Difference to the supermarket is no longer a point of difference for organics because the industry helps stock those same supermarkets that organic buyers have sometimes been critical of. Organics in the supermarket, however, is a good idea because it makes the food available to more people, though I was recently told of a supermarket removing organic lines because they didn’t earn their shelf space in economic terms.

But back to packaging. What’s made me write about it and organics? A visit to a small food store that stocks a lot of organc lines near where I live, is what. Needing some oats and grain flakes to make my morng muesli, I walked in and found the cereals on offer… three or four certified organic cereals… from the USA… no value for these for Australian farmers, so I skip them. A packet of Kellog’s cornflakes with an ‘Australian made’ label… at least their purchase would support our farmers, if the label means what it appears to.

On my way out of the shop I noticed some firm looking Pink Lady apples… organic, so the sign said. But I didn’t need the sign to tell me that they were organic. The huge sticker plastered on each and every apple more then adequately told me that.

Now, stickers on apples is unfortunately comon these days but these organic apples had the largest stickers I have ever seen disfiguring a piece of fruit… they were huge. My question was this: why? Why does the industry find it necessary to market its products by sticking a big, colourful sticker on every apple that the buyer then has to peel off and discard? I know it’s a little thing, but why does an industry that constantly makes claim to its environmental benefit have then to show that it cares so little about the environmental costs of waste that it forces the customer to pass into the waste stream the excess packaging, those stickers, that it deems so necessary to its marketing? Sure, those stickers identified an organic product, its oint of difference, but they also highlighted a point of sameness — waste creation.

That wasn’t the end of it. Seeking one of those items that you usually can’t buy in an organic supplier, I walked into the supermarket and, as usual, cast an enquiring eye over the fresh produce. And what did I find? Organic kiwifruit, and non-organic kiwifruit. How did they stack up in terms of packaging? Well, the organic line won out again for its excessive packaging. Where the non-organic was offered in a net, the organic was packaged six to a plastic box.

Here’s my point. These incidents are minor but they are also indicators of a problem the organic industry has. It has two problems, actually, and both are barriers but in different ways. The cost of organics puts it out of reach of many shoppers and the perception and expectation of higher cost puts it out of the purchasing intention of many who can afford it. This I have seen.

The other barrier to organics is excess packaging, like those kiwifruit in the supermarket. That deters the many in our cities who know the financial and environmental cost of our waste stream, espcially food packaging waste.

When will the organics industry think seriously about the packaging problem it has in the eyes of many who are its natural customer base? There are options — the greater use of recyclable packaging or the use of no packaging at all, such as how those organic kiwifruit could have been sold.

I consider myself fortunate as I have to buy less and less from either supermarkets or specialist food stores. As  Food Connect City Cousin (City Cousins operate the Food Connect weekly distribution points for the community supported agriculture enterprise) the organic (certified and uncertified provided as ‘chemical free’) foods I get come unwrapped, without stickers and packaged is a cardboard box that is returned for reuse.

Please help us to save the Liverpool Plains. We have our new petition available to sign online. Send the link around to get as many signatures as possible.

The Liverpool Plains is an extremely important foodbowl of Australia — reliably producing crops yielding 40 percent above the national average. It is also in the Namoi Catchment which is an important catchment area for the ailing Murray-Darling Basin. At the moment it is being explored for coal and coal seam gas.

If you care for your supplies of fresh local food and the health of the Murray-Darling Basin and subsequently the Great Artesian Basin please sign this petition. This is very important for all of us and particularly future generations.  Please pass it on to at least five of your friends and ask them to pass it on.  If you would like to know more, please look us up on www.ccag.org.au

http://www.petitiononline.com/CCAGNSW/petition.html

Thank you all so much.
Kind Regards
Rosemary Nankivell
Chairperson of Coal Seam Gas Committee
Caroona Coal Action Group
0428 643284

The talk, held in the seminar room of DLA Phillip Fox on level 38 of a CBD office building, was one of a series put on by the Environmental Defenders Office (EDO). In retrospect, it was a worthwhile offering but it could have been done better.

Lynn Saville from the Sydney Food Fairness Alliance was first off. Lynn played a leading role in creating the Hawkesbury Food System some years ago and presently serves as a councillor on Willoughby Council over on the northside. She presented the case for maintaining Sydney’s urban fringe market gardens in the face of a growing urbanisation being doggedly pursued by the development industry and its fellow travelers, the NSW Labor government.

Predictable in a way, Aaron Gadriel from the development industry lobby, the Urban Taskforce, played down the value of Sydney’s urban fringe market gardens although he said that he could not foresee the complete disappearance of farming from the region. His talk, however, failed to address potential future challenges such as the peaking of the global oil supply and its price-inflating impact on food costs and availability, or climate change and the increased potential of the eastern coastal plain in food production and the relation of urban growth to that.

