IT WAS ON A SUNNY SATURDAY MORNING

It was also the day that the garden team acquitted their Matching Grant from the City of Sydney. The City provides the grants as start-up capital to community gardens and other community initiatives. There to acknowledge that was Ashley Heath, who administers Matching Grants for the City of Sydney, and her predecessor in the role, Lynn Welch.

Also invited by the gardeners was City of Sydney CEO, Monica Barone, who in her speech emphasised how the community garden was a local element in the Sustainable Sydney 2030 plan, the City’s blueprint for the next 30 years. The same could be said for all of the City’s community gardens and the civic engagement that comes with them. a

Monica spoke about the value of community initiatives to the City and urban contexts such as the income gap and other sociological matters related to living in Australia’s global city.

Celebration is important to community gardeners and to all community-initiatied projects, especially those that create places in our cities where families and individuals can gather and cooperate in some common project. And the James Street Reserve C0mmunity Garden has much to celebrate, having repurposed under-utilised city land for a productive garden where both food and social relationships are gardened.

The current edition of House and Garden magazine was provided to all at the dinner. It featured photos of the community garden and is just the latest in what has been quite a lot of media coverage. The day after the garden’s first birthday dinner, the James Street garden appeared on television. In the garden, the crew have also adopted an educational role, hosting visits by groups intetested in starting their own gardens, tours for local government staff and overseas visitors engaged in urban agriculture.

From right... Janet Verden (community garden team), Lynn Welch, Monica Barone (CEO, City of Sydney), Ashley Heath (grants manager, City of Sydney), Russ Grayson (community gardens, Landcare coordinator City of Sydney).

Some of the James Street Reserve Community Garden crew at the birthday celebration.

Within a month of returning to Sydney I witnessed another exciting move in community food systems—the launch of Sydney Food Connect. At last, it seemed, the idea of community supported agriculture (CSA) was catching on across the nation.

Sydney Food Connect's superb birthday cake... fruit and vegetables tumble from the horn of plenty as they tumble from the fields thanks to the hard work of Food Connect's farmers.

Fast forward a year to late-April 2011 and I find myself on a minor street in Rozelle, a street of industrial buildings quite close to the old coal burner that once fed electricity to the city. That power station lies dormant now, its windows smashed and its monolithic facade a testament to a fading age.

That street is deserted on a Sunday afternoon but follow the music and inside an anonymous industrial building you find festively and celebration. The occasion—the celebration of Sydney Food Connect’s first birthday.

Social business, social outcomes

Food Connect is no ordinary business… it’s what’s called a social business or a social enterprise… a business that has social goals. This gives it a value that run-of-the-mill businesses don’t have, a special social value. Social business uses business methods to achieve worthwhile social goals.

It takes time to establish a small business and Sydney Food Connect is still striving to establish itself as a viable economic entity. The purpose of Food Connect is to make the produce of regional farmers and food processors, such as bakers, available to city people who subscribe to the weekly box of mainly organic, local food. Sure, some foods like avocados and bananas come from further north in NSW, but as organic food entrepreneur, Tsung Xu—one of the people who has assisted Food Connect says—to some extent you have to supply people with what they want and those fruits are not farmed near Sydney.

Unlike other community supported agriculture (CSA) start-ups, Food Connect sources its produce from a larger number of farmers. This provides security of supply and avoids seeing the system collapse when a farmer who is the sole supplier to a CSA decides its time for a career change or to move on. This happened to an earlier CSA in Sydney.

This farming family supplies Sydney Food Connect from their urban fringe market garden.

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When farmer’s produce comes into the Rozelle packing facility a convivial crew divide it into small, medium or large boxes and these are taken by refrigerated truck (to keep it fresh and reduce wilt in Sydney’s summers) to the City Cousin pick-up points throughout the city. There, in the early evening, subscribers collect their boxes of organic, local food and in many City Cousins enjoy a few minutes of conviviality with other subscribers. Some bring their young children—at our Randwick City Cousin, the young boy of a subscriber usually insists of being taken outside to see the ‘windmill’, the wind turbine that spins high above the community centre.

The Sydney Food Connect crew.

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Pure permaculture

Avocado farmer, Sandra Fishwick of Red Plateau Organic Produce on the Comboyne plateau, supplies organically grown avocados to Sydney Food Connect. Comboyne is the closest supply of avocado to Sydney.

