Story by Russ Grayson

Read the story of day one of the transformation of the Barrett House footpath garden.

View the photo album of the Barrett House footpath garden.

IT WAS SUCH A CURIOUSITY that people stopped to look, to ask what was going on and to talk.

“Oh… are you making a community garden here?”, said a couple passers-by, hopefully.

On of these was a young woman with two young children. The boy was especially keen on watching those of us planting.

“You can watch the lady dig for awhile then we have to get going”, the mother said to the boy as he stood watching Fiona use a spade to scoop soil to mark out where he path would go.

“He likes digging”, his mother said to me “At home he digs the front lawn”.

Steve Batley, the landscape architect council uses for design as well as garden and permaculture  education was scooping holes into the freshly laid mulch, filling them with a handful of soil and inserting seedlings of herbs, vegetables and flowers.

“Do you want to plant something”, he asked the young boy, who hurried around to take up a trowel and start excavating. Steve guided him through the planting process and his mother ended up waiting there somewhat longer than she had anticipated.

Planting, this late afternoon, has become something of a children’s participation activity and a spectacle to passers-by.

Some of the garden crew—from left: Steve Batley, landscape architect, Sydney Organic Gardens; Richard Wilson, manager 3-Council Ecofootprint Program; Fiona Campbell, sustainability educator, Randwick City Council; Cecelia Nunez, eastern suburbs permaculture.

Day two

Fiona and Richard check out the new community compost bin. The Gedeye bin that replaced the Aerobin has the virtue of simplicity, being easier to maintain, use and clean. Being a common model, people understand how to use it. The Aerobin which the Gedeye bin replaced, in common with the same model used in the community composting system in Chippendale in inner urban Sydney, created good breeding conditions for an infestation of cockroaches.

It was day two of rehabilitating the footpath planter outside Barrett House—Randwick Council’s energy and water efficient demonstration house that serves as a meeting space for community organisations and as a workshop space. You find it at the end of the commercial strip on Frenchman’s Road, between Clovelly and Carrington roads.

Day one, a week earlier, had brought the removal of the agapanthus that had previously occupied the patch and the dismantling of the community compost bin which, when Fiona started detaching the panels to clean the bin, she found to be infested with cockroaches. The bin had created ideal habitat and the roaches had set up a breeding colony in it. The new bins will be easier to clean and offer few of the nooks and crannies the Aerobins made available to roaches and their hatchlings

 Positioning the community composter

Once the garden had been cleared we discussed how best to position the Gedeye bins and the accompanying rubbish bin that would hold the  dry, carbon-rich leaf litter and other material that composters would add a handful or two or three of to the kitchen wastes they tossed into the community compost bin.

Supplying enough carbon material has been something of a challenge for community composters and it is needed to balance the nitrogen-rich kitchen wastes or the compost can get… how do I put it?… sort of sloppy, disagreeable looking and maybe even smelly. It was telling that someone commented that she could smell the compost in the bin—the one that the crew removed—when she walked past.

We decided that the best place was more or less where the bin had been—up against the moraya hedge that forms a visual barrier separating the road from the footpath. A platform will be levelled for the bins at the next stage of garden reconstruction. Meanwhile, the Gedeye composter and rubbish bin have been placed there and brought into use.

Making the garden

First task in the makeover of the roadside planter was to mark out where the path leading from the footpath into the garden bed would go. A path would be necessary for people to access the community compost bins and for maintenance and harvest of the herbs and vegetables planted into the bed.

A simple, curved path leading around the small, fruiting lemon tree planted by the three Eastern Suburbs mayors at the opening of Barrett House was the obvious solution, and this will be paved in the next phase of garden construction.

This leaves a broad band of garden along the footpath edge and a broad patch around the lemon tree. It was the footpath edge that was planted out this time. It brings the herbs and vegetables within easy reach of passers-by, which is just fine because this is a forage garden from which local people are welcome to take to supplement their cooking.