Nor did he mention the economic value of the regional food industry to the city economy or the potential for this to be increased through maintaining city fringe farmland for agriculture in perpetuity. The idea of viable local economies was absent as Aaron promoted the value of big farms, claiming that small market gardens were unviable. His was very much a business as usual formula.

What was disappointing was that NSW Agriculture speaker, David Mason, who has been the department’s urban agriculture officer, did not discard his Powerpoint and address Aaron’s points. Instead, we got a far-too-hurried series of word and number-laden Powerpoint images flashed momentarily on the screen, far too rapidly for comprehension. Opportunity lost.

Can do better

The author and educator, Edward de Bono, says that the best criticism includes suggestions as to what could have been done better. So as someone who has been influenced by de Bono’s work, let me have a go. I’ll put my ideas together in three packages. Here goes…

Package #1 — bettering a bad format

What we, the audience, got from what could have been an engaging discussion was a sequence of three largely disconnected presentations in which Powerpoint-based information, not the ideas of the presenters, was the driver. It was as if the presenters had to get out what they planned to say rather than improvise by responding to what previous speakers had said.

These were content-driven presentations and they suffered as such presentations must.  When Angela Garber coined the popular term, “death by Powerpoint”, what she was getting at was this type of presentation. Powerpoint, after all, was coded to be an aid, not the main way to convey information. That is done through the speakers’ brain and mouth working together.

This was the type of seminar in which the presenters could have been instructed not to present, in which Powerpoint could have been discarded entirely. That is to say, in some situations having a series of speakers get up there one after another and do their scheduled presentation is an idea that is now… how do I say this?… suboptimal? …tired?.

Instead, this was the type of seminar in which a hosted conversation would have allowed something to have been done which was not done — the exploration of the speakers’ ideas and values. Rather than a Powerpoint-driven infodump of far-too-many facts and figures, a conversation guided by a leader to keep it to topic and on time would have been a far more engaging format. The audience would have walked away with more.

Why is this conventional approach all-far-too-often found in seminars tired? Because it is based on the old paradigm that says there are givers of presentations and there are recipients and they are separate species. This is one-way communication, a product of the industrial age, of the old university, the old media, of the superseded business model… so last century, as they say. It is, as US academic, communications and intellectual property commentator and author, Lawrence Lessig puts it, “read only” communication that requires a receptive and passive audience that… well, just sits there and opens its mouth only in the allocated time slot, which is usually far too short.

I’m not saying that the conventional seminar does not have a place anymore, just that we need more diversity in information delivery. The old approach ignores the reality that digital communications has made ours a read-write culture, that this is now the cultural reality that organisations of all kinds often lag far behind. Those formerly known as ‘the audience’ can be co-creators in a conversation that offers a collective wisdom.

Package #2 — the images

How do I sum up kindly and inoffensively, trying not to upset them, the visual style of the presenters’ Powerpoint images? Let me just say that their images were crammed full of sometimes superfluous information that was off-topic. The only exception to this, on occasion, was Aaron Gadriel’s images.

Here’s what I am trying to say on a kindly way — the presenters presented:

• no road map or lead image to encapsulate and summarise the main points they were about to make
• no end image to reiterate their main points and tie the presentation together
• far, far too many words per image
• more than one idea per image
• no photographic, video or sound bites — just words words words — no diversity
• irrelevant image content more to do with organisational history and background rather than sticking to the topic of the day — food security; this resulted in a squandering of time that would have been better used to make the speakers’ points
• too many, far too many bulleted lists, like this one.

These things are educationally unsound as well as displaying ignorance of the visual presentation of information and the cognitive processes related to the use of Powerpoint. That is, making information available in a form that people can easily use.

What I am saying is that the presenters ignored Golden Rule #1 of information design when using Powerpoint and similar software. And Golden Rule #2 it is this — less is more. Don’t write a dissertation when a couple words or an image will do. This has been more than adequately explored in Garr Reynolds well-regarded books on the visual design of information delivery and on making presentations.

Powerpoint images do not convey knowledge and ideas — the presenter does. It comes forth from his or her mouth, which, for the occasion, should be firmly plugged into his or her brain. In other words, the presenter should know their stuff and not rely on the poor prop of Powerpoint, which was designed as an aid to presenting, not as a substitute for the presenter.

Package #3 — the presentations

In their book, Making It Stick, brothers Dan and Chip Heath offer ideas of what makes messages stick in the brain, ideas derived from research carried out as part of their work (see Amazon review). This should be essential reading for all who get up and make public presentations, as should the books of Garr Reynolds, mentioned above, for those using Powerpoint.

Had the Heath brothers been read, then the speakers would have insinuated something completely missing from their presentations: emotion. Emotion as an initial reaction is hardwired into the human psyche and irrespective of the intellectual twaddle peddled by those who would see humans as mere molecular machines, it trumps objectivity. Emotion can be one of the most effective means of emphasising important points.

A speaker who shows passion for their topic via emotion is a speaker who enthuses. One who stands and reads or who just churns out verbiage without any body movement, without any change of tone and pitch and volume or any other display of evident enthusiasm is behaving like a verbal tranquiliser. Their information will come across as such.