From time to time I get disappointed with environmentalists. You would think that they would know that food is a keystone resource and that food choices have a direct impact on the generation of greenhouse gases, on waste going to landfill (where it breaks down to release methane) and on water consumption, and that they would rush to join Food Connect because food procured closer to where it is eaten and that is grown organically reduces these impacts. It’s good that some do this—the Greenpeace office in Ultimo, Sydney, is a City Cousin and that makes a pleasant change to the organisation’s usual hobby of attacking Apple. What’s not good that many environmentalists don’t, either because they have no local City Cousin or they’re happy to shop in the supermarket.

Environmentalist failure to support social business is not new, as the case of EcoForest Ltd showed some years ago. Rather than invest their surplus income in an ecologically-managed forestry operation, they preferred conventional investments.

The argument that permaculture people should support Food Connect is a no-brainer. Food Connect epitomises permaculture founder, Bill Mollison’s statement that it can be better to buy your food from someone who has produced it ethically than to try to grow your own.

Because Food Connect buys from regional farmers (returning up to 40 centre in the dollar to the farmer, in comparison to the supermarket’s five of so cents) it supports Bill’s edict that we should return food production to the city, in this case to the market gardens on the urban-rural interface.

Bill and permaculture co-founder, David Holmgren, also said that permaculture initiatives should be financially viable. And, as a permaculture-influenced enterprise (Julian Lee, founder of Sydney Food Connect, is a graduate of the Permaculture Design Course), that is exactly what Sydney Food Connect is attempting at the moment. Food Connect is precisely the sort of social enterprise the two were talking about.

Music, food and a good time

Social entrepreneur and founder of Sydney Food Connect, Julian Lee.

Old industrial streets in the Inner West take on an empty, forlorn aspect on a quiet Sunday afternoon in mid-Autumn. But everything changed once I walked through that door… here was live music, dancing, the conviviality of the good company of fellow City Cousins, of Food Connect staff and Food Connect subscribers an their children and partners. Here too was more food than could be eaten at the event—the left overs were packaged as take-aways—here were brief and unplanned testimonial speeches and here was the Food Connect’s superb birthday cake.

That cake, I have to say, was more an edible sculpture than a common cake. The cabbage with its veined leaves was a true work of fine art…  culinary art, and the carrots were made of carrot cake, the lemons of lemon cake… it was a case of having to destroy the art work in order to enjoy it and its varied flavours.

So, one year on and Food Connect has built its own social network of City Cousins and city eaters but there remains more to do to increase the number of subscribers and recruit new City Cousins to take this innovative social idea into the suburban heartland.

Food Connect Sydney: http://sydney.foodconnect.com.au/

Food Connect accountant Margaret, on left, presents Lena, now leaving Food Connect, with flowers.

Bondi Food Connect City Cousin, Lance Lieber.

Robert Pekin, from the Food Connect foundation, started Food Connect in Brisbane in 2004.

Fiona Campbell, Randwick's Food Connect City Cousin, has a few words.

Food Connect Foundation's Robert Pekin conspires with Randwick City Cousin, Fiona Campbell.

TO JUDGE BY THE SIGNS on farmer’s market stalls, food grown locally seems to be something of a specialty at Evandale market. A recent visit disclosed sign after sign on a number of stalls advertising the localism of fresh vegetables, herbs and fruit.

Some stallholders sell organic fruit and vegetables although these are not certified organic, leaving it to the buyer to decide whether or not to trust the seller. Like Sydney’s urban fringe farmers, most of those selling at Evandale are from non-English speaking backgrounds, mainly people from Asia.

If you come here at the right time of year, look for the stallholder selling heaped, overloaded punnets of Tasmanian berry fruits, including delicious redcurrants, strawberries and raspberries. At any time of year there are jams made from local fruits, Tasmanian honey and other bottled preserves.

An island set up for locally produced food

Tasmania, as an island with a decentralised population (approximately half, around 200,000, live in the capital, Hobart; around 70,000 occupy Tasmania’s second city, Launceston; the remainder are scattered through Penguin, Burnie, Huonville and lesser centres), is ideally suited to the development of small, family owned farms that could feed its population centres with perishables, dairy and other foods. In comparison with the mainland (the rest of Australia, that is) the soils are fertile and the island is well-watered. Occupying a cool temperate climatic zone, a wide variety of culinary herbs, fruit and vegetables can be produced, as well as dairying and fisheries including the fish farms that are already established. The good news for orchardists is that there is no fruit fly in Tasmania.

Evandale market features several fresh food stalls.

