For a long while the thought of posting was exhausting, it was another job on a long list, but this morning I woke up with the sun and felt the urge to write again. It feels like a deep breath.
After my 6 month overseas adventure where I posted almost every day the real world got some getting used to. I needed a break and I needed to make big decisions. I was a jar all shook up, the particles slowly settling, there wasn’t enough of me to share.
We had to move and for the first time it was just the two of us, part relief, but I hadn’t realised how the safeness and convenience of our share house community had made me forget that there was an outwards and inwards I needed to explore. I decided to look for a new job, reconnect to friendships and try new things. Change is inevitable and scary, but the best thing I ever did was embrace it, I haven’t felt this “me” in a while and putting myself out of my comfort zone has made me think deeper and as strange as it is to say, feel more human.
Not long ago I felt consumed by the office, I sought solace in social media dreaming, “pinning” your life away, wanting, buying, an empty sort of existence that so many people fall into. Things never bring long-term happiness, just more wanting. So I decided to do more making. I hope to be more active on the blog and I’d love hear your suggestions for crafty skills to try. The internet is filled with gems, but it’s hard not to get lost in the muck.
Here are some blogs that have delighted me: Foxlane – Kate’s beautiful farming family, kitted out in lovely hand knitted clothing Glutton For Life – What an amazing name! Laura’s musings are as inspirational as her recipes Paticheri – I always look forward to Deepa’s comments on my blog and adore the beautiful, colourful photos she posts she posts from her Indian home. The perfect cure for a grey day. Our Neck of the Woods Tammy’s homestead in America, love her commentary on woodland life The Shady Baker – Jane’s beautifully honest account of the highs and lows outback farming
Big thanks to the volunteers and Nola for her amazing photos from the day!
The food forest has flushed green after a harsh summer that stripped the ground bare. The survivors: those born hardy or who retreated to the shadows of apple trees.
It was clear that we hadn’t quite gotten the balance right in terms of perennial plants, I blame the nasturtiums, they make everything seem so lush in spring but when it gets hot they are gone over night abandoning their companions to bake and burn. The same thing can happen in winter when a icy wind dislodges the last of the orange leaves and herbaceous plants tick their faces under the soil until next spring, it ends up looking like a forest of twigs and dirt, not ideal. That elusive perfect blend not only of the 7 layers of a food forest but of evergreen, deciduous, semi-deciduous, herbaceous and annual, a continuous dance of seasonal succession.
But thanks to a surprise donation from some nuns (I just love the randomness of that sentence, thanks ladies!) we were able to have a “take two” with our planting plan. And what a turn out! Despite our number limit, facebook invites are always a game of chance – is a yes a yes? what does maybe mean? This time Yes Yes Yes. Overwhelming at first, but once we got into our groove everyone worked together so well and we got so much done. We cheekily extended our boundary into an overgrown tree planter that the council’s gardening henchmen had neglected, it was a nest of grass and my hat goes off to the brave souls who bravely hacked back the jungle.
The most exciting part of the day was seeing our special flip top signs oiled and installed. Tom and Pat are the superstars who made my sign designs a reality.
Next food swap/permabee will be 2-3pm on Saturday 27th June! I hope to see you there to finish putting up the signs and adding the laminated “treasure hunt” style plant descriptions! It’s going to be so much fun! Check out the Flemington Food Swap facebook for information. (No facebook? Just comment on this post and I’ll add you to the mailing list) We will be having a potluck afternoon tea/food swap afternoon tea afterwards at 3pm! Hope to see you there!
The food forest a month earlier in need of some drought tolerant plants!Drought tolerant plants are concentrated around the edges whilst moisture loving plants are sheltered in the “natural swale” of the land near the fence which is supplemented by drip irrigation.Hardy indigenous bush tucker that was once eaten by Victorian Aborigines and is accustomed to our harsh, dry summers.Signs are made from off-cuts from Tom’s renovation! Can’t get much more sustainable than that!
Sign posts in! Thanks Tom!shop discount beach wedding dresses UK at prombee.co.uk
Taming the jungle! It is important to control grass at the edges especially fences and under trees where it is hard to remove once the garden grows up.