Facts and figures populated the seminar’s Powerpoint images so plentifully that their effect was lost, as was the effect of creating a sense of credibility for the information that is so important to gaining audience confidence in making presentations. It was a case of fact and figure overdose, and like and drug overdose it disrupted the normal capacity of the brain to make sense of the world. All of that important quantitive information was lost in the dense verbiage of text that occupied the slides corner-to-corner.

The future

The EDO offers a valuable service in their public seminar series and my critical comments are offered merely as suggestions to improve this. Likewise, food security, the topic of the seminar, is something that is going to be very important in our and our childrens’ future.

The seminar brought together different interests, opposing interests, and could have been the forum in which these differences and the ideas and values they are based upon could have been explored in a calm and enlightening manner free of the polarisation they engender as discussions in the political or media sphere. What we got was, in effect, a series of position statements that, interesting and clarifying that might have been, did not dig into the issues to any depth as could have a conversation.

Nonetheless, thanks to the EDO for taking the initiative to organise these talks.

THOUGH I SELDOM EAT MEAT, when last in Tasmania I was offered a slice of venison… freshly cooked local food, grown and shot locally.

Eating it was something of a field-to-food experience as the man offering the stuff was the man who had shot it. He explained that it was killed on a friend’s farm and that he was careful in what he and his fellow hunters pointed their rifles at. I got to thinking that hunters should be conservationists as they would have an inherent interest in conserving the habitats their food roams in, and in preserving the wellbeing of those animals that become their food source. This man seemed to fill that bill.

Similarly, it was while talking to fishermen hauling nets onto the beach at Byron Bay a few years ago, and learning that they may have to cease operations there and move on, that I realised the extent of the divorce between the source of food, those who produce it and those who eat it. Were some of the environmentalists who wanted an end to fishing there also fish eaters, and, if so, what did they care about the sourcing of their food?

This came to the fore, again, when the reef off Shelly Beach, Manly, was placed of-limits to fishers. I’m all for reserving no-catch zones, but would something like an ‘extractive reserve’ in which amateur fishers could take a limited numbe of fish be more of a win-win situation? This might have preserved fishing as a source of wild harvest — local food, surely — and maintained a direct link between food and eater.

From poisoning to eating —  a new view of ferals

I know this might get me into trouble with some readers, but associated with the ideas above is the notion of turning our national, feral animal problem into an edible solution.

This is no new notion and hunters have been doing this for some time. Yet, we see the somewhat pathetic response to reducing the camel population in Australia’s desert centre on clips from US junk television when presenters with no knowledge of the landcare issues involved with ferals (or of camels either, probably, though they might have see one in a zoo or perhaps on their television) condemn Australia for shooting the creatures. Then there’s the idea of bringing back into fashion those 1930s stoles made of fox hides — you might have seen them in old movies… fashionably dressed women with a fox fur wrapped around their shoulders to ward of the evening chill and to look oh-so-cool, Neanderthal style, with the head and forepaws of the animal bobbing as they walk. Maybe better not go there, though chicken keepers might think the idea has merit.

In preparation — a meal that included freshly picked garden weeds and found greens.

a

That’s another story. This one is about thinking outside the box when it comes to eradicating feral animals by turning feral into feast, and it comes from a friend in Victoria who may not be (or may secretly aspire to being, perhaps?) one of those forementioned fashionable women who would be seen with fox hide stole.

She lives down there on the desolate and windblown (see correction in Comments) southern coastline around Apollo Bay, and she writes: “My goodness! what an amazing feast! The only thing feral about it was the rabbit, venison, and edible weeds… yum! Well done Landcare”.

What she was so exuberant about was a Landcare initiative to get ferals out of farmers’ fields and onto the table. It may or may not have had something to do with something called the Hunter Gatherer Dinner Club (I am since informed that it didn’t).

She takes up the story…

“This was the menu:

“Entree -
“Peter’s bullet-hole bunny terrine with figs and walnut, served with tomato relish and a nasturtium and watercress salad.

“Main -
“Doug’s hand-fed fallow deer with wild mushrooms wrapped in brioche pastry, served with roasted garden escapees, plus this delicious walnut, pear and garden and wild green salad.

“Dessert -
“Ken and Simon’s weedy apple tarts with blackberry sauce.

“Wow! I must say again, well done SOLN! I’m so happy that after all these years of me blahing on about eating weeds instead of poisoning them and running little permaculture events here and there, that SOLN is now having great big delicious feral feasts here as part of their AGM. I almost feel like saying ‘my job is done’ although there’s still no LETS system here, there’s still no CSAs running here. There’s still inadequate community access to local food and production of.”

Could it be that the feast mentioned offers a rather innovative local solution to a lack of local food?

A respondent, presumably a local feral epicure from the local Landcare group, said:

“Certainly encourage others to put feral feast on in their areas maybe through your local Landcare if they are up for it. Takes a bit of planning – most importantly getting your shooters and your chef. We may try and make this an annual event because everyone loved it”.