Evandale is not the only source of fresh foods available from weekly markets. Tasmania’s renowned leatherwood honey, so-called for the leatherwood tree that the bees harvest and that grows in the cool temperate rainforest, is readily available. A local apiarist was found enthusiastically selling his product at Exeter market in the Tamar valley, approximately 20 minutes drive north of Launceston, not far from the popular Exeter Bakery.

In Hobart, too, food localism is a selling feature with stallholders at the Saturday Salamanca Place markets having notices advertising ‘local grown’. ‘No Spray’ was also noticed on products.

Finding Evandale

Evandale markets are open every Sunday morning. A charge of 20 cents is made for entry.

Evandale is about a 20 minute drive south of Launceston. Follow the highway past the airport and watch for the turnoff sign.

It is an old town and those with an interest in history and architecture might like to walk its streets to view the Georgian buildings, both domestic and commercial. The town also has a number of antique shops, art galleries and, for the hungry, cafes.

Tasmania's soils grow tremendous potatoes. Here's some freshly dug.

Evandale is no the only market near Launceston. Here, Fiona buys localy made jam at Exeter market, north of Launceston in the Tamar Valley.

How Tasmanians buy potatoes.

Local product for local eating. All cities and towns should be able to feed themselves with perishables and other foods grown locally.

The tour was one of three organised as part of October 2009’s Sydney Food Fairness Alliance’s (SFFA) Food Summit, Hungry For Change. While other tours headed off to the urban fringe farms and foodlands of the urban north west and south west, the other bus, kindly supplied by the City of Sydney, pointed its wheels southward and drove the short distance from the pickup point in Surry Hills, where Hungry For Change was held, to the Waterloo Estate community gardens.

Most diverse region

The idea behind the tour, organised by the SFFA’s Chantelle Doyle and led by Russ Grayson, was to expose visitors, some of whom were from interstate, to a range of different food initiatives in the inner urban-Eastern Suburbs region.

Collectively, the Inner West, inner urban and Eastern Suburbs are home to the most diverse range of food initiatives in the metropolitan area. Based on different models, the initiatives include those of the voluntary community sector, local government, small business and farming.

Journey to Marton

Parking on the streetside, the 22 passengers walked past Solander Community Garden, the second of the three to be built at Waterloo Estate thanks to the initiative of the UNSW’s Faculty of the Built Environment, South Sydney Council (since absorbed into City of Sydney), the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network and local people living on the Estate. A short traverse of the parkland brought the visitors to Marton Community Garden.

Marton Community Garden is one of three on the Watrloo Estate. The small but productive garden is farmed by residents of the public housing project that surrounds it.

Marton is a small community garden that receives support from the City of Sydney through their Community Gardens and Volunteer Coordinator, Annie Walker, and the Royal Botanic Gardens Trust’s Community Greening Program for residents of social housing. Allotments are distributed to gardeners in which they produce mainly vegetables. The garden is fenced to prevent damage by the mindless and features a large mosaic artwork on the wall adjacent to the entrance. Prue Reuben, from the UNSW Faculty of the Built Environment, told the visitors that graffiti is less of a problem than might be imagined. One graffitist, however, did make an inscription on the artwork. It was small and unobtrusive, saying only that “I helped make this”.

Prue has many years association with the Waterloo Estate community gardens and she showed us the first of the community gardens to be built there — Cook Commuity Garden.

A circular garden occupying what was once a childrens’ playground (the playground has been moved adjancent to the garden), it is divided into pie-shaped segments made into allotments. A set of three new, raised allotments have just been planted in the area around the circular garden and a triple bay of enclosed compost bins was installed when the garden was built. All of the allotments are allocated and the garden has been popular since first opened in the 1990s.

Cook Community Garden was the first built on the Waterloo Estate. It is a small but well-used community garden producing vegetables and culinary herbs and providing active recreation and learning to its gardeners.

Visitors explore Cook Community Garden.

Soon, the travelers on the food trail would see another community garden, only this one would be much larger than those of the Waterloo Estate.

Darlington and places east

There are unsung heroes out there in the community and Auntie Beryl is one of them. A quiet woman with considerable achievement in the training of her people in the area, it was she who the food trail travelers next met.

Yaama  Dhiyaan Cafe and hospitality training centre is adjacent to the site of the weekly Eveleigh Farmers’ Market. There, Auntie Beryl’s initiative as one of the people who got the Aboriginal livelihood program started was evident in the class studying for future livelihoods in the food and restaurant industry. Auntie Beryl explained how Yaama  Dhiyaan operates after which we enjoyed coffee, conversation and biscuits.

