I like receiving mystery packages providing they don’t tick. Thus, it was with anticipation that I opened this most recent parcel, postmarked South Australia, and found it to contain a rectangular object. Realising this was a DVD (you can tell by the round shiny thing inside the case), I slid it into my Mac’s disk slot and discovered it was about an orchard… about a particular kind of orchard. Watching it, it dawned on me that this was the work of a particularly notorious Adelaide gang of freerangers, but more on this gang later and its links to another media product of Adelaide’s urban food subculture.

Some of us benighted residents of Australia’s most populated and productive state wonder why it is that Sydney is usually the last in line when it comes to community initiatives. Several theories have been developed around this, but they are not for this article because they are too depressing for local people.This DVD that arrived in the mail merely reconfirmed our perceptions about our city.

Why was this so? Well, Sydney has tried but it has so far failed to develop an enterprise like this orchard described in the DVD. That’s because it is a special sort of orchard… an urban orchard… the Urban Orchard.

Pleasing it was to discover that those Adeladians didn’t invent the Urban Orchard. Melbourinians are responsible for that which, for any patriotic NSWelchperson, only makes it all that more depressing. Adelaide, after all, is further away down on the southern shoreline and people are less likely to notice that city developing something ahead of Sydney. Intercity rivalry aside, it has to be admitted that the two far southern capitals have achieved much when it comes to their Urban Orchards.

Urban Orchard is a…

So what is an Urban Orchard? It’s a food swap. You grow too many lemons, so why not swap them for other edibles at your Urban Orchard market. It’s about the power of bartering… apples for asparagus, carrots for capsicum. It’s simple, but for a monetary economy, it’s profound.

Watching the Urban Orchard video was like watching a cavalcade of friends and colleagues… there was Joel Catchlove who is doing outstanding work advocating for local, South Australian food and the future of the Adelaide region’s small farmers. Just to show that someone attached to Adelaide’s Fiends of the Earth can inhabit the social mainstream, he’s formed a relationship with the new Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance. Then there’s Jeremy Nettle, another regional food systems advocate. And there’s Kate Hubmayer, Black Forest primary’s education-in-the-school-kitchen-garden maven and contact for the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network. What surprised me was that (Dr) Harry Harrison of Adelaide’s Rare Fruit Societywas missing in the video. But you can’t have all of this innovative mob at once, I guess.

The video takes you though how Urban Orchard operates and, if you live outside of Adelaide or Melbourne, leaves you wondering how it is that your city doesn’t have one. The video traces the history of food production and gathering on the Adelaide Plains from the time of the Kaurna Aboriginal nation to the present day, and visiting productive home gardens of the past, the video features Phil Bagust, co-author of The Native Plants of Adelaide, Phil Dixon from the Living Kaurna Cultural Centre and Friends of the Earth’s Jeremy Nettle.

Then, there’s a minor disjunction as the Urban Orchard crew descend below a railway bridge and enter the murky world of a city creekline infested with what some would call weeds and others call food. Being Adelaide, there’s no water in the creek but that’s beside the point, for it is what grows on the banks that is interesting.

Which brings us to something that this gang or urban freerangers produced in the time before the Urban Orchard. I discovered it and got one when in Adelaide for last year’s Paddock To Plate conference on the future of food. Then, I misplaced it – easy to do given the size of the thing – and only recently rediscovered it squashed between a couple of books. This hand written production sits comfortable in the palm of the hand between the fingers and wrist, and its link to the Urban Orchard video is a prickly one.

Here’s the link. The video shows the freerangers – including one of their young children – traversing the matted vegetation of an Adelaide creekline and harvesting the fruit of Opuntia. And that tiny handwritten microbook is on the same topic – how to understand, harvest and cook the same species. And Opuntia? For those whose education did not include urban food foraging, the title of the microbook gives it away – The Gentle Pleasures of the Prickly Pear. Yes, the spiky, flat-bladed prickly pear that few know as a food, unless they are Mexicans. It turns out, Jeremy explains in the video, that this plant – its oblong, spiky ‘leaf’ and its red flower so reviled by bush regenerators and other plant ethnonationalists, is a culinary delight. Now, that rally is weed to wok.