How’s that for turning a feral and weedy problem into its own solution?

Oh, by the way..,. has anyone noticed the rapid population increase in those plump little furry domestic dogs on out streets recently?

I’m not  lover of the supermarket shopping experience but I do venture into the places on occasion. Such an occasion occurred recently when I walked into a supermarket in Sydney’s eastern beachside suburb of Maroubra. As to which of the supermarket duopoly’s shopping warehouses it was, I don’t recall… they are so similar that I find little to distinguish them… they blend together in the mind.

I noticed that there was something new when I made my way to the checkout. What was new was the checkout itself. It had gone, at least in its traditional form. Where there had once been a checkout operator there now was none. Instead, a machine stood ready to accept shoppers’ credit cards and a woman was there to help shoppers navigate the touchscreen and insert their cards — her job was to train the customer in this latest iteration of supermarket shopping.

I realised that I was witnessing the beginning of the end of the probably somewhat dulling but nevertheless income-generating job of checkout operator — what has become known as the ‘checkout chick’ on account of the preponderance of women occupying the position.

that avenue of low-demand work might be about to disappear

This was not the first time I had encountered an automated checkout. My first encounter had been some years ago in Lismore in what must have been an early trial of the technology. Now, it appears, the automated checkout is starting to appear in increasing numbers.

The role of checkout operator is not exclusively a female job. I had noticed that males have started to appear, both young men and those of late middle age for whom the work might offer employment in a job market that eschews the older male worker. Now, assuming the automation of the checkout proceeds, that avenue of low-demand work might be about to disappear.

Impact a job-shedding potential

Assuming that the presently small number of automated checkouts prove effective means of corporate cost-cutting and that they proliferate to replace most of the human checkout operators at some time in the not-distant future, what could their impact be, potentially?

there are those stubborn shoppers who like to interact with a human at the checkout

Would the disappearance of the operator have an impact in the newer, outer-urban suburbs where local jobs might be in short supply and where the work might provide the parents of young families the opportunity to shape working life around their parental and other responsibilities? And what impact on the working lives of older working people, now that the federal government is talking up the need to work later into life? One employment option less in an job market that doesn’t want older workers?

The job won’t go entirely, of course… there are those stubborn shoppers who like to interact with a human at the checkout despite the false smiles, the false ‘hello’ and ‘how-are-you’ they are greeted with. Then there are those troublesome others who prefer to deal in that traditional means of exchange — cash — you still need a human operator for that.

Open to criticism

The supermarket industry has become a target of criticism and it could be that an increase in the number of automated checkouts adds to this.

Criticism ranges from the lack of competition inherent in a market dominated by the two big chains through to the impact of supermarket buying policy on farmers and the consequent production of food waste, the impact of supermarkets on traditional streetfront shopping strips and the types of businesses trading there to the high energy consumption of lighting, refrigerating products and of air conditioning the often huge shopping warehouses we know as supermarkets.

the supermarket is sometimes the only source of food in a suburb

The impersonal experience of industrialised shopping that is part of buying your needs in supermarkets was highlighted for me when a friend mentioned how he walked along the laundry and bathroom products aisle unintentionally imbibing the volatile organic compounds outgassed by the products there. Don’t take my word, try it yourself and notice that, yes, that aisle does smell different and what exactly are those chemicals that we can smell?

These are all valid criticisms and some of them could be addressed through changing product procurement policy and through more energy efficient technologies, however they are beyond the scope of this article.

What is not is that critics sometimes fail to acknowledge that the supermarket is sometimes the only source of food in a suburb and that, as well as critique, what is needed are guidelines for sane supermarket shopping. Instructive here may be food writer, Michael Pollan’s prescription to shop the periphery of the supermarket where fresher and less-processed food are found. He calls most processed supermarket food products ‘foodlike substances’ because of their sometimes distant relationship to the foods they purport to be.

Software a shopping helper

Help in navigating the plethora of foods and foodlike substances found on the supermarket shelves is at hand, providing you own one of the newer multipurpose, handheld digital devices known as smartphones. There is already a free application for the Apple iPhone called ‘Shop Ethical’. The idea is that, as you shop the aisles, you can look up the ethics of the manufacturers of particular products, see whether the manufacturer is a Australian company and ask yourself whether the company’s behaviour is worth the support of your buying their product.

Looking up soy products > soy milk, for example, discloses that Bonsoy, a Spiral Foods product, is organically produced. Click the ‘assessment’ button and you learn that it is also GE free (not made from genetically engineered inputs) and that Spiral Foods is based at Unit 4, 56-72 John Street, Leichhardt, in Sydney’s Inner West. Click another button to learn that Spiral Foods manufactures soy sauce and ‘health products’ (type undisclosed) as well as soy milk.