The tour had hoped to drop in at Thoughtful Foods Co-op at UNSW, however we were now a little behind in time so we went on to our lunch stop at Randwick Organic Community Garden.

What a contrast to the smaller Marton Community Garden. Here was a garden spreading in concentric circles towards a distant fence, and here was Emma Daniell, horticulturist and garden educator, to tell the food trail tourers how this long-running garden works.

Randwick Organic Community Garden features both allotments and shared gardening areas. The garden is entirely rainfed (there is no connection to city water) and harvests water from the adjacent stable, storing it in a 23,000 litre water tank (the orange coloured object at rear left).

On reaching the Eastern Suburbs, the food trail tour had lunch amid the spaceousness of Randwick Organic Community Garden. The community garden is self-magaged and occupies land owned for the most part by Randwick City Council.

Unlike the Marton Community Garden, this garden is a voluntary community effort open to all (like all community gardens on Department of Housing land, Marton is open only to residents of the social housing that surrounds it). All of the allotments are now claimed. There are also shared garden areas. It’s a mixed garden of young fruit trees, herbs and — before the fox got them — chooks. The visitors saw the new, reinforced chook pen now in construction. There is a large water tank-come-art-work, thanks to the Arts in the Community Garden team, and a large pergola that provides table and chairs for meetings, socialising or just lounging about. The nursery and storage room form part of the structure.

Here we lunched on wraps, fruit and juice supplied by O-Organics, the caterer. Best of all, this was a no-waste lunch — no plastic film wrapping the wraps and the plastic trays in which the food was delivered and transported were reusable.

Medium density gardening in Maroubra

It was only a short hop over to Maroubra where, not far from the famous surfing beach, the tourers stopped at a block of apartments where they found a circular ‘mandala’ garden full of vegetables going to seed.

Kimberly, the woman behind the garden, explained how she and her partner maintain it and how it is the product of a Permaculture East ‘permablitz’, a mutual assistance project in which a group descends on a property and installs a food garden. Kimberly is also a graduate of Randwick City Council’s Living Smart course.

The vegetables were going to seed when the tour arrived at Kimberly's apartment vegetable garden. She plans to collect and dry the seeds for replanting next season. The garden makes productive use of what was a lawn monoculture and showed what apartment dwellers could do to improve their property and supply a little food. Kimberly is at left, Peter Driscoll second from right.

Here, people met Peter Driscoll, another Permaculture East member who helped build Kimberley’s garden and who started TransitionSydney.

It was Kimberley who came up with the idea of making a food garden at the front of her apartment block. The garden was built through a Permaculture East permablitz.

Farming Sydney’s far east

It was a bit of a navigational adventure to finally find Gordon Ha’s market garden at Phillip Bay, at the far south of the Eastern Suburbs close to Botany Bay.

Gordon’s farm (download submission to retain the farms) is one of three that occupy the sandy flat at the far southern end of the Eastern Suburbs. Locally, these small but intensely managed and productive  family-owned farms are known as the ‘Chinese market gardens’ as they are all farmed by Asians and have been for some time. The are all that is left of the market garden industry in the Eastern Suburbs and, with three other market gardens over on the other side of the airport in Rockdale, are a reminder of how the city once fed itself.

This was the first visit to a market garden for some on the tour, however any romantic notions about the farming life must have been dispelled when Gordon told people that he works six and a half days a week in the market garden.

Responding to the visitors’ questions, Gordon said that he fertilises his garden beds with urea and turns vegetable residue — the part of the vegetable plan left after harvesting the edible part — into the soil where it breaks down into organic matter. He is not an organic market garden and he makes use of some pesticides.

For some of the food trail visitors at Gordon Ha's market garden at La Perouse, it was their first time on a farm of this type.

Gordon said that he does not supply the Flemington wholesale markets. His produce, mainly Asian vegetables, goes to local greengrocers. That’s truly local food.

Interesting that learning about farm life might have been, work soon called and Gordon had to excuse himself to go move his sprinklers — he pumps irrigation water from the creek adjacent to the property. He left the tourers to wander around the farm.

A full day and an instructive one

The inner and eastern food trail tour took people to regional food enterprises that ranged from the community based to livelihood training to commercial family farm. It was a fitting and instructive end to the SFFA’s Food Summit.