Urban Orchard is a wonderful melange of edible ideas… food for the swapping and food for the finding. So, how would you use the 32 minutes of this video (apart from watching it for the pleasure of the sheer exuberance of people who set up something so simple yet so timely as a food swap, and who hunt the elusive Opuntia in its native habitat of Adelaide’s urban creekline)? Unlike many food issue videos, Urban Orchard is not so long that you don’t have time for a structured conversation around the topic after showing it to a group. It’s presentation is light and enthusing and skilled educators will be able to draw out pertinent themes for later discussion.

Adelaide might be at the bottom of the continent in a map makers sense, but when it comes to innovations in community food, it’s right there at the top thanks to that bunch of freerangers wandering around the city’s urban creeklines and setting up productive community places where your excess production of food can be swapped. To paraphrase Bill Mollison, Urban Orchard is a proven way to turn consumers into producers.

An Urban Orchard. A film by Joel Catchlove and Jeremy Nettle, edited by Simon Gray.
Order from: Friends of the Earth Adelaide
$20.00 postage included.

Photos show the currency issued by the combined northern NSW LETSystems in the 1990s.

IN THE LATE 1990s the combined LETS systems of the NSW Northern Rivers region — aka the Rainbow Region — issued a printed local currency, possibly the first issue of such currency in recent times.

The currency was negotiable for LETS transactions — LETS is an acronym for Local Exchange and Trading System — by members of Northern Rivers, Nimbin and Mullum Byron Tweed LETSystems.

The full range of LETS local currency

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LETS is a community-based trading system than operates either cashless or with partial federal currency. This latter was introduced in the 1990s so that people could meet taxation and other obligations only serviceable in federal currency. Usually, LETS transactions are negotiated between supplier and user for an agreed price in LETS credits, the transaction being entered on a database and member accounts adjusted accordingly. This enables trading without direct reciprocal exchange, which diffentiates LETS from barter where the exchange of goods and services is direct between those in the transaction. With LETS, you don’t have to swap something of equal value with the person you trade with.

Once, Blue Mountains LETS, a mere 90 minutes by electric train west from Sydney, was the largest such system in the world. Blue Mountains LETS negotiated with the Department to Social Security to clear up ambiguities around beneficiaries receiving payment in LETS for trading in the community. According to Blue Mountains LETS, trading made it possible for unemployed people to maintain their worklife skills and was, therefore, a socially beneficially thing.

One Australian LETSystem — I don’t recall whether it was Blue Mountains LETS — approached the taxation office about paying tax in local LETS currency. Unfortunately, the department declined.

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Australia a LETS early adopter

As I understand the history, LETS was developed in Canada by Michael Linton. He came out to Australia in the 1990s and spent some time here working on LETSystems, particularly one that never eventuated. That was Sydney LETS and Michael and locals working with him envisioned it as a metropolitan-wide trading system.

I recall Michael and the team working into the night at the Old Randwick Community Centre in Bundock Street, not all that far from the newer centre presently being retrofitted for energy and water efficiency and being fitted with a PIG — a Permaculture Interpretive Garden which will serve as a training garden for Randwick City Council’s Sustainable Gardening course for home and community gardeners, and for school and other visitors to the planned education program.

Somehow, the association of LETS with the Centre is fitting as, just down the hall from the LETS office was the office of another metropolitan group that spawned a number of regional sub-groups, Permaculture Sydney. We offered our 110 hour Permaculture Design Course from the premises and out of that grew the Centre’s own community garden — Randwick Community Organic Garden.

Sydney LETS didn’t get quite as far as issuing its own currency, however.

The local LETS currency is explained on the flip side of each note.

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Why northern NSW?

Why was it that northern NSW proved economically fertile ground for the issuing of a local currency?

I believe the answer is due to demographic reasons. The region, particularly the sector inland from Byran Bay on the coast, through the regional small city of Lismore and further inland to the green fields around Nimbin became Australia’s premier counterculture zone in the early 1970s and attracted a  youthful and mainly innovative group of what was then known as ‘new settlers’ — rural reinhabitants whose previous lives had been spent in the cities. These people, searching for new ways of living, created their own culture over the years and, as it and they matured, the milieu proved intellectually and culturally susceptible to novel ideas like starting your own currency.