Assessing products through handheld digital devices will likely become a practice of the discerning supermarket shopper

Flick downscreen to find that the Vitasoy brand is highlighted with a big bold black ‘X’ on a red background, in contrast to Bonsoy which carries a big bold black tick on a green background, that it is a product distributed by Lion Nathan Australia and is owned by Vitasoy Australia, both companies being awarded the big bold black X. A further click takes you to the ‘company focus’ screen that lists related companies and discloses that the company manufactures in Australia. The big bold black X signifies what the software describes as ‘criticisms’ of the company, which is one up from ‘boycott call’. A qualifier at the bottom of the screen tells you that ratings are based on the product parent company rating and do not signify the quality of the product itself.

Also now available for your handheld digital device (previously known as the ‘mobile phone’ to signify its single-use origins) are applications making use of augmented reality. Point your device’s camera at the product barcode and on the screen, superimposed over the product image, appears information to help you decide whether you want to support that product and its manufacturer.

Assessing products through handheld digital devices will likely become a practice of the discerning supermarket shopper, however the question must be asked as to whether shoppers disposed to make use of such tools and buying habits would purchase very much in the supermarket anyway. Even if they do not shop regularly in the supermarket, some of the products found in the application are likely to be stocked in organic food shops. This opens those premises to shopper-initiated, on-the-spot assessment of their product lines. Making product and company information available on-demand, on-the-spot, can be seen as a democratisation of the process of consumption.

Were this type of product assessment to become more widespread, is could reflect the popularity of products through their sales figures, and thus steer supermarket and organic industry buyers to stock more appropriate products.

Shopping the old-fashioned way

But none of this was available that evening as I stood in line at the checkout to buy a carton of milk so that participants in the community education course could enjoy the stuff in their coffee or tea.

Incidentally, it had been quite a walk to retrieve that single product from the rear of the store, as, in supermarkets, it is a marketing practice to place popular, everyday items such as milk at the rear of the store so that shoppers have to walk an aisle or two of other products in the hope that they will be sufficiently attracted by something to make an unintended purchase.

Oh, purchasing only a single product implies the use of cash, so it was to a young woman at the checkout that I handed my $5 note, avoiding interacting with yet another machine that day.

“Hello”, she said automatically but cheerfully, “how are you?”.

Surfing remains a preoccupation of those fortunate enough to live within close distance of that curve of golden sand, but new times have thrown up now ideas in the suburb. One of those new — and good — ideas can be found not all that far from the famous beach in the front yard of a modest block of 1970s walk-up apartments. There, an innovative young woman by the name of Kimberley has turned a monoculture of lawn grass into a polyculture of vegetables, all in a garden of curvaceous edges.

Look beyond the circular garden — it’s called a ‘mandala’ garden design because it copies the shape of Indian mandalas — and you will see a number of young fruit trees down the side of the building as well as a compost bin.

It seems that in the City East the idea of food gardens in apartment blocks is slowly catching on.

See another apartment food garden here.

Visitors from the Sydney Food Fairness Alliance's Food Summit tour of food systems in the City East region get an introduction to Kimberley's apartment garden.

The 'mandala' shaped garden is a variation on the circular garden bed design. Plastic weed stripping has been used to define the garden edge and to present a barrier to lawn grass invasion.

Kimberley - the woman behind the garden — who did the Randwick City Council Living Smart course.

The curved shape of the apartment's vegetable garden is evident in this photo.

Grown in North Queensland, the fruit is about two-thirds of a finger length in size and is eaten raw after removing the yellow skin. In taste, the soft white flesh is sweet, with a tang that is and reminiscent of magenta lillypilly (Syzygium paniculatum), though much milder.

Achacha fruit

BIG MARKETING EFFORT
Marketers were encountered in January at fruit and vege shops in Sydney, offering a taste and information on the fruit. A small paper carry bag provided to take away your achacha in carried information about it.

The marketing indicates the scale of the effort being made to create a market for what appears to be a new fruit in the shops.

The information provided claims that the fruit is ‘eco-friendly’, however the actual meaning of this remains unexplained.

Achacha fruit peeled and ready to eat.

NOT THE FIRST NEW FRUIT
Other, less common fruits that might appeal to a segment of the fruit eating market have appeared from time to time.

One such is loquat, a tasty, round fruit found in Sydney home gardens where it’s production often goes unused and where it can become a vector for the perpetuation of fruit fly.

Another is dragon fruit, which is the fruit of a cactus. Then there are the berry fruits — blueberry, raspberry etc.

These have all added to the diversity of fruit available to the public.

PACKAGING COULD GENERATE BUYER RESISTANCE
These less-common fruits can be a little pricey at times, however the real disadvantage that marketers and retailers have yet to come to terms with is packaging waste. All of these products come packaged in foam punnets covered in plastic film — waste, other words, that persists in landfill.

To a increasingly waste-aware public, this could create buyer resistance to an otherwise good product. Perhaps marketers might look to the new, biodegardable and compostable bioplastics now becoming available (see: http://pacific-edge.info/bioplastics/) as these are made from plant material themselves and may be more acceptable to discerning buyers interested in the fill lifecycle values of the fruits and their packaging.