While there are other places the tour could have gone, the day introduced visitors to the diversity of approaches that, together, go some way to feeding the metropolis, or this part of it, anyway. Feedback offered by the tourers suggested that it was this diversity of enterprises that was the high point of the SFFA’s tour.

Lawson is a town whose small, main street strip of shops is being rebuilt so that what was the back of the buildings becomes the front. Others fronting the highway, old timber buildings, are boarded up, their days of buying and selling now ended.

Funky Lawson shopfront

The cause of this transformation is the widening of the Great Western Highway where it passes through town. The changes are seen as soon as you walk off the footpath along the highway, when you enter an area rebuilt. There, the pale rosy colour of new brick buildings and the white of those cherry blossoms are what catches the eye.

Sufficiently caffeinated at the local cafe-come-art gallery, the three of us walked over to the community centre where we were to meet local people interested in staring a community food garden.

We — Fiona Cambell, Rob Alsop and myself — had left the hills of Fairlight and driven up to the Blue Mountains after learning that track work of the Western Line would make a rail journey of a little over an hour each way into one spanning a full four hours and more. We had decided to do that a little differently too, foresaking the freeway for the old highway where it winds its way across the plains and through the towns west of Sydney. It was the type of journey made by travelers of a generation ago, one now forsaken for the long straight line of the freeway.

Our presence in the Blue Mountains that day was for the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network, and the day started with a look at a number of sites for the proposed community garden. One of these was a portion of a disused golf course, the club having gone broke some years ago. Another was a steeper, north east facing slope adjacent to a rehabilitation centre from which a sweeping view over the grey-green of the forested ridges of the lower Blue Mountains led to the flatness of the Cumberland Plain far below. There, in the far distance, the spires of the city rose to mark the eastern horizon.

It was as Rob said — after trying to get a community garden started in Manly and finding a marked lack of potential sites, the plentiful supply and the size of the places potentially available around Lawson was enough to make us envious.

An enthusiastic gathering

There were about 35 that gathered in one of those newer brick buildings, the Mid-Mountains Neighbourhood Centre, as the community garden group reported to members on progress in assessing potential sites for the garden and on related matters.

Participants were mostly from the Lawson area, however there were a few from the Katoomba area higher up the mountains to the west. One was a woman from Blue Mountains Council, in the job for less than a week; others were from the Blue Mountains permaculture association, another the president of the gardening society. And there were a couple familiar faces — David who I had met while making a presentation on food issues to the annual general meeting of the Blue Mountains Food Cooperative; another, from the permaculture network, met when launching Rosemary Morrow’s book a few years ago among the heritage apple orchard at Katoomba Community Garden.

The Neighbourhood Centre, with its framed ceramic artwork decorating the exterior walls, envelops a small courtyard occupied by trees that must cast a welcoming shade in the heat of summer. There, inside the building and sipping coffee or tea from blue plastic cups bearing the logo of the city council, we started by taking the group through a Powerpoint presentation to set the scene about the role and potential of community gardens. This was for the most part a slide show of photographs of community gardens chosen to illustrate the points we raised.

A discussion followed in which most of the participants engaged. What was the value of becoming an incorporated association? What about public liability insurance? How do we work successfully with other people? What about disagreement and decision making? How do we start? How do we structure the garden? What role would council have in the garden? These were all questions familiar from other consultations with community garden start-ups and they were just a few that were raised.

The mood that afternoon was positive and optimistic and it soon became apparent that there was  a considerable range of skills available in the group such that would cover most of the needs of a getting a new community garden started. These included people with experience in production agriculture as well as others experienced in home gardening. Training new gardeners would be no problem — there were skills a-plenty.

Starting is something that appears likely, given the reported change in personnel following the most recent local government elections. The challenge now is finding land and defining the needs of the gardeners, a process they are to set out on.

The event ended with the group planning their next moves… an ambitious bag of activity but, given the intent and capability of those present, something that will be accomplished.

Sydney-bound, we took the freeway and our conversation most of the way back consisted of a debrief on the day. What could we have done better? Well, we need a better Powerpoint for consultations such as these. How do we do that and what need we say in the presentations? Well, we really need a number of Powerpoints, for use with groups at different stages of development. Let’s start on making these shortly, the three of us, we decided. What could we have explained more clearly? What points should we focus on?

All questions for serious pondering now that the Sydney team of the national community gardens network is receiving more frequent requests to consult and to make presentations and engage groups in purposeful dialogue.