A public forage garden? Won’t people rip up all of the plants and take them? This is a common but valid question, especially because we have learned from other gardens that many people don’t know how to harvest vegetables. Instead of taking a few leaves of lettuce, for example, they take the whole plant. We expect that this will happen at the Barrett House planter and Council’s sustainability crew—Richard Wilson, manager of the 3-Council Ecofootprint Program and Fiona Campbell, sustainability educator—will simply replace the removed plants.

There is an element of trust here, and while a limited amount of vandalism might occur—we accept this possibility—more likely is that people will not trash the garden, taking only moderate amounts of produce. We could erect a low fence around the garden but all this would do is say to passers-by is ‘don’t touch’; ‘this garden is not for you’—and that’s just the impression we want to avoid. One thing that has been learned is that when you put up a fence or a ‘keep out’ sign people cease to care for what is behind that barrier. Not what we want at the Barrett House footpath garden.

In the yellow light of the setting sun, seedlings are prepared for planting.

Watching people passing by stop to look and talk with the garden makers, I realised that this—this positive, direct contact between council staff and the public—is the best sort of public relations councils can find. It is of far greater value than any number of media releases, any number of official announcements.  Why? Because it is authentic.

There’s still some work to do to complete this little patch of footpath edibles and that is being planned. Anyone in the area, including anyone from a permaculture or a Transition Town group is welcome to participate—just call Richard Wilson at Randwick Council.

As day turned into the half light of early evening I sat talking with Cecelia on the wormfarm seat below the yellow robinia tree in the tiny Barrett House garden. The pedestrian traffic was less now, but as we looked out onto the footpath garden resplendent in its cover of fresh mulch, a man passing by stopped, looked it over then bent down to smell the bright yellow marigolds. Then, we realised, we had created something worthwhile. Our work was done.

A young helper self-recruited from a family passing by the garden decided he would rather dig than walk to the shops.

Costa Georgiadis - host of ABC Gardening Australia

The stories we tell make sense of and give meaning to our lives.

Costa’s father tells the story of the chook leaping into the feed barrel as he opened it. He tells the story of his flying days too, and of life in the countryside.

His son, Costa Georgiadis, tells stories about our food… how it is grown and how people are taking that into their own hands.

Storytelling was vary much on the agenda last night at the squash club in Bondi Junction where Fiona and I had been invited to join others for the launch of the new edition of ABC Gardening Australia, hosted by Costa.

Hubbub of animated ambience

As you would expect, there was the hubbub of people talking… what could only be described as an animated ambience within which excitement and anticipation seemed to vie for dominance.

But come 6.30pm, it was anticipation that prevailed as the room hushed and ABC 1 filled the big screen.

A bucolic sunset tints the sky and fills the screen with textures of red and pink… fade to a waterfall in the bush and a slow zoom takes us down towards its plunge pool far below where a character stands in the shady defile that thousands of years of running water has carved into the rock… you notice that he is soaked by the spray – and probably cold down there too – then that familiar voice starts and it tells us that we are part of all this… this land both old and new… it says we must care for all this to care for ourselves. Then, a cut to Costa’s Sydney Eastern Suburbs home and we are invited to follow him through the gate and into his backyard of fruit, vegies and chooks.

Another cut, and it’s out onto the footpath as Costa tells of its coming transformation from sandy soil and bland lawn into an agriculturally biodiverse ecosystem of food, flowers and habitat plants. The figure from the waterfall walks towards the camera talking about this – then there’s the slightest of pauses as he looks into the camera to mark the end of his monolog… and makes the transition to launch the program – “Hello… I’m Costa and this is Gardening Australia”.

The four minutes of that introduction, that transition from the wild nature of the bush to the cultivated nature of the city… well, it worked… and it made a fitting entry to this new series of the popular ABC program. As Costa’s welcoming words faded into the program introduction theme, viewers across the nation surely knew that something new was afoot.

Over the following 30 minutes viewers were swept electronically from Hobart Botanic Gardens below the blue bulk of Mt Wellington to a garden in Melbourne and onto rural NSW and over to that Sydney Eastern Suburbs footpath about to undergo transition from landcape poverty to garden plenty.