Information: www.achacha.com.au

It was on the way back that the interesting encounters happen.

Feral bananas make their escape through a rickety paling fence.

Walking past a deserted house, its once prim garden now overgrown, we notice a few young banana saplings making their escape through the decaying fence of aged, grey palings. In doing this they are being quite stealthy, never impeding passers-by so as to invite removal and making their quiet escape in the deep shade of an overhanging tree.

Have we come across some vegetative conspiracy to turn the quiet streets of lower Coogee into a plantation of the long yellow fruit, their bright green fronds to wave gently in the late afternoon sea breeze? More than one of us hopes so. We leave this new generation to continue its furtive propagation in the shadows.

At the start of the climb towards Howard Street our second encounter of the morning is about to take place. Here, from the front garden of a modest block of apartments, a spindly tree with elongated, sage-green leaves thrusts its fruit-laden branch over the footpath, threatening passers-by with clusters of the shiny green things at just above eye level height. The branch is one of many sagging under the weight of the the olives.

“Wonder if anyone actually harvests this”, I ask in speculation, savouring the imaginary taste of fresh crusty bread dipped into a bowl of the oil, reinforced with balsamic vinegar.

We move on just a few metres up the road to encounter number three of that morning. Here, we find a woman who has done some of Fiona’s council workshops. We stop to talk. She lives in an adjacent apartment, an early example of a brick, 1960s walkup of the type so ubiquitous throughout this city. Beckoning us towards the street verge, she proudly shows us where she has taken over a bare patch in the footpath, where council has planted a young tree around which she had established a patch of spider lillies with their bright white tracery of flowers. It provides a flourishing contrast to nearby derelict verge that supports nothing more than a scatty growth of gravel and weeds.

She invites us into the back garden of her apartment block where she shows us this huge lillypilly tree — we guess that it’s a fine, mature example of magenta lillypilly, Syzygium paniculatum — and a ‘tree of heaven’, a nitrogenous species considered a weed in the Sydney region. They grow from the neighbouring property but in front of them, on her apartment’s land, I notice a row of council recycling wheelies and a number of those common, black plastic composting bins that are used by the apartment’s residents.

Apartment dwellers composting their kitchen wastes is not a new phenomenon to us — Fiona has provided training in composting for apartment residents elsewhere in the area — but what is less common, though no longer quite so rare, is the small vegetable garden over by the fence.

“The people living upstairs started it”, she tells us. “This is the only sunny space in the backyard, so it was put here”.

Sited in this sunny area (though no sun this drizzly morning) is a small patch of productivity… tomatoes bearing a modest crop of smallish crimson fruit, a sprawling pumpkin vine, Italian parsley, eggplant and more.. And in pots, capsicum, rosemary, the edible herb purple pirilla (possibly Perilla frutescens, family Lamiaceae) with its leaves shaped like those of the stinging nettle, more Italian parsley, an olive tree, a couple citrus including a lime tree and more.

We talk for awhile and soon it’s time to leave. As we walk out to the footpath, Fiona mentioned the olive tree down the road.

Olives that threatened passers-by with a CLUNK! on the head.

“Oh, yes”, the woman responds.

“Last year I spoke to some men there, on the footpath. They had a ladder to reach the higher parts of the tree and they were picking the olives. When I approached them, they assured me that they had permission to collect the fruit.”

So, a walk to the beach for a little exercise and a coffee has ended in serendipitous  encounters with an escape of feral bananas, a woman living in an apartment block with its own composting system and its own small food garden and a overhanging olive tree harvested by urban gleaners. These, I think, are signs of hope in this area of medium density living.

Apartment block food production and urban gleaning… not a bad discovery for a Sunday morning walk.

WHEN WE MOVED INTO THE APARTMENT near The Spot in Randwick, we noticed that someone had planted a few herbs and that there was a wormery in use by one of the owners. There was also a large sandy strip, once a garden in the backyard. What sort of garden it had been we didn’t know.

At our first body corporate meeting one of the residents said that it was she who had planted the herbs and who maintained the small wormery. She also said that she would like a garden in which to grow food. The other owners were not particularly interested in gardening, however they were fine with the idea of building a new garden from which we could all take some food.

It would soon come to be.

Preliminaries — look and think

First to do was to observe the sun and shade patterns, figure our what would happen with runoff in heavy rain and to assess the type of soil in the backyard.

DAY ONE, early morning: The site before work started. The sandy patch had once been a garden. The fence is to be trellised for growing climbers such as passionfruit and beans. An existing Acacia baileyana (Cootamundra wattle) is seen to the side of the garden. It is a relatively short lived legume (family: Fabaceae) that is considered to be a bushland weed by some in the Sydney region but that is commonly grown as an ornamental. Over the fence are a citrus, in the backyard of the neighbouring apartments, are a young mango and a fig. Out of sight, a young avocado overhangs the fence from the apartments on the other side of the yard.