An aside: the woman from council let the meeting know that council is planning to assist people to trade their goods at the local Magpie Markets in what sounds to be something akin to the microenterprise model. Something new and of value to people and the local economy, I suggested.

SATURDAY was an uncharacteristically mild winter’s day in Sydney as we turned into the carpark of the Carrs Park Community Centre, once a bowling club. Demographic change had led to the abandonment of the club and, just across from the carpark, a visible sign of the repurposing of what, for a generation, had been the site of the not too energetic recreation of lawn bowls was rising within the confines of a safety barrier.

The first bale is placed at Carrs Park Community Garden's outdoor classroom. (From left): Jenny Howie (Kogarah Council), Susan (Huff'N'Puff), Fiona Stock (Kogarah council).

It had been months since Faith Thomas and I had been here. Then, the deserted bowling green had been a flat plain of low, patchy grass. Now, an enthusiastic bunch of people were erecting a strawbale classroom to go with the Carrs Park Community Garden that is starting to grow like some fungus emerging from the damp earth.

Faith and my mission on that project for Kogarah Municipal Council had been the multipronged one of writing council policy directions on community gardening, writing a gardener’s manual to cover the management of the garden, conducting a community consultation throughout the municipality to bring together a core group of people interested in starting the community garden, and conducting two participatory site design days. These had developed concept plans for the garden. It was those plans that Council’s landscape architect, Anthony Parker, had mashed together into a site design.

Kogarah Council's waste manager, Fiona Stock, has seen the project through from the start.

A site changed forever

As we walked over to the garden to meet Council’s waste manager, Fiona Stock, the woman who has driven the community garden project and made it happen, noticeable were the works that have made the old bowling club building, now the community centre, more accessible. Inside the room used by the community garden crew I could see the Huff’N'Puff strawbale building people taking the gardeners and others through the four day course in strawbale construction.

Outside, on what had been that flat plain of low grass, the base of the outdoor classroom had been completed only the day before. Construction-wise, it consists of a base of old vehicle tyres infilled with soil and capped with a cement deck. A timber framework has started to rise from it and this is now being infilled with strawbales held firmly between steel rods. That previous day had seen the strawbale crew experimenting with different types of render to apply to the strawbales, one of which has been selected and which will be coloured to match the community centre building.

It would have been easy to have the construction crew from Living Spaces do all of the work themselves, but Fiona and her co-worker, Jenny Howie, have made the right decision that this should be a participatory construction under the supervision of the Huff’N'Puff crew.

Roofing tile seconds have been used as durable garden edging and the garden mulched.

A garden emerges

And what of those concept plans developed on the final day of the participatory design process?

The first manifestation of them are the two parallel, curving garden beds that already support the growth of edible winter greens. Here, the gardeners have taken an idea from the Randwick Community Organic Garden which used roofing tile seconds placed upright into the soil to make a low maintenance but very durable garden edging. Paths of bark chip have been laid around the beds. A compost-rich soil topped with a mulch layer of light yellow straw reveals that these are new gardens. So too does the line of young citrus along the eastern perimeter of the one-time bowling green.

More is to come. After the garden is officially opened, the area in the middle of the green will be progressively built over with community garden allotments, the two existing beds being for shared gardening. Over in the corner, a small area has been reserved for children from Council’s childcare centre that occupies the basement of the community centre building. Provision for disabled gardeners and visitors is to be installed as well.

A mother and daughter team apply silicon sealant in peparation for placing the straw bales.

A surprising find

I watched that warm Saturday afternoon as the gardeners, and those who had come especially for the strawbale building course, hefted bales and did all those things that go into making a strawbale building. Pleasing to see were faces familiar from our community consultation and participatory site design days.

It’s long been my philosophy that things usually take longer than planned to get done. But this garden and the associated outdoor classroom are an exception. Thanks for that go, first of all, to the community garden crew, then to the Huff’N'Puff folk who advise and help people unfamiliar with building to erect something of lasting community value. Thanks also go to Anthony Parker, Council’s landscape architect, to Fiona Stock and to Jenny Howie, all of whom participated in the site design activity and all of whom have maintained their enthusiasm through the trials and tribulations that are a part of any innovative project.

It was surprising to find that so much work had been done. The Carrs Park Community Garden, with its multiple user groups and outdoor classroom, truly shows the value of collaboration in going out and making things.

Huff'N'Puff's Susan makes a measurement to size a strawbale to fit.

More photos: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?saved&&suggest&note_id=148969942904&id=46128279174#/album.php?aid=135672&id=46128279174&ref=mf

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.