Continuity, pace and content

Why did the program work? What held it together during its vast sweep across the continental east? Continuity. Pace. Content.

Continuity created by the linking device of references to sandy soils and asking the state-based hosts what you could grow on that footpath in Sydney and elsewhere. The continuity of repetition. And pace. The different sense of pace and dynamic given by those state hosts.

Creative presences

Looking around at those gathered there that evening I realised that there were a lot of expectations around the new program. Community gardeners and permaculture promoters would have their own expectations and hopes, yet these must be tempered by the knowledge that the program has to cater to a broad range of gardening interests. I realised, too, that out there would be those who disliked the new feel, the new direction. But that’s the package that comes with anything new… the detractors, the supporters, the uncertain. Even though I don’t have a television, count me as a supporter.

Present were creative types like Costa’s production people, the two digital mavens from the College of Fine Arts setting up a website for Costa, the elegant Gina Lopez carving out a niche for herself in the business around sustainability, Megan Chatterton and her family… Megan is community workshop organiser from the City of Sydney with whom I used to enjoy working there… Sandi Middleton from the Centre for Sustainability Leadership and so many more. To all these people, to his sister and father, Costa gave due acknowledement in his speech following the program.

As we stood talking, Stan – Costa’s father – said that his son would now be busy in his new role and he would likely see less of him. Coming and going, though, is something Costa has been doing since his days as host of SBS television’s Costa’s Garden Odyssey.

As evening became night people drifted off, and stepping out onto the street a small group turns towards the Bondi Junction commercial district. There, among them, is a fuzzy silhouette soon to become even better known around the country. The good news, though, is that the silhouette is an authentic one with its hands and feet firmly planted in the good soil.

Costa and gardener planting the footpath planter at Waterloo Community Centre

Put to me in such convincing terms by Sophie from the City of Sydney’s SAVE program (Sustainable Action and Values for Everyone—quite a mouthful and an acronym-driven name if ever I heard one), how could I refuse.

First off, Sophie and I made the short journey out to Waterloo in a City Prius so that we could measure the footpath to see if it would be wide enough for the Salvation Army Waterloo Community Centre to build their footpath garden on. Plenty of room, it turned out, for the four proposed planters.

The planter construction crew with the finished product.

I asked Sophie to make sure the builders consulted Dial-Before-You-Dig to check whether there were water or gas pipes, electricity or other cables below the footpath. Had there been and had the gardeners built a footpath garden directly on the ground itself, it would have had to be rebuilt had the utility needed to dig up the underground service for maintenance. That was the thinking behind the model of raised garden planter the City was proposing in its draft policy—something with a base that could be moved out of the way and later returned, was access to underground services needed.

Next, I thought, why not try to prototype the type of planter the City was proposing in its draft Footpath Gardening Policy and locate it on the footpath to demonstrate the preferred offsets from the kerb?

The guys from Hobo-Gro, who mentored TAFE Outreach participants in the course that constructed the planters, assist to align the planters on the footpath.

The project got underway with TAFE Outreach teaching the participants, clients of the community centre, how to construct the raised planters made of marine ply reinforced with wood salvaged from freight pallets and with drainage holes in their base.

A few weeks passed and the planters were complete. I made an inspection to check them and found them strong and—in their bright orange paint—colourful… just the thing to brighten up a dull streetscape across the road from the Waterloo Estate, a large social housing conglomeration of 1960s tower blocks that, in the open space around them, features three well-used community gardens.

To make his talk more memorable, Costa brought along a feathered teaching assistant.

Lasagne gardening

Meanwhile Sophie and her colleague, Megan—who was with the City’s Sustainability crew—has arranged two workshops during which the planters would be installed, filled with growing medium, planted and mulched, two per session. That process would be led by none other than ex-SBS and now ABC Gardening Australia host, Costa Georgiadis. The workshops quickly filled.