Seen in this light, the Northern Rivers LETS currency can be seen as a natural outgrowth, as an emergent property, of the culture that emerged in that region in those not-really-so-distant days.

The notes were similar size to federal dollars, looked like money and had a texture similar to federal currency. This afforded them a certain credibility and made use of what people already knew about money. Nimbin Rocks, a prominent local landmark, is seen in the background with the ranges surrounding the town of Nimbin. The snake suggests the Rainbow Serpent of Aboriginal mythology and is a recognition of the place and role of the local Badndjalung people in the landscape.

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Bloom and decline

It was the permaculture movement of the 1980s that had much to do with the development of LETSystems in Australia. Robert Rosen, an innovator in the permaculture approach to economics and ethical investment has written on this website about the history of permaculture’s involvement in community economics through initiatives such as the Permaculture Earthbank. Also at work at the time was social investment innovator, Damien Lynch, who started with August Investments (still going) and went on to help found Australian Ethical and Ecoforest Pty Ltd.

In many ways, the permaculture of the 1980s was quite different to what it is today. Then, there was, proportionally, a great deal more focus on and involvement in things economic and community development than, perhaps, there is today. For one thing, the ideas of EF Schumacher, the British economist who wrote Small Is Beautiful – Economics as if People Mattered were more in the forefront or permaculture thinking. There was an active interest in technologies such as the intermediate or appropriate technologies championed by Schumacher. There was also influence from an economic-oriented US group, the Schumacher Society.

Some of those early permaculture adopters had a more social focus to their use of the design system, being involved in community work of different sorts. Being both a part of mainstream society and at the cutting edge of a new social movement, it was more or less natural that they would turn their attention to innovations like LETS when it came along.

Soon, regional permaculture associations had adopted LETS trading. Then those in the permaculture of that time let it go where it wanted to go. LETS spread and broadened and the golden age of LETS in Australia dawned like a warm orange sun coming over the horizon.

This was the 1990s. Around the start of the new century however, the number of LETSystems had gone into decline. “What’s happened to LETS?”, was a question that you would be asked. Blue Mountains LETS shrunk as did others. LETS survived, but as a microcosm of its earlier promise.

I don’t know why this happened, why something that caught the public imagination and bloomed went into sudden decline. Was here insufficient popularisation and recruitment into LETSystems? Was it that people became wealthier and found no need for LETS? Did development of the system fall below a critical level? Did permaculture change and take on a new focus?

One explanation I have encountered a number of times is that you couldn’t buy all that much by way of daily living necessities through LETSystems. It was easy to trade for a massage or some similar service, but an incapacity to buy food, construction materials and some skills became LETS’ weak point. This might be something worthy of the emerging community currencies mulling over.

Images of local wildlife lend the LETS notes a bioregional character and suggest coexistence between nature and human culture. The scene depicts the broad expanse of water that is Byron Bay and beaches stretch far to the north. The prominent peak on the horizon is Mt Warning, named by Captain Cook the navigator on his 1770 transit of the Australian East Coast. Mt Warning, the first point of the Australian maintand to be touched by the morning's sunlight, is flanked by the Border Ranges, the political boundary between the states of New South Wales and Queensland.

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A new dawn and rebirth

It was only a couple days ago that someone said this to me: “You know, those things we were ivolved in years ago are only now coming into their own time”.

What he was saying was that we should be cognisant of the ideas innovation curve when we look back on these innovations in social history, such as permaculture and LETS. All new ideas are born of innovators on the creative fringe of society, are taken up by early adopters who tweak the innovators’ ideas and make them workable and then are taken up by early and later mass adopters.

Could it be that this early phase of LETS, whose history I have briefly described, was the innovator and early adopter stage? And that what we are now seeing with what seems to be a creeping popularity of LETS and local currency ideas being the start of a late early adopter phase, a time when the wrinkles of those early attempts will be ironed out of the fabric of community econmics and newer, better systems developed? Could this be where the work of the Transition movement in local currencies fits into the development of the idea?

I hope so. The continuance of LETSystems suggests a level of popularity for an idea that persists. It may be that the permaculture movement and the first phase of community economics focused on LETS in the 1990s has unconsciously handed on the idea to the emerging Transition movement and that it is here that we will see the action. People and ideas, we know, flow from place to place and come together in new milieus that emerge from the turmoil and churn of societies and global trends. This would comply with a trend that has seen ideas popularised in the permaculture movement only to be taken up and developed fully by organisations and movements beyond permaculture.