Running grass gone! Looking so much more spacious!This was a beautiful, fun and productive day. Activities like Permabees are a fantastic low stress way to build a sustainable community. I’ve tried organising other social community building events like picnics and food swaps, but when the main attendees were my friends and my family I realised two important facts: strangers are shy and won’t show up to “social” events without a “pack of friends” as a buffer, I’m shy and organising these things stresses me out too! You just can’t force these things. And after repackaging the food swap as a permabee, it made it clear if you make it attractive they will come and if it involves and activity rather than talking you’ll have 30 people there without even trying and it will be a blast! We’re already planning our July Food Swap as a documentary night. I’ve learnt my lesson.Below is a little brainstorm about the highs and lows of building a community, the things that make it worthwhile and the pitfalls to avoid. Maybe you can help me add to the list! At the end of the day if it’s stressful and isn’t fun for you, the organiser, then it’s time to rethink the path you have taken or perhaps you just need to find more people to support to make the going easier. A highlight of the last Food Swap Permabee was that one of my uni classmates showed up who I hadn’t seen for about five years! We hadn’t actually spoken much at uni, but we soon found out we had SO much in common and it was exciting to discuss possible joint ventures and remember that Architecture can be holistic if you can shake yourself free of all that convention spouted as truths.
Attractive
Activities and workshops where you can meet like minded people without social pressure.
Sharing knowledge, learning a new skill.
Swapping tools and food
Supporting each other, banding together for or against an important cause
Making hard tasks easier by delegating and utilising individuals’ strengths
Building friendships, combating the loneliness of the city and the isolation one can feel when fighting the sustainable cause. Connection.
Being re-energised by other people’s passionate and determination
Having fun, celebrating and eating amazing food other people have brought along
Mentally and physically healthy alternative to sitting alone on the computer or watching TV.
Unattractive
Awkward social situations
Burning out because everyone relies on you (or a small group of you) to take charge and organise everything
No one showing up to your events
Stress of organising events where a lot of people come
Insurance and oh&s associated with community events
Pressure to come up with ideas
Pressure to instigate other people’s ideas
Lack of privacy when you have one of those yuk days when you don’t want anyone to recognise you and you run into about 5 acquaintances on the journey. (don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean)
Dylan installing drip irrigation along the fence. We wanted to minimised irrigation so we have concentrated plants that need moisture like berries along the fence leaving outlying areas for drought tolerant herbs, shrubs and bush tucker.
It’s been six months since we had to say goodbye to our old house and garden. It’s sad to lose all that productive space, anyone who has bought or built up beautiful new soil will know how it feels, but I guess the positive is that it has really driven me to pour my heart and energy into the community gardens I’ve designed.
I had a lovely email from Annelies asking me to answer some questions for her research project on backyard food growing and I thought this was a good chance to share my last thoughts and photos of our garden which six housemates could get a salad out of for every dinner and a lot more in peak harvest season. It wasn’t going to replace farming, but with nearly every baby spinach encased in plastic nowadays it sure cut down on our garbage, water waste and pesticide ingestion. We’re not going to cover our wheat and rice requirements in a 9x9m backyard but salad is easy, and everyone, even an apartment dweller can do it and be a lot healthier for it.
It was actually really therapeutic to reflect on our first permaculture garden journey and I’d like to thank Annelies for the idea. I had forgotten how much we actually got from that garden and it has given me the inspiration to transform our new garden! I hope it inspires you too!
I love reading your comments and enjoy responding to your questions, so keep them coming! 🙂
From humble beginnings
Earth bag raised garden beds filled wit herbs and salad plants.
How much of the food you eat do you grow on your property?
SALAD NOT STAPLES
– know your gardens limits & understand your climate
We didn’t grow staples such as rice, wheat, lentils, chickpeas or corn. We have experimented with them, but with our climate, space constraints, time required in ground and their nutrient demands it just wasn’t feasible.
We concentrated on growing greens and fruit. We were about 90% self-sufficient in greens (e.g. lettuce, spinach, chard, bok choy, tatsoi, etc). We grew almost all our herbs including bay, rosemary, oregano, thyme and chives. Our fruit and nut trees required a few years to fruit productively but by the time we left we were getting: bananas, avocados, apples, nectarines, peaches, almonds, plums, babacos, strawberries, lilly pillies, oranges, lemons. We also had kiwiberry, currants, pomegranate, elderberry, passionfruit, goji berry and lime trees that were yet to fruit. In a few years this would have easily been enough fruit for the year, but not enough nuts.