Megan and I did our short talks, then Costa started with one of his food-focused dialogues, demonstrating how to make a wicking planter from a two litre plastic drink bottle by cutting it in half and rearranging the pieces, and discussing the value of non-hybrid seeds and other things. Then it was out to the footpath for the day’s garden construction.

Watching Costa describe how to fill the container gardens, as willing workshop attendees did the work, was like watching a garden chef make a vegetable lasagne.

A scatter of rocks was place in the base to aid drainage (drainage holes had already been drilled through the base), covered with a thick layer of sugar cane mulch, then cow manure spread over it. Next, in went a layer of lucerne, a leguminous straw that embodies in its fibre the nitrogen that plants need to grow. Following that, a powdering or rock dust to supply needed minerals to the growing plants then a layer of chook manure followed by a layer of cow manure followed by another layer of lucerne mulch, rock dust and yet more chook manure and, finally, a layer of lucerne mulch. Quite a lasagne garden indeed, and one full of varied animal droppings—not the sort of lasagne that you might be tempted to eat for dinner.

Nothing like seedlings to create interest

The layers were watered as they were placed in the container garden then seedlings planted through the mulch layer after Costa demonstrated the technique.

That done, the gardens were finished. It was quite clear that participants had enjoyed themselves as they stood back to admire their good work.

Dimensions and offsets

The planters are 1.2m in length, 0.6m wide and high. There is a base in the planters positioned 0.43m down. The purpose of this is so that they can be moved out of the way if council or some other entity imagines that it needs to dig up the footpath. With no services located below the grassy verge here, this wasn’t strictly needed as it would be were there pipes or wires below the footpath.

The planters could have been made a little longer—the draft policy stipulates that there be no longer unbroken access to the street than three metres, though that would be too long for a single footpath planter. Their height lifted them well about that which could be a trip risk, as are many of the low roadside gardens that civic-minded people construct for themselves, many built around tree bases much to the annoyance of council tree managers who think that microorganisms could transmigrate from garden soil into tree trunk and weaker their trees.

The idea in the draft policy of creating a colour contrast with the surrounding footpath area so that passers-by can avoid colliding with the planters was more than adequately taken care of by their bright orange paint job and the reflectors stuck on the planters.

An offset from the kerb to the outer edge of the planter of 0.6m was maintained as per the draft policy to allow access to and from vehicles, especially important for our ageing population and for those with mobility aids. The planters were located 1.5m from transmission wire poles to allow access for their servicing and replacement. The same consideration is made for street furniture such as seats. Plenty of space was left between the garden planters and the nearby bus stop, which is used by a small community transport bus. When we measured the footpath before the project started we realised that the required minimum 1.5m footpath width, to allow unimpeded pedestrian passage, would be more than adequately accommodated.

When the adjacent seating area with its native plants is completed, along with a tiny community gardening area for community centre clients, a rather uninteresting and unremarkable strip of street will have been converted into a biodiverse and very interesting learning and local food source, just the sort of thing we need to spice up inner urban streetscapes in a way that offers food, environmental, social and learning opportunities.

With all of those benefits, a better example of tactical urbanism would be hard to find.

Planting out could get kind-of crowded.

The planters with 0.6m offset from kerb and clear of the footway. The height of the planters lifts them above trip hazard and the colour also contributes to that by contrasting with its surroundings.

Job nearly done—a workshop participant waters the completed and mulched planter garden.

The seedling give-away was a popular part of the event.

City of Sydney Waste Projects Coordinator, Sarah van Erp, led workshops on compost making and wormfarm management at the event.

Organising crew—presenter, Costa Georgiadis (left), event organiser Megan and the author.

The author at Bourke Street Park Community Garden site with a garden bed hastily constructed and planted in time for the official opening of the park makeover of which the community garden in a component.

