Council is aiming to trial small-scale wind powered turbines at sites across the City.

Once the trial is complete, Randwick Council will be better informed and equipped to decide how to best use wind-powered energy at a local level.

Trialling the effectiveness of wind power technology is just one initiative under Randwick Council’s Sustaining our City program, which is designed to improve Randwick City’s air quality and reduce greenhouse gas emissions as outlined in the 20-year Randwick City Plan

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.

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).

………………………………………………………………………..

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.

Ecopella provided a harmonious performance.

Thanks to the efforts of the Arts in the Gardens team’s Mary O’Connell, this year’s celebrations featured Ecopella, an accapella group that took the audience through songs amusing, political and frivolous.

Phillip and this community gardener refused to be intimidated by the durian's smell.

The performance was followed by celebratory food that the gardeners had made themselves, fruit juices or wine, but appetites were exhausted well before the supply of food. There was, of course, the traditional BBQ of sausages for those seeking to sustain this fine Australian tradition.Some, however, were less certain about the durian that Phillip Booth brought to the celebrations. The spiky-skinned, tropical fruit has a bad reputation for its odour, however that did not deter a number of community gardeners from trying the sticky, stretchy, rubbery, chewy flesh, which most found quite palatable, even nice-tasting.

The Randwick Organic Community Garden has become popular and there is now a waiting list for allotments. New gardeners, however, participate in the shared gardening areas, building their skills while awaiting an allotment.

Good news is that the community garden’s egg supply may soon be reinstated. Following the devastation of their chicken flock by a rampaging, nocturnal fox, a reinforced and greatly enlarged chicken run has been built in preparation for a new flock.

Since it restarted at its present location in Payne Reserve, Randwick, a little over three years ago, the community garden has gone from strength to strength.

Phillip Booth carefully opens a durian. Phillip, now a professional evaluator of sustainability education and other programs, once managed the Permaculture Epicente in Sydney.

The system was installed by Australian owned company, Solgen Energy, to connect to an array of existing solar electic panels to create a combined 48kW solar energy installation. The additional 36kW array of 216 photovoltaic modules generates up to 58 megawatts of electricity a year and reduces Council’s carbon emission by 58 tonnes of CO2 per year.

Randwick City Council has installed 20 kilowatts of solar panels at other Council sites and has undertaken other sustainability initiatives including large water conservation projects as well as introducing a community car share scheme that includes designated parking for both car share and hybrid vehicles at popular shopping and beachside locations.

Council makes use of an environmental levy to fund the Sustaining Our City program that incorporates a Local Greenhouse Action Plan and a range of community education initiatives such as the annual Eco Living Fair, Sustainable Gardening course and Living Smart course.

In 2010, Council’s Sustainability Education Officer, Fiona Campbell, will oversee a project to retrofit for energy efficiency, water efficiency and public education the Randwick Community Centre. The project will see the installation of simple technologies to reduce energy and water consumption and feature interpretive signage and education programs, including the PIG — the Permaculture Interpretive Garden — to offer visitors and participants in council courses ideas that they can implement in their homes and apartments.

Rating

INNOVATION/DESIGN THINKING: Medium.

A solution to carbon emission reduction.

SCALABILITY POTENTIAL: High if roof space and funding available.

REPLICABILITY: Can be copied easily with existing technology.