Whether these are the social dynamics that will recreate those early innovations in LETS and similar schemes as something new and exciting enough to capture the public imagination will be known in time. Let’s watch and, perhaps, help make it happen.

More on LETS in Australia: Find links to LETSystems across the continent — http://www.lets.org.au/

The echidna is found is the forests of northern NSW where it digs for insects with its long snout. It is another of the local wildlife to appear on the notes.

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WE ALL KNOW THE VALUE OF TURNING KITCHEN and garden waste into fertiliser by composting, but in Chippendale they’ve taken the idea a little further.

There, on Myrtle Street, residents of this Victorian era thoroughfare of terrace houses are co-operating with the City of Sydney in a trial of community composting.

The technology deployed is a large capacity compost bin marketed as ‘Aerobin’. The device is relatively new on the market and is claimed to have superior composting capacity compared to conventional bins due to the internal design that is said to improve aeration. Aerobins are available from retailers for around $350.

A makeshift carbon materials bay made of palettes was recently added to the community composting assessment site. The vegetation along the street verge includes a small number of citrus and avocado trees as well as culinary herbs.

When Fiona Campbell and I visited the experiment we met with Micheal Mobbs, one of the instigators of the project. Michael explained that there has been, annoyingly, a small incidence of plastics contamination of the organic matter in the bins.

On opening one of the bins, we found a surplus of food wastes. This was too great a volume of nitrogen-rich materials that, if it continued, could turn the compost anearobic. And anaerobic compost is smelly compost. Not good for a community composting trial.

Local resident, Michael Mobbs, shows Randwick City Council sustainability educator, Fiona Campbell, how the community compost system works.

On my next visit we found a makeshift bay made of palette timber that had been constructed as a container for carbon-rich materials for adding to the compost bin. Much of its content appeared to be dry leaves fallen from the street’s trees. Compost needs a balance of both nitrogen and carbon-rich materials to decompose effectively. Lifting the lid and peering into the bin, I found that someone had added some of the carbon-rich materials to the compost. It looked more promising that on our first visit.

Community composting requires a simple and reliable process if it is to be effective. The presence of impurities like plastics should be anticipated, as should the need to inspect the bins and add materials or water as needed.

We will have to await the end and evaluation of the community composting trial to see where it needs to be tweaked if it is to be expanded in its number of locations.

Rating

INNOVATION/DESIGN THINKING: Medium.

SCALABILITY POTENTIAL: Reasonable. Space and community attitude dependent.

REPLICABILITY: High.

Dick was the focus of the September 2009 TransitionSydney Cafe Conversation at the E-Lounge in Glebe Point Road. There, in the upstairs room, people from Sydney’s sustainability, transitions and permaculture networks took the opportunity to learn of Dick’s involvement with the city farm and to talk with him about making accredited permaculture training (APT)  — the certificate level courses designed for schools and as workplace training — availability in the city.

Dick Copeman

From city farm to sustainability hub

In its decade and a half of existence, Northey Street City Farm, with its 2.5ha on the banks of Breakfast Creek (27° 26′ 30″ South, 153° 2′ 30″ East), has gone from modest community garden to Brisbane’s major sustainability hub. Although it sources some funding from grants, the city farm crew have achieved a level of self-funding through setting up small social enterprises such as the:

• weekly organic farmers’ market that attracts more than 1000 on Sunday mornings
• commercial nursery — Edible Landscapes
• training for government workplace programs
• training in permaculture introductory and design courses and in accredited permaculture training
• workshops and events.

Time for accredited training in Sydney

Nationally accredited training in the permaculture design system has been developed by a self-managing team within Permaculture International to structure permaculture so that people can develop livelihoods from it.  The courses, depending on the level of certificate desired, are long and quite demanding, calling for considerable time to be spent gaining experience.

Dick has been involved in APT from its start. Now, he thinks it is time that APT was offered in Sydney and, following the TransitionSydney Cafe Conversation, that is likely to happen. There, Dick met a number of people already studying for the qualifications needed to teach APT. It is they who would form the first batch of trainers.