And go well they did over the first two meetings of the team that will set up the Bourke Street Park Community Garden, the second community garden in Woolloomooloo. That number would have been three had Housing NSW not demolished the informal (‘guerrilla’) community garden that locals started on its unused land , without permission, and operated for some time. Their idea was to put to productive use unused land in an inner urban area where public open space is in short supply. The state government department said they planned to build on the land and so the community garden must go. Go it did, but that was years ago and at the time of writing there is still no sign of Housing NSW building anything at all. What could have been a productive garden managed by local people is now a wasteland covered in the saplings of London plan trees.

The other community garden, Woolloomooloo Community Garden in Sydney Place, was established over a decade ago on its present site and before that was a tiny patch located below the Eastern Suburbs railway viaduct. It is now full, so a new community garden seems to be just the thing that is needed for Woolloomooloo, the densely populated area occupying the valley and its sides between Potts Point and the central business district.

Preparation for gardening

I had been warned that the Woolloomooloo demographic could be a difficult one, however I found the people at the meetings easy to get along with and encountered no difficulties. Woolloomooloo has a preponderance of social housing residents who are supplemented by those in private accommodation. It is what demographers call a ‘low-income demographic’ but the area is dotted with pockets of private home owners.

I worked with two smart, enthusiastic City of Sydney staff on this preliminary work—Kristin and Yvette from City Engagement, the team that organises and runs community engagement. They, with their competence and cheery attitude, were a pleasure to plan and engage with in my role, which was to assist the team of people interested in using the area set aside for community gardening get started through two meetings:

• one, to come to agreement on what their needs from community gardening might be—what in formal moments we call the ‘needs analysis’
• and at the following meeting to work out how they will make decisions, solve disagreements and communicate—what is formally known as ‘governance’, though I avoided using that term.

Social design component done, I arranged for a landscape architect experienced in designing community gardens and training community gardeners in the skills they will need to lead a participatory site design. The process will be to take the garden team through a site analysis so that they get to understand the site and what influences conditions there, then to draw up a concept plan, negotiate this with the garden team and come to agreement on any changes, then produce a working drawing that will guide construction.

The City will purchase the required number and size of galvanised iron planter boxes and these will be installed as per the plan, as will an area set aside for composting that will make use of the rodent-resiatant domestic Geddy composters.

Later, the City plants to relocate one of its old trams in the same area as the community garden and retrofit it as a activity shed for local people, what s commonly known as a ‘men’s shed’ but has been given the name of ‘men’s and shiela’s shed’ in Woolloomooloo… perhaps we should just stick with ‘activity shed’. This was not part of the original plan for the site but after it was raised and I did a simple social ROI (social return on investment analysis to estimate the idea’s potential value to local people—what they could get out of participation in it compared to the cost of installing the thing) I realised that social return—social benefit—would be analogous to that from the community garden and therefore the shed should go ahead.

A unusual mix

The garden group will be an unusual mix. There are people from both social and private housing, however the interesting inclusion will be the nearby Ozunan Learning Centre that wants to use the garden for horticultural therapy with Woolloomoloo’s homeless men.

TAFE Outeach, too, has indicated interest, offering the opportunity to create something quite innovative with the community garden, the activity shed and this diverse mix of community gardeners and social agencies.

For me, taking the project through social ensign and up to sit design stage has been interesting and rewarding. Now, its up to the gardeners to create something new in Woolloomoloo.

The crew... and the garden before starting its makeover, still infested with agapanthus.

The garden at the end of the day—free at last from agapanthus and ready to prepare the soil for vegetables and herbs at the next working bee.

Day 1

Steve Batley removes an agapanthus.

This was day one of two to repurpose Randwick Council’s footpath garden bed, at the end of the commercial strip on Frenchmans Road, from a low-biodiversity agapanthus plantation into a high-biodiversity herb, vegetable and fruit patch.

It didn’t take long for the energetic crew to remove the agapanthus outside Barrett House, the retrofitted, energy and water efficient building shared by Randwick, Woollahra and Waverley councils and used as a meeting place by community groups and for council workshops.

The day started as all such events should, sitting around the table, coffees in hand, discussing how to proceed. Day one—this cloudy and, later, rainy Thursday morning—was to bring the clearance of agapanthus from the garden bed in preparation for next Thursday’s installation of path, compost, mulch and edibles.