Soil conditions were obvious. This is the Eastern Suburbs and the soil is, well… it’s mainly Eastern Suburbs sand… which means that it retains few of the nutrients that growing plants need and little of the water they require to grow strong and healthy. The sandy soil would have to be augmented to make it fertile.

Designwise, we decided on two narrow beds for those veges and herbs plucked frequently – such as leafy greens, tomato, capsicum, eggplant and so on – and a broadbed for those that take a longer time to grow to harvest and for perennial vegetables (those that live and produce over several years). The beds would be raised above the ground and, to produce a good harvest as soon as possible, we decided to bring in an organic-rich growing medium to fill the beds and to supplement the sandy soil.

We could have gone with the no-dig, sheet mulched type of garden, however this type of garden construction takes some time for nutrients to penetrate the sandy soil to such as extent that the garden would reach optimal productivity in reasonable time. We had seen the value of building raised beds and bringing in a rich, organic fill at Randwick Council’s training garden, which is used for its Sustainable Gardening course at the Bundock Street community centre. Here, the raised beds are far more productive than the adjacent ground level no-dig, sheet mulched garden. Eastern Suburbs sandy soils are so nutrient-poor that bringing in a nutritious fill to make a garden is justified.

The fill we used was composted from council’s green waste collection and was accelerated in processing by spraying the green waste windrows with ‘effective microorganisms’. Essentially, this makes it a bacterially-accelerated composting method.

The beds were to be made from recycled plastic boards, which once were printer cartridges. These come sealed against ultraviolet light and leaching.

The decision to go ahead and create a garden was easily made.

Day one — time to act

The crew from Sydney Organic Gardens turned up a few minutes ahead of time and soon we were measuring and laying out the position for the beds. In addition to the garden beds, an adjacent slope needed stabilising and work started on this by installing the first retaining wall. Later, we will backfill this and also a second retaining wall, to effectively turn an unstable, unusable bare soil slope into a terraced garden.

DAY ONE, morning: Fiona removes invasive madera vine that grew over the fence from a neighbouring garden. The vine was not put through the compost as that would have provided good growing conditions and seen its spread. Mader is an exotic and invasive weed of the Sydney region.

By lunchtime, what had been a patch of bare, unproductive sand had been replaced by a series of three raised garden beds. After a break, we started work in the hot afternoon sun on the task of moving the five cubic metre mound of organic fill that was blocking the footpath… by hand.

As a 1920s apartment block, there was no driveway to bring materials to us in the backyard, so everything had to be carried manually. The fill was shoveled into buckets and rubbish bins on the footpath, carried down a total of 17 steps, tipped into a wheelbarrow, wheeled carefully down the narrow path and, finally, tipped on to the garden where it was raked into a low mounded shape. It was hot work.

DAY ONE, morning: Construction is underway on the first of the raised beds, with Steve's apprentices working on the second bed behind. The apprentices had joined Steve's business only four days previously.

Day two

Today, the garden beds having been built and filled by late afternoon the previous day, we were off to the nursery to buy bales of pea straw to mulch the garden. Other than being a good price at the time, pea straw is leguminous, that is, it comes from the pea plant, which is a legume. The advantage of this is that legumes have a biological association with the bacteria that produce nitrogen, one of the main nutrients needed by growing plants. As the mulch breaks down the nitrogen becomes available to the roots of the vegetables, providing them with a source of the plant food.

A source of nitrogen-rich material in the garden activates the principle of the garden providing some of its own nutrients, cutting down on the material brought in from outside as the garden gets underway. This is nature-assisted-design.

The mulch was well watered in as the day cooled towards evening.

DAY TWO, evening: As the day dims towards night, Fiona spreads a thick layer of pea straw on the garden beds as a mulch. The pea straw is from a leguminous plant that produces the nitrogen needed by growing plants.

Day three

DAY THREE, morning: On the morning of the third day of the garden project, Fiona plants seedlings of vegetables and flowers (that form part of the pest management/pollination strategy).

Up while the day was cool, it was a morning for us to plant our seeds and seedlings.

First in were some flowering plants that will attract pollinating insects as well as them  meat-eating, predatory insects that feed on the vegetarian bugs that eat our vegetables. This makes the basis of a food web and it’s something that evolves as the garden matures. It’s part of our Integrated Pest Management strategy that helps us avoid the need for non-organic pesticides.

Capsicum, asparagus, lettuce and other vegetable seeds and seedlings then went in. Hopefully, in a few months, we will return to the garden to harvest and eat what we have planted.

By 9am, food production on Sully Street was underway.

Enacting principles of design

Some of the design principles enacted in the garden include supplying nutrient inputs for the garden. To help with this, a compost bin was installed. When one of the non-gardening residents saw this, she asked if she, too, could use it for her kitchen wastes. This shows how ideas spread via the ‘demonstration effect’. That is, by demonstrating the idea and providing the infrastructure (a compost bin in this case), some people will be motivated to adopt it.