Other seasonal treats such as tomatoes, cape gooseberries, eggplants, broccoli, pumpkin, zucchini etc were enough for 1-2 months of the year when they were in season, but there was not enough to preserve for the rest of the year.
How have you managed to grow this quantity?
PERENNIALS, KING OF THE LOW MAINTENANCE POTAGER
We had raised garden beds for annuals, but from experience you can get a greater yield with less maintenance from a food forest system primarily comprised of perennial edible plants.
GROW UP – make use of vertical space in small gardens
Where space and light is limited using fences and other vertical space is important.
KNOW YOUR MICRO CLIMATE
Careful analysis of miroclimates on your site is important, for instance our garden was south facing, but one corner in the south west got sun all day and this is where we planted out cool banana.
– save time, water and grow more resilient deep rooted veg
The most effective annual garden beds are wicking beds as they require less time for watering in summer and plants in them are more resistant to extreme heat which were are getting a lot of in Melbourne.
We practiced a four year crop rotation to reduce the risk of disease and keep proper nutrient balances in our soil. Plants from the same family generally have different nutrient/pH requirements as well as propensity to fall victim to the same soil borne diseases so letting the ground have a rest from a plant family for three years helps avoid issues. Green manures and legumes help fix nitrogen in the soil and improve its quality.
The tropical corner, a microclimate warm enough for a ‘Cool Banana’ to fruit
AVOID CHEMICALS
Chemicals are a quick and dirty fix that lead to long term problems. Killing pests will stop beneficial insects immigrating to your garden to take care of the job for you and might even harm the good guys you already have. Likewise herbicides & fungicides damage the delicate balance in your soil not only getting rid of weeds but killing off the good bacteria, mycelia fungi and earthworms that contribute to rich beautiful soil.
It might take a few years to get your garden in balance and some plants might be sacrificed, but once it is filled with soil life, ladybugs, birds and bees you’ll never look back.
COMPANION PLANTING
– nurse maid plants, beneficial pairings and alleopathy
In Australia we have plenty of light so the English way of planting in neat little rows with a halo of dirt around in unnecessary. Grow plants tighter so they shelter each other and use a mixture of plants to confuse pests with silhouette and smell. Some plants work especially well together such as carrots and onions. companions-planting
RETHINK WHAT IS A WEED
Nutrient filled, hardy, self-propagating, edible, when is a weed not a weed? Instead of pulling out those dandelions why not try the leaves in salad and the peeled root in a stir fry? Nettles make a tasty pesto and attract butterflies and protect their larvae. edible-weeds
WORM FARMS & CHICKENS
– garden helpers to improve your soil
These permaculture pets area great source of manure and soil conditioner without the need to increase your lettuce’s food miles with the bought stuff. Worm castings also help your soil retain moisture and both are great way to quickly process food scraps. diy-worm-farm pascoe-vale-permablitz
MULCH
Protects your soil from drying out and adds nutrients as it decomposes. Why note try 1. Living green mulch – ground covers such as clover, 2. Chop & drop, 3. Seaweed. seaweed-mulch using-seaweed-mulch chop-drop
Bamboo & bananas need a lot of water, but can tolerate the salts and soaps grey water. They also grow very fast and are great for screening out neighbours to the southIn our garden edible flowers are fixed with vegetables, not just to add colour to a salad but as bee forage.
– support small business rather than the duopoly supermarkets (people versus corporation)
We also support our local Foodworks grocery store where the owners know us and we feel loyalty towards them. For staples we visit various organic grocery stores and buy things in bulk and use our own containers. Some include: friends of the earth, Ceres, Lygon organics
BUY IN BULK
(affordable organics, dried staples, less packaging)
Organic food is more expensive and as backwards as it seems things made in Australia can also be! If you buy dried instead of tinned and buy in bulk organic is a lot more affordable (about the same as the small packets of non organics in the supermarket. Plus there is the added bonus that you use your own containers so you don’t have to feel guilty about packaging. wholefoods friends of the earth ceres grocery
What changes have you had to make to your diet to source food sustainably?