It was decided that the community compost bin, an Aerobin type, should be emptied but that the fruiting lemon tree planted at the opening of Barrett House by the three eastern suburbs mayors should be retained.

Agapanthus… we’ve probably all seen it because it’s quite common as a public place planting. It’s a perennial with long, dark green straplike leaves and clusters of colourful flowers on a long stalk, and it is favoured by councils for its ease of maintenance. Removing it is sometimes easy, sometimes more difficult, especially when it forms a large root mass and is quite heavy to free from the soil and lift.

The agapanthus removed, the question was what to do with them… they were offered to passers by but nobody seemed interested… so what about composting them?… that was a possibility but wouldn’t it be better to replant them somewhere? A call to council’s nursery solved the problem—they would take them all… which meant that creation of the new garden would be a zero waste operation.

Fiona Campbell cleans out the community compost bin. The Aerobin model was found to be infested with cockroaches and was removed in favour of the simpler Geddy bin which has fewer nooks and crannies where the creatures can breed and is easier to maintain and clean.

Community compost bin

The community compost bin situated in the footpath garden is used by people living nearby, and as as soon as the agapanthus was removed from around it Fiona set to work, removing its panels so as to empty it out.

As is found in other community composting systems there was a preponderance of kitchen and food scraps in it but not enough of the carbon materials that make for a balanced compost mix. Compost requires a mix of dry, brown carbon materials and moist green, nitrogen-rich material for effective breakdown.

Providing dry carbon materials has proven to be something of a challenge with community composting bins in some Sydney installations, with one group of community composters sourcing coffee husks from a nearby coffee roaster as carbon material.

The day after the gardening session, Richard and Fiona, from Randwick Council, installed a rubbish bin adjacent to the composter to hold a supply of dry leaf sweepings. It is planned that, when council maintenance staff sweep the fallen leaves from below the adjacent native fig trees in the park, they will put them into a bin from which community composters could scoop a handful to add to their kitchen wastes.

At the same time the two replaced the Aerobin with a couple of the domestic, black plastic Gedeye compost bins (also known as Dalek composters because their shape is reminiscent of the malevolent Daleks that appear in the BBC television series, Dr Who). These are easier to use that the Aerobin and compost is more easily removed.

The things you find in compost—a whole coconut would take quite some time to break down.

Community composting is a new idea presently being trailed by Randwick, Waverley and Leichhardt councils as well as by the Sustainable Chippendale team and, in Melbourne, by the City of Yarra. It’s a means of reducing household green waste for people living in apartments instead of consigning the stuff to landfill.

Footpath gardening, too, is something new, presently being done in the Randwick, Waverley, City of Sydney and Marrickville council areas.

The design and plant list for the revived footpath garden is being developed by Steve Batley from Sydney Organic Gardens, who provides garden design and education services to Randwick and other councils. The project is facilitated by Three-Council Ecofootprint Project Coordinator, Richard Wilson and by council’s sustainability education coordinator, Fiona Campbell. They were assisted this day by a Permaculture Sydney east member, Cecelia, and the author.

And next Thursday? We start on soil preparation, mulching and planting out… at the end of which the conversion of the agapanthus monoculture into a shiny and tasty new vegetable and herb garden will be complete.

Although the place is already in use, the time has come to populate it with new ideas and new community ventures and the placemaking process was ideal for this—explaining how that worked was my role. The purpose of placemaking is to engage people in generating ideas to create safe, attractive places where people like to gather. It is a participatory, inclusive process that is powered more by what citizens want than by the ideas and desires of professional designers.

The Permaculture Interpretive Garden complements the energy and water efficiency retrofitting of the community centre buildings and the associated community education program.

Fiona Campbell and Grahame Collier.of creative ideas. Grahame explained that the challenge was where those present want to take the facility now that the energy and water efficient retrofit and educational facilities are almost complete and the associated Permaculture Interpretive Garden close to completion too. A range of participatory processes was used to extract and define ideas and these were documented.