Another principle was that of access. Plants that will grow in the narrow beds are easily reached from three sides (the fourth abuts the fence, which we will trellis for passionfruit, climbing beans and the like). Stepping stones provide access into the broadbed where longer term and scrambling plants like melon, pumpkin, asparagus and the like are to be  established. It’s understatement to say that Amanda, one of the apartment owners, is something of an asparagus enthusiast and was quick to put her young plants in. Next day, she was seen nibbling on the thin shoots.

Low maintenance was another consideration as well as being an established principal of effective garden design. That is one reason recycled plastic boards were used, hoping that they might outlast timber. Bark chips were layered thickly to make mulched pathways around the garden beds and to keep down weeds, and a strip of plastic edging was dug into the soil around the garden to reduce invasion by stoloniferous (those that spread by creeping and setting roots from their nodes) lawn grasses.

The use of the recycled plastic boards lent itself to the construction of rectangular garden beds. We chose these because of their ease of construction, maintenance and harvest. There are garden designs such as the mandala gardens favoured by those in permaculture, however these can make for more intensive maintenance on account of the greater length of garden edge that interfaces with paths and grassed areas, and there is no factual evidence that they are any more productive that conventional, rectangular garden beds. Simplicity, as usual, is the key to effective and manageable systems.

We enacted the principle of low-water-use gardening by bringing in the organic-rich, moisture-retentive fill for the garden beds and by placing a think layer of pea straw mulch on top of the beds to reduce water loss by evaporation. Now, a couple of the apartment owners are talking about a water tank and one of them even likes the idea of a photovoltaic array on the roof.

Productive apartments

Edible gardens on apartment block common land can be difficult things to start as the agreement of people on the body corporate is necessary. Fortunately, though slowly, they are starting to appear. Now, here is Sully Street’s first. As well as food, apartment gardens provide the opportunity for active recreation and make a more useful form of landscaping than lawn and unproductive ornamental plants.

By growing some of the food we eat we apartment dwellers, too, can become producers, not mere consumers.

See another City East apartment garden here.

DAY ONE, morning; The work starts by stockpiling the materials for the garden and marking the location for the raised garden beds. Steve Batley, the landscape architect who set up Sydney Organic Gardens (www.sydneyorganicgardens.com.au) and a past permaculture design student of ours, is seen with the measuring tape.

DAY ONE, late morning: The raised beds near completion and filling with reprocessed organic growing medium.

DAY ONE, morning: Rob Alsop drills a board in preparation to bolting it into the raised bed. The board is a recycled plastic, made of old printer cartridges, that has been stabilised against ultraviolet light and leaching. Rob is otherwise an illustrator and trainer. He illustrated Rosemary Morrow's book, An Earthkeepers Guide to Permaculture (http://pacific-edge.info/617/) and A Good Home Forever (http://pacific-edge.info/649/) and teaches permaculture design.

DAY ONE, morning: The five cubic metre stockpile of organic growing medium blocks the Sully Street footpath. The medium is reprocessed, composted green waste from the council green waste collection.

DAY ONE, early afternoon: An apprentice has carried a bin load of organic fill down the stairs from the stockpile on the footpath and tips it into a waiting barrow. The fill was then wheeled down to the garden.

DAY ONE, afternoon: A barrow load of growing medium is tipped into the garden bed. Once there, the soil was raked into a smooth shape that was slightly mounded in the centre to allow for compaction.

DAY THREE, morning: On the morning of the third day of the garden project, Fiona plants seedlings of vegetables and flowers (that form part of the pest management/pollination strategy).

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IT’S THE END OF FEBRUARY AND OF THE SUMMER OF 2010, and around two months after creating our Randwick apartment blocks’ vegetable garden it is now in full bloom and we have started to harvest from it. The foliage of the plants forms a low canopy over the mulch. Pests have been few and minor.

A new garden has now been made on the opposite side of the apartment block’s backyard and has been planted to seedlings of jam melon. These were grown from flat, red seed given by the Italian partner of one of the apartment owners. He got the seed from his parents, who inherited it in Italy from their parents. I guess this is what you might call ‘hetritage’ seed. He says that the jam melons taste terrible raw but make an excellent jam. We look forward to a jam processing session upon his return from Italy is a few months.

Shading may limit winter productivity in the existing vegetable garden, however the jam melon patch could make a fine winter garden. We’ll see.

Around two months after creating the vegetable garden we have started eating from it. The platelike leaves of cucumber and pumpkin spill from the broadbed at the end. The coil of black plastic stripping will be dug into the ground to form a weed barrier to prevent lawn grass invading the paths and vegetable beds. That, and the laying of a bark chip path along the garden edge, will be done as the final part of the garden construction.

Looking along the garden beds towards the apartment block compost bin. The straw stacked next to the bin is to add carbon-rich material to the kitchen scraps placed in it. This ensures a good carbon-to-nitrogen ratio and stops the food scraps making the compost anaerobic and smelly.