ETHICAL MEAT
(reduce over consumption of meat, degradation of land, animal cruelty & trawling)
We now eat mostly vegetarian with the exception of fish/seafood we have caught ourselves or sustainably sourced. Dylan also has a little bit of kangaroo or beef from the Farmer’s market where you can talk directly to the farmer about how their animals have been raised. fishing adventures
BUY AUSTRALIAN GROWN & MADE
We limit tofu and soy in our diet and try to get bulk NSW rain fed rice and Tasmanian quinoa. This is starting to sound a bit Portlandia so I might as well go all the way there…we eat a lot of Australian nuts, seeds and berries. (Yikes what hipsters! ha!)
Affordable, fresh, local, nutrients not lost, well-rounded balanced diet
David Holmgren’s wife Sue told us how one year she didn’t eat tomatoes all winter because she hadn’t grown enough and couldn’t bear to buy any. She said she felt really good, better than she had felt in ages and although she would preserve tomato for the coming winter it illustrated how even good things should be eaten in moderation because toxicities can build up. It’s good to give your a body a break every now and then like we would have before cheap oil made all year tomatoes, bananas and strawberries a thing.
I try to limit packaged foods to reduce waste and plan on trying a rubbish free month this winter which hopefully will help me develop better habits.
We try to eat as seasonally as possible and buy organic preserves such as canned tomatoes if we can.
(don’t get caught out when your at your most vulnerable – tired, hungry, under pressure)
Being prepared is a must: soaking dried pulses for future meals, making excess so we have meals to take to work makes a huge difference so we don’t end up having to head out for a sneaky takeaway too often. We try to make eating out a fun treat not a lazy convenience (but we haven’t perfected this one).
I work full time and Dylan is at uni so our blender has made a huge difference in making it possible to quickly and painlessly make pasta sauces and soups from scratch come dinner time.
Has there been an impact on your wider lifestyle?
With only a small shady backyard there has been a real incentive to actively contribute to local food security. The Flemington Food Forest I designed with the support of The Farnham St Neighbourhood learning centre has morphed from a fun community garden in a local park to an education tool with signs for school students and I get a lot of joy from it. I have also taken over organising the Flemington Food Swap which my housemate set up, I am really trying hard to develop a nurturing sustainable community in my suburb to bring together like minded people and make sustainability fun and social. Someone’s glut is someone else’s zucchini brownie after all.
What are the groups/networks that you utilise to source your food? Both formal and informal.
Flemington Farmers Market
Racecourse Road Foodworks (if you ask them to get something organic or ethical they are always happy to oblige)
Organic Wholefoods Brunswick & Flemington
Friends of the Earth
Ceres
Natural Tucker Bakery
What food items have you found difficult to source locally and/or sustainably?
Coffee
Tea
Fish/seafood
Chocolate
Coconut
Monocultures – corn, rice, wheat, etc
Bananas and other tropical fruit
Sugar
Cashews
Pine nuts
Brazil nuts
Pepitas not hulled overseas (many are grown here then exported to China for processing)
Dates
Are there any alternatives to this?
We use a lot of beans for our main staple as we can grow some at home and they add nitrogen to the soil.
Almonds are the main nut we eat and we occasionally make almond milk as it is not so easy to find milk such as Elgaar where they rest their cows and reuse their glass bottles. No soy milk!
Honey instead of sugar and maple syrup, we keep our own bees. We are also growing yacon as this is meant to be a great sugar substitute. We grow stevia, Dylan likes it, but I don’t.
Peppermint and other herbal teas
Dylan likes his coffee but he gets it from Streat where it is Faritrade and they hire & support local homeless people.
our beloved chooks, more trouble than they’re worth, but lovable all the same
how to build good habits … instead of making then breaking new year’s resolutions.
