or garden.

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Cara Edwards – Urban Farmer

cara-edwards

Cara Edwards rents a flat in the heart of Hobart and, despite not owning land or having much space, she has become an urban farmer, using her own small backyard and other pockets of land she has borrowed from friends. She sells her produce from a bookcase converted into a roadside stall, on the footpath outside her inner-city flat. I spoke to Cara about her life there.

Why here?

When my partner Fin and I met, a few years ago, we were both facing the age-old problems of finding ethical work, rising property prices and securing a loan. Last year we leased a tiny flat in the inner-city suburbs of Hobart, Tasmania, and started on our plan to grow a whole lot of food, make a little money and live a productive, home-based lifestyle.

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Noticeboard

noticeboard

The theme for the Perth (Swanleigh) convergence in October 2016 is ‘Permaculture – designing for resilience’. David Holmgren, Rowe Morrow, Robin Clayfield and Graham Bell are running advanced courses, and some prominent permaculture practitioners have indicated that they will be there.

Registration information

Registration will soon be available on the website, so please check that frequently. All costs, courses, tours and other events will be listed there.

Registration and attendance at APC13 is a prerequisite for any tours and courses that follow. Only PDC holders can enrol in advanced courses.

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Pip Picks

pip-picks

Here is a product that you don’t have to buy but you can make yourself and simultaneously create connections and community. Nothing quite reminds you of summer than a bottle of preserved tomatoes in the middle of winter. Gather your glut of tomatoes or buy them in bulk from the market and get together with friends to have a passata making day in your own backyard.

For those in Melbourne you can join in the Crowdsaucing day with CERES Fair Food. Register for the event and saucing tomatoes, grown by a local organic farmer, will be delivered to you at your house, a community kitchen or someone’s backyard. CFF will also provide you with sauce-making knowledge, how-tos, free delivery of the saucing tomatoes and labels.

Because ‘at the heart of everyone, there is a little Italian Nonna yearning to get elbow-deep in tomatoes with friends, family and even strangers. Getting together to turn tomatoes into sauce isn’t just about the reward of home-preserved tomatoes in the cupboard, it’s about belonging to a community and doing something good.’

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Permaculture Around The World

permaculture-world

The Ekukhanyeni Relief Project was started in 2003 to support vulnerable children in communities affected by severe poverty and HIV/ AIDS. Ekukhanyeni has created fifteen childcare centres, which incorporate permaculture gardens, to help care for over 600 children in informal settlements around Johannesburg.

Ekukhanyeni* identified that, because of poverty and illness, families were fragmented and parents had diminished capability to provide for their children’s wellbeing. They wanted to help the children, who had no access to good food, care or formal education. While some of the children involved are orphans, the parents of others go away to work all day and the children are left to fend for themselves in the slums.

Ekukhanyeni’s community-led approach creates centres to nourish and educate the children, but the food cultivated and services provided also support the communities around the centres.

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Urban Food Street

urban-food-street

The blackboards at every corner of this neighbourhood are a giveaway – there is something at work here, bigger than the sum of its parts. In this pocket of a suburb on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland, a community project is changing the way local residents think about food and the act of eating. The scope of Urban Food Street has grown exponentially, and it’s hard to believe it started with one lime.

In 2009, residents Duncan McNaught and Caroline Kemp were inspired by the words of architect Ken Maher, at about the same time as the price of a single lime hit $2. Maher’s work pushed them to think about community engagement with the suburban landscape, and how they could add value to their Buderim environment. This led to the relatively simple act of using the road verge outside their home to grow herbs and citrus trees, for their neighbours and themselves. Caroline explained that, ‘This is an urban area, so space is at a premium. We wanted to take that dormant public space and turn it into something useable and functional.’

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Editorial

robyn

After reading Nick Rose’s book, Fair Food; Stories from a Movement Changing the World (UQP 2015), I knew it was going to be the theme for this issue. Fair Food is central to what so many of us are striving for: food that is produced in a way that supports not only our bodies, but the producers who grow it and the wider community as well.

Fair Food goes beyond growing our own vegetables. It’s about creating systems that help build community, such as farmers’ markets and community-supported agriculture. You may not always grow everything you want to eat yourself, but you can support people within your community to grow it for you.

Ideally in each of our bioregions (‘Bioregions: our spirit of place’, page 68) we can provide for the community that resides within it. It is not efficient or practical for most people to be totally self-sufficient as individuals, but collectively it is possible. We can support the local sourdough baker, buy our meat from local farmers (Tammi Jonas profile, page 32), supplement our own vegetables through local producers (Borja Valls profile, page 42) and share and swap what we grow ourselves (Su Dennett profile, page 58). There are certainly alternative realities to the mass food production model.

Sadly, our current reality negatively affects community wellbeing. With the majority of people buying food from the supermarket duopoly, such multinational companies are given ultimate power to dictate the price they pay farmers.

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Cooking From The Harvest

cooking-harvest

Creating a truly local meal–where every part of the meal is produced locally–can be a challenge, but once you get into it, it is also quite addictive. It takes a bit of a mind shift – to look at the harvest first, then let the imagination run wild, and lastly find a recipe for final inspiration.

Traditional recipes have often been developed around harvest time, so finding recipes from somewhere with a climate similar to your own is a great place to start. We now have access to so many plants from different parts of the world that we can get creative, mixing and matching cultural tastes while eating from our own gardens.

When you consider the harvest first, you need to start by looking deeper into what is actually available in the garden, often using plants, and parts of plants, that are otherwise overlooked. This may mean using the same ingredients every day for weeks, so getting creative becomes increasingly important.

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