The lack of a training venue in Sydney, such as Brisbane has with Northey Street City Farm or Melbourne with CERES, was discussed. The nearest Sydney has come to this was the Permaculture Epicentre in Enmore in the 1980s (in the building presently occupied by Alfalfa House Food Co-op) and the attempt by a coterie of permaculture people in the 1990s to start a CERES mini-replication at Manly. That bogged down in gaining access to land.

The possibility of establishing a decentralised training facility, made up of a number of sites, was discussed and opinion was that it could be made to work.

Unsung hero

Dick is one of those unsung heroes of sustainability, those who go about getting things done yet who do not promote themselves and their work as do some prominent in permaculture.

The day after the Cafe Conversation, Dick continued his journey to Melbourne. After that, it’s back to Brisbane and the familiar food forest on the banks of Breakfast Creek, where the shade of tall mango trees provides shelter form the torrid heat of a Brisbane summer and where work will soon start on floodproofing the city farm’s building.

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TransitionSydney Cafe Conversations are networking events to introduce people in Sydney’s sustainability networks to local and visiting innovators.

Watch for future TransitionSydney Cafe Conversations.

LET ME SAY A GOOD WORD about someone new to her job… someone still learning but who is bound for success because she has the needed combination of right motivation, right attitude and right action. Her name is Annie Walker and just this January she started her new job with City of Sydney as its volunteer and community gardens officer. Young and smart, Annie comes with a background in local government sustainability education.

City of Sydney Community Garden and Volunteer Cordinator, Annie Walker (left), accepts a gift of Jerusalem artichokes from a community gardener

To take on this position with the City is to be plunged, rapidly and dramatically, into the people side of community gardening. It’s known among community gardeners who have been around awhile that the skills of growing plants are picked up over time. Growing people and their capacities within organisations, and assisting them to solve problems, however, is a far greater challenge. And it’s this that Annie has taken on. If anything, it is people skills – participatory planning, decision making, problem solving, conflict resolution, negotiation and the rest – that make up the key employment skills and personal toolkit of someone taking on this liaison and catalyst work with local government or any other agency.

Annie assumes the role more than ably managed for years by the City’s Michael Neville, who continues with the council in his work in waste education. Michael is not leaving the community gardening milieu, however, and will continue his interest and activity with both the Sydney regional community gardens network and the national City Farms & Community Gardens Network.

Annie’s first larger scale public task was to organise a series of three day tours of Sydney community gardens. The purpose was to familiarise people presently active in the gardens or interested in starting or joining a community garden with the design, management and other ideas found in gardens in the City of Sydney and Randwick local government areas. My role (through the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network) was an educational one of tour guide. Here’s how it went…

First brew

The first harvest was brewed by Toby’s Estate, the coffee roaster down the road. For them, it was an opportunity for their staff to take coffee straight from tree to steaming brew. It was almost certainly Wooloomooloo’s first and, so far, only harvest of the global beverage, coffee. Now, with the branches hanging low under the weight of a new crop of shiny green berries, Wooloomooloo community gardeners are anticipating more cups of the local product. Not bad for what’s usually a tropical crop, grown here in the inner city, even if it does fruit only every second year.

Wooloomooloo Community Garden was the first of the gardens visited on both of the City’s tours to date. The City supports a total of 13 community gardens, Annie explained to the crowd of 22 that filled the council’s minibus on each of the tours. Two more gardens are in the planning stage with another opening in Alexandria. Although some of the gardens are not on council land, they still receive support from the City and are encouraged by Clover Moore, the Lord Mayor of Sydney, who demonstrated her push for urban food systems by opening the recent Food Summit launch in Parliament House for the Sydney Food Fairness Alliance.

A gardener harvests her leafy greens at Wooloomooloo Community Garden

Small and productive

Wooloomooloo Community Garden occupies part of Sydney Place in the narrow valley of closely-packed housing between the CBD and Potts Point. One of Sydney’s early-settled places, Wooloomooloo is not a wealthy area and includes a fair portion of social housing.

Designed and built by the City of Sydney to replace an earlier and very small garden below the Eastern Suburbs railway viaduct, the community garden demonstrates compact design, durable and low maintenance pathways and raised garden beds of concrete block — some lifted higher to accommodate less-mobile gardeners. There are one or two reserved as community beds with the rest divided into small plots for individuals. From these spill the herbs and vegetables, fruit and flowers that thickly carpet the place. There’s one of those grafted stone fruits that produce two varieties of fruit from the single tree, an old enamel bathtub full of water celery and another showing the first shoots of next season’s water chestnuts.