RRecently we had some shocking heath news in our family and like an icy bucket of water to the head I was reminded that life is too precious to waste. Don’t we all have dreams, a desire to give our life some purpose and worth? Stagnating in an office cubical of status quos is probably not anyone’s life’s goal, and yet here the majority of us are rusting away. We try to shake things up every New Year, but isn’t it just like running on an unhappy hamster wheel of deny, binge, guilt of broken resolutions. Can you even remember what they were by April? Take this as a cyber slap in the face to get it together, if we have each other we can do it! *insert inspirational quote of your choice here*
Health, family, community and happiness are the big ones, right? So let’s help each other build good habits for life. That’s good habits forever that make our life better. I know, I know puns are the worst. Bad habits are hard to kick, but so are good ones so to achieve our goals let’s start scratching away at them, because our goals should be our life’s work not the work of a year and then as quickly forgotten.
Dream big then break it down!
So let’s come up with the big dream, don’t rush it, this is the fun part. We’ll work out how we’ll get there later, for now just get a nice blank piece of paper and some coloured pens for an old fashioned brain storming of all the things you ever wanted to achieve. Don’t rate them, let them flow, even the little ideas might help you work out the bigger picture.
Let’s make it worth it, what’s one thing that will make life better for you? Not make people envy you or make you the cardboard cutout of success, no no no, white picket fence and a sports car in the driveway is so last century. What will make you happier and healthier and more fulfilled? It doesn’t have to be grand, but a worthwhile aspiration will probably tick off a number of smaller dreams on your list as well.
The New Year’s Resolution Approach would be to select one (or even more disastrous, all), clink a glass of Champagne and stumble into January with blind resolve. Feeling inspired for a new you, working hard, getting bored, tired and frustrated (a merry cocktail indeed) and giving up or just getting distracted. So to win at life we might actually need a game plan.
So the best goal will have links to other things in your list and not be too whimsical. So ‘learn French’ isn’t really up there, if I had move to France with handsome French husband then it would definitely be part of it, but that’s not something I’m interested in (so don’t worry Dylan). Same with learn an instrument, unless one of my dreams is seriously to be in a band.
The why motivation
If you really want to reach your goal, and sooner rather than later, you better have some pretty good reasons to get you excited. It’s not just the getting started, it’s the not giving up. If you ask yourself “why the hell am I doing this for?” a week, month or year in and don’t have a good answer you’ll give up and maybe it wasn’t worth it after all. “Because it makes me seem more interesting and cool” just won’t cut it.
You need weapons to defeat the “cant be bothered” monster!
Here are some question to get you going, can you think of any more good ones to ask? Don’t limit your self think emotional as well as pragmatic, mental as well as physical.
What will it help you achieve? Why is this important? Will it give you better quality of life?
Will it mean doing more of what you love? (This one is important, if you don’t choose something that involves something you already like and will enjoy doing a lot of the time it just won’t be worth it.)
And less of what you hate? What are you unhappy about in your current situation?
And more of what you’re neglecting?
And will it support causes you admire rather than deplore?
Who else will it help?
This is the list you stick in your wallet, on your fridge or have tattooed on your arm because it’s important to never loose track of why you are doing something, the how and when can evolve but the why should be your solid foundation.
As you can see I have chosen “build a local sustainable community”, originally I chose be self-sufficient, but after our rocky start to this year it became clear that whilst being self-sufficient is an honourable ideal what I really need and the sustainability movement too is COMMUNITY. It’s just no fun if you do things alone, and I might just get a bit closer to my self-sufficiency goal if I work, learn, teach, share and have fun with a group of like minded individuals at my own back door. The only way to convince people to be more sustainable is to show that at its heart it is just more fun and fulfilling. I haven’t had a lot of fun lately so perhaps it’s time to start.
No your enemy!
It’s that little wheedling voice making excuses when your at your weakest, say when a task coincides with a rerun of Mad Men on a rainy day.
So why you haven’t been able to organically and easily achieve your goal yet. What internally and externally has made it hard? Once you work this out you can figure out how to overcome those obstacles. This is a great way to exorcise all those little demons of self-doubt, laziness and plain whininess. It’s not always easy to creak into gear, floating can be so much more fun, but you’re just drifting to a big fat boring nowhere.
The following might be issues:
Convenience of bad, inconvenience of the good
Addictions, whether they be too sugar, watching TV, facebook, or something harder
Social pleasures or pressures
Imbalance, exhaustion and over work
Money, generally the lack of it
Bad habits and routine
Lack of knowledge and confidence
Difficulty
Time poor
Fear of change
Boredom
So let’s work out your excuses while your feeling strong and motivated so you can pound that wheedling guy into dust.