Led by Fiona Campbell, council’s sustainability educator, and sustainability education consultant, Grahame Collier, the session raised quite a lot of good ideas.

Ideas flowed:  a more welcoming entrance, drop-in centre function, video evenings and discussions, building on the social ambience during the Food Connect City Cousin weekly food box collection, the coming workshop in creating a food forest in the Permaculture Interpretive Garden, a parents’ and children’s’ group, restarting the children’s EcoHero club at the centre, activities in the garden, Sydney LETS market days, a sewers’ swap where people could exchange things sewers need such as buttons and fabric, a jelly—a co-working facility and more.

The Hub, with its wind turbine and solar photovoltaic array producing energy or the grid, has been in use since it was opened last year and is venue for council’s Living Smart, community leadership and Sustainable Gardening courses as well as for workshops and collaborative consumption-type swaps.

The construction crew. Lower left is City of Sydney Community Worker, Urban Renewal, Cara Levinson, and behind her is the author.

I met with the City of Sydney’s Green Square Community Worker, Urban Renewal—Cara Levinson—who assists this group and another, Friends of Victoria Park who work n the social side of things there. Cara informed me about what the group had in mind and I took these ideas back to the City of Sydney at Town Hall House. My role? To facilitate what it was that Green Square Growers wanted by clearing the bureaucratic bumps so that the Growers could get on with building their first project. My other role was to ensure that materials for their project were on hand, at the right place at the right time.

It was my brief in working with the City to take this pro-community approach, to ease things through the decision making structure, source funding, materials, skills and training so that people could get on with that it was they wanted to do. In this, I was encourage by what Ernesto Sirrolli, the social entrepreneur from the US-based Sirrolli Institute, said about the role of people working with local government—that they, too, could take an entrepreneurial approach and facilitate communities taking action, a role describes as that of ‘civic entrepreneur’.

Small project, big achievement

Green Square Grower’ first project was the construction and installation of a raised garden bed in the plaza outside of The Tote, an old building repurposed as a library and community centre. It was to be of the wicking bed type, a self-watering garden consisting of a garden built over a rock-filled reservoir which is periodically topped up with water.

Adding an educational diagram is always a useful passive educational device for public place installations.

A commendable criteria for the project was that it be made of recycled and reused materials to that it could serve as a model for others. A visit to Reverse Garbage sourced the timber for the raised planter, which was assembled off-site and brought on-site in prefabricated form on the morning of construction.

The location of the planter had been worked out over the preceding day and this was confirmed when the group of 12 or so turned up.

First, the planter was installed then a layer of sand was spread over the brick paving. A double thickness of builders’ plastic was laid so that its it lapped up the sides of the planter box for about 30cm or so. This contains water in the reservoir which is connected to the soil surface, added later, by a perforated tube of agricultural pipe used to top up the water supply in the reservoir. A cap is placed on this to prevent the tube filling with leaf litter. Next, recycled concrete aggregate was tipped carefully (so as to avoid puncturing the plastic liner) onto the planter base—this stabilises the reservoir which holds the water that irrigates the garden above. The aggregate was covered by a geotextile layer, the purpose of which is to prevent soil particles moving into the aggregate-filled reservoir and blocking it. On top of that compost was lid to round 30cm sep, close to the maximum depth through which moisture will wick by osmosis. Straw mulch was laid and seedlings planted through tho into the soil below.

The wicking bed built and now in use, you can only wonder what Green Square Growers next project will be. Whatever it is,Victoria Park will steadily go from empty to edible.

A level is placed across the planter to ensure it is installed straight.	Shovelling concrete rubble into the base of the planter, on top of the plastic liner.
Sabena's (left) daughter fills the rubble-filled reservoir.	The worm tube is installed. The tube was populated with worms and food scraps added. The worm waste will fertilise the garden.
One of the gardener-children places a banana skin into the worm tube.	Construction almost complete, there's only watering the seedlings planted into the mulched garden.