The gardeners know they should have removed some of the banana trees to leave just a mature one and its successor but, as one of them explained, that just didn’t happen. Now, an area by the streetside fence is filled with a large clump, from one or two of which hang stems of young, green bananas from which the gardeners have cut away the conical, purple flowers known as ‘bells’.

Once, the garden had a reticulated irrigation system. Some locals, however, discovered that the irrigation pipes were just the right diameter for use in bongs. With the irrigation literally gone up in smoke, watering is now via a hose with a spray nozzle. A very small tool lockup — necessary because the garden is protected by only a low fence — compost bins, an industrial scale wormery salvaged from a school that didn’t want it anymore — and a bamboo and galvanised iron shelter that drains rainfall into a large plastic water tank make up the rest of the garden infrastructure.

Small, compact, well used

Annie had organised a seed swap to start the day on the first of the three tours and the visitors left Wooloomooloo with little packets of seeds as the tour made its way towards inner urban Redfern, site of the Greg Hewish Memorial Garden. The swap had been a positive start to the day, and walking away with a pocketful of seeds was something that would make the event stick in the minds of participants.

The Greg Hewish garden adjoins a small patch of lawn immediately in front of a community centre that houses the Food Distribution Network, a food box delivery service for people who have difficulty in obtaining food for themselves. Its clientele includes aged and ill people. Facing what was a printery housed in an old Art Deco industrial building, the land belongs to the nearby church.

The Greg Hewish Memorial garden team

This is a small, inner urban community garden consisting of three rows of raised beds, made of brick, that are divided into plots. Present are what are now common features in community gardens — a rainwater tank for irrigation, lock-up storage for garden tools and a composting facility. Also present were the most important part of any community garden — the gardeners. And, just as those at Wooloomooloo Community Garden had done, they made the visitors welcome. By the time the minibus pulled out of the narrow street, the visitors were loaded with cuttings of rosemary and clusters of Jerusalem artichoke, some destined for the pot, some for the garden.

The second of the City’s tours visited the tiny Newtown Community Garden rather than the Greg Hewish garden. It’s tucked away on the front lawn of a community centre only metres from busy King Street. The garden is a rather well constructed patch of raised, heavy timber beds and includes a water garden in the shade of a tall eucalypt. That day, the gardeners made sure the visitors departed with envelopes of seed harvested from the garden in their pockets.

Newtown Community Garden is compact but productive.

Garden of ripples

Imaging a still pond. A rock is thrown in and ripples radiate out towards the edges from a central point. That’s the design of the Randwick Community Organic Garden, the beds of which ripple from the central, raised herb garden. The beds are divided into the plots or allotments managed by the gardeners and are raised slightly above the ground by roofing tile seconds installed upright into the soil. The space between them forms bark chip-mulched paths more than wide enough for a wheelbarrow.

Along the western perimeter that separates the garden from the park’s playing field, Randwick City Council’s Bushcare team has worked with the gardeners to establish a windbreak of native plants endemic to the area. On the community garden side of this, and tucked up against the acacias and other trees, is the garden’s pergola, which is presently being extended to include a nursery and storage shed. A necessity in any community garden, the pergola provides shelter from sun and rain. Below is a large table around which the gardeners meet, socialise and share food. Across on the other side of the garden are a small and a large plastic water tank that receive roofwater from the neighbouring stables. With a combined capacity of 30,000 litres when full, the tanks are the garden’s only source of water. This probably makes Randwick the city’s only rainfed community garden.

The commercially available plastic compost bins used by the gardeners were a council requirement, as was the chainlink fence. The idea was to avoid the rodents that find habitat when open compost bays are poorly maintained. A cluster of the black bins stand adjacent to the utility area next to the corner planted as a tree garden with pawpaw, banana, tamarillo and shrubs above a small pond and a groundcover of sweet potato.