Keeping it bite sized
So now we can finally start working out some good habits, a salve to those bad ones. So let’s break your dream up into mini goals, we’re short term thinkers for the most part, that is why our world’s going to hell in a handbasket as our adorable grannies would say, so let’s make it work for us. So short term goals for long term benefit. One of mine is to start up a Flemington Food Swap, perhaps I’ll see you there. It’s a way to connect to the community, find passionate people to help me and most important of all it will be fun! It’s one step, but when it gains momentum I will feel a sense of achievement. It’s important to be kind to yourself, you won’t always succeed, sometimes you’ll falter and give in to your excuses, but instead of beating yourself up, thing about what you have achieved no matter how small and get back on the horse.
Getting in the habit
So we’ve got our dream and we’ve got our goals but how do we achieve them?
Have you ever woken up exhausted, and some how you ate your breakfast, got your teeth brushed, dressed and out the door, you can hardly remember doing them, but you almost literally sleepwalked through them. That’s because they are habits, you do them everyday, they are routine. That’s what we have do to achieve our goals as painlessly as possible. Steps so tiny they seem ridiculous but the beauty is you hardly notice them and you can build them up slowly like dunes being formed by grains of sand.
I read one example of a guy who was told by his doctor to floss his teeth every night. He would always starts enthusiastically, but come his next appointment it might have been months since the last time he flossed. So he said he would floss one tooth every night, just one. It took only a second, so he could never justify not doing it and more often than not once he got started he would end up flossing his whole mouth. Sometimes it’s just the getting started that’s hard, then your body takes over from your mind.
So make a list of all those little things you do everyday, or every week. Then work out new little “habits” you can tag on to them to help you reach your goal.
A goal might be to eat healthier. An obstacle might be that you are so tired after work that getting take away is what you end up guiltily doing. You might then have a mini goal of preparing meals and freezing them so all you have to do is heat them up after work. Habits you might start to achieve this are: every Sunday morning go to the farmer’s market for breakfast; when you make a meal double it and freeze half; when you get up Saturday morning soak some beans, etc.
Or if you want to produce no waste, instead of starting cold turkey you might still go to the supermarket but a habit might be: when you buy packaged food only buy it in glass jars you can reuse for preserves or after you have filled your basket put two packaged items back.
It could even just be after you brush your teeth spend 5 minutes cleaning or blogging or practicing. You’ll do more than 5 when you feel like it, but even when you don’t 5 minutes is so little it’s not hard to smash through it. Don’t give yourself room to procrastinate by making it too formidable.
When you’ve locked in one small habit add another.
Review and rework
This is the final step. Don’t just slavishly follow your plan into the ground, if things aren’t working they need a tweak. Start small, but don’t be afraid to reassess your goals, after all we change, sometimes we don’t realise something is not what we really want until we almost achieve it. Only you and perhaps the ones you love who have the benefit of perspective can know what’s right, dreams evolve.
But at the micro level if you’re struggling to make a habit stick ask yourself:
Why am I struggling to change?
Can I make it easier for myself?
Can I remove temptation?
What can I replace it with?
Now this is not replacing one evil with another, it’s figuring out what positive aspects a former negative habit had that you have lost. Things aren’t black and white. Perhaps giving up coffee or cigarettes meant also giving up a 10 minute break from staring at a computer screen, a chance to chat to co-workers, stretch your legs. My co-worker and I have come up with the idea of a “pause pomme” (an apple break) where we each eat and apple and walk around the block.
Could eating out be replaced with rotating dinner parties with friends or potluck suppers?
Is keeping your room neat as simple as having a drawer you can dump your clean laundry in until you have time to sort it rather than what happens to us, a vicious cycle of clothesline, hamper, bed, floor.
But most important of all, don’t lose sight of your ultimate goal.
Well I hope you’ve gotten something out of this. Let me know if you have any tips!
I’ll share my progress with my goals as I go. Honestly finishing this post feels like aback patting moment for me, it’s been sitting in my drafts for so long!
So wishing you all happiness and inspiration for every day and every tooth flossed! Good night.