Randwck Organic Community Garden is larger than the inner-city gardens and is designed as concentric circles of gardens radiating from a central herb garden

Gasps of surprise greeted sight of the Randwick Community Organic Garden as the minibus pulled in, such was the contrast in size compared to the two compact, inner urban gardens already visited. The garden is on land owned by council, zoned as public open space, part of which is also owned by the state government Department of Lands. It is tucked between racing horse stables and a park. Randwick is in its second iteration, previously having occupied land adjacent to the Randwick Community Centre that was later closed, and that was started by students attending a Pacific-Edge urban permaculture design course.

A key to the success of the Randwick community garden is less the compost and mulch the gardeners have added to the porous and low-nutrient-retaining sandy soil, and more the organisational structure. This was inspired by that of the community garden which used to exist at Bondi Junction, those gardeners now on their new site as the Paddington Community Garden in the Woolahra Council area.

The arrangement sees new gardeners spending a period in the shared beds before they can apply for an allotment. This ensures they plan to stay around long enough to manage the allotment so as to avoid the problem of allotments being left unused while others are waiting for them. New gardeners are allocated to a team in which they learn about families and suites of plants as they acquire the skills of community gardening. Like other community gardens, an annual fee is payable and, when an allotment is acquired, an additional fee comes with it. It is in this way that the costs of running the garden, which includes public liability insurance, are met, modest they might be. The Randwick garden is an incorporated association, and although this entails a few extra but simple administrative responsibilities, it qualifies the garden to apply for grants.

Out back of the church

From the ripples of Randwick it was back to the compactness of inner urban gardens.

A timber arch bears the name and website address of the Glebe Community Garden and welcomes visitors as they move through the entrance between the old stone walls of the church yard. We were back in City of Sydney territory and this was one of two community gardens in the City that occupies what was poorly used land. The other is behind Waterloo Uniting Church and is used mainly as a therapeutic garden by people with HIV.

A mere block from Glebe Point Road, the Glebe Community Garden does not have the raised beds of the other gardens visited by the tour. Here, garden beds are edged with stones. There are two main, larger beds divided into individual plots, and there are the usual tool lockup and water tank. According to one of the Glebe gardeners, hand watering, rather than the pumped and piped irrigation system installed by council would have proven a more reliable way to get water to plants.

The second of the City’s tours went to Glovers Community Garden in Rozelle, in the Inner West, Sydney’s first community garden which was started in 1985. Complete with a flock of chickens and a mix of allotments and shared gardening areas, the garden climbs a low hill. Demand for gardening space has seen the garden spread further up the slope. This, the gardeners have terraced. On the late Autumn day of our visit the terraces supported a profusion of leafy greens and fruiting vegetables.

But there was something interesting at the top of the slope, above the terraces. I learned about it when Steve, a man perhaps in his late sixties, came over to talk. An immigrant from Greece many decades ago, Steve was eager to show us his work. It’s sort of peripheral to the community garden although it joins it, but what a lot of work it must have been. He’s planted olives, mandarin and oranges and has colonised a strip along the fence over by the road by clearing the forest of castor oil bush and terracing the slope. Last season, Steve said, he harvested a pumpkin from that garden weighing 20kg. We found it full of vegetables. Steve is proud of his work and has effectively colonised an area of unused land.

This was guerrilla gardening, I realised, par excellence. It was larger than any other guerrilla garden I have seen and it differed in one major respect — unlike some other guerilla plantings, Steve’s was regularly maintained. No chance that his plantings would be abandoned and ignored to become a insect pest vector for other local gardeners. Steve was more than happy to talk and it took a bit of cajoling from Annie to drag us away.

Glebe community gardeners with their patch of New Zealand spinach, an Australian bush food with a place in all community gardens

On the road

A day’s on the road visiting community gardens. All different, but all exhibiting the reality that community gardens reflect their site and the demographics, interests and skills of their gardeners. And all featured the basic infrastructure kit common to community gardens — durable paths and garden edges, rainwater tanks, tool storage, pergola to shelter the gardeners and a level of organisation pertinent to the gardener’s needs.

The tours are a simple but productive initiative of the City of Sydney and of the City’s community garden officer, Annie Walker. Much was seen and learned and much networking took place. Above all, the tour showed that our cities can be humane and sustainable places and that community gardens, with their local production of food and their social benefits, are key components in making those cities resilient in the face of global change. This was the city as solution.