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.

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Based on a David Holmgren’s (and here) address at the food security theme day of the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network’s national conference, March 2007, Collingwood Town Hall, Melbourne.

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STANDING THERE ON THE STAGE and looking out over the several hundred gathered in front of him, did he momentarily reflect that this is where his work, started thirty years ago in that southernmost capital city of Australia, would lead him? Did he ever imagine that he and his collaborator’s ideas would be the reason that people nationwide would come to listen to him?

a grassroots, international movement of practitioners, designers and organisations – of networks

He stands there briefly, in front of that crowd, then starts to talk about a design system for sustainable living, “ …one that’s concerned with both the production and consumption side and that is based on universal ethics and design principles which can be applied in any context”.

There’s no prizes for guessing what David Holmgren is talking about. For those that do not know, he went on to describe permaculture as  “a grassroots, international movement of practitioners, designers and organisations – of networks”.

Quickly, he warms to his topic that day in late March 2007 when he addressed the national conference of the Australian City Farms and Community Gardens Network on the day set aside for presentations on food security.

That the day would be set aside for such a topic is testament to the journey from fringe to mainstream that the idea of food security has traveled. It seems just a few years ago that people would respond with a ‘what’s that?’ on hearing those two words. Then, it was heard mainly in the isolated conversations of international development practitioners. How things change!

The city feeding itself - allotment garden at Collingwood Childrens' Farm, Melbourne. Government can assist urban food production by adopting policy to support community allotment and other types of shared gardens. The high fences separating the allotments have now been removed.

The design approach to sustainability

“I want to take the design approach of permaculture to look at food security in a future world of low energy availability,” David announces. He suggests that there is confusion over the issue of food and that is is only now starting to appear in official sustainability thinking.

“The official version of sustainability we get from government, very well intended and often well informed… it’s all about buildings and transport but it’s not about food. This is why gardening is seen as a hobby rather than a serious form of agriculture”.

David has long advocated that the production of food in our cities, whether in home or community gardens, should be recognised as a valid form of small scale agriculture. What he talks about, in effect, is the farming our suburbs. He coined the term ‘garden agriculture’ in recognition of this.

Part of the household economy

David distinguishes between garden and urban agriculture. “I see urban agriculture to be in some way commercial or which produces a surplus for sale. Garden agriculture I see as part of the household economy where people produce for their own needs. Of course, there’s a complementary relationship between them”.

The practice of home garden agriculture is an Australian tradition, just as it is for most cultures. It is not something new. You hear this when people recall how their parents or grandparents had a backyard vegetable patch or kept a few chooks. Those recollections indicate the problem, however. Home gardening has become a memory for all too many, a memory that harks back to their early childhood.

Home gardens are part of the household economy. The home garden of a shared house in Perth, Western Australia.

Just how pervasive home food production has been in Australian social history was disclosed in an Australian Bureau of Statistics report on the subject in 1991 and, more recently, by Andrea Gaynor’s book, Harvest of the Suburbs (Harvest of the Suburbs – an environmental history of growing food in Australian Cities; 2006; University of Western Australia Press, Crawley, WA. ISBN 1 920694 48 X).

Permaculture more than organic gardening

For David, the challenge is to bring those memories to life in the present. It’s not a vain hope. Home gardening started to pick up as an urban activity back in the late 1960s, thanks to the rise of the organic gardening movement. Subsequent years have seen a steady growth, propelled in part by food fears such as those over agro-chemical contamination of our food through the use of farm chemicals – a concern stretching right back into the 1960s with the publication of Rachael Carson’s Silent Spring.

It’s also about our connection with nature, about tools and technology and about community

Other fears followed. In the 1990s, permaculture co-originator, Bill Mollison started to warn about genetically modified food. Recently, home and community food gardening and the idea of eating locally-produced food has been popularised by the international Slow Foods movement and the seeking of local solutions to global warming and peak oil.

Permaculture must take some credit for the popularisation of home food gardening over the past 30 years. It forms the focus of their permaculture practice for many.

It wasn’t that they needed convincing, but David reiterates the link: “Permaculture is clearly about people and food”, he tells the audience. “It’s also about our connection with nature, about tools and technology and about community. So it really covers a much wider scope than it is commonly understood as a specific form of organic gardening”.

David suggest that food issues “throw up an enormous number of opportunities. I’m trying to make permaculture central to the issue of sustainability, putting those simple, core ideas of small, local, nature, food on the table as the most important”.

What people think, what they feel

By this time David is getting into the swing of his presentation and speaks with greater emphasis. He tells the audience that we can expand the production of food in our cities even without breaking up pavement or taking down buildings.

“The other thing we need is dietary change to seasonal, local food that is less processed and that contains less animal protein.

“These changes are possible in a very short time. A lot of it has to do with people’s heads – what they think, what they feel. It’s said that this is the hardest thing in the world to change. We’ll see.

“Full organic methods, including the full recycling to land of all wastes including human waste, is in the long term the most critical feature in the sustainability of the food system. We won’t have that bleed of high quality nutrient in human waste not going back to the food system.

Polyculture breeds productive landscapes

“An element commonly associated with permaculture is what we can probably call polyculture – the integration of crops, livestock and structures rather than the idea that these are all separate systems. This is where we get the synergies, the efficiencies and so many of the social and environmental services. There are elements of beautiful and productive landscapes that come from this integration that polyculture brings.

It’s very hard for one or two person households to undertake household economy measures

Home garden as polyculture. Annual and perennial vegetables grow with fruit trees and vines. Fiona Campbell and Russ Grayson's one-time garden in Sydney.

“Another basic redesign strategy is to increase our household size. All our systems in modern societies are too big but our households are too small for the sustainable, efficient use of resources. It’s very hard for one or two person households to undertake household economy measures. We can get economies of scale through larger household size”.

Moving away from one and two person households would be a challenge as these are the fastest growing segment of the housing market in the major cities The trend is supported by the movement of people into apartments, of which there are two main segments. One is made up of first home buyers purchasing apartments because of their greater affordability in the inner and middle ring of suburbs in our larger cities. The other segment are ‘downsizers’ — parents whose families have grown up and left home, or who might be retirees who are no longer able to, or who prefer not to maintain suburban houses and gardens. The resource cost of one an two person households was disclosed in Sydney University research. This indicated that these smaller households still required the same number of white goods and other appliances as larger households, although the appliances might be smaller in size.

The notion of a ‘household economy’ is something that David’s partner, Sue Dennett, was to raise in a workshop later in the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network conference. There, she discussed the economic, environmental and food value of setting aside preserved seasonal produce to have supply of out-of-season foods without importing them over vast distances, with all the travel and greenhouse gas emissions that entails.

Thinking in terms of a household economy would certainly present a challenge to a culture in which the definition of ‘economy’ is money-related and entails working outside of the home. It would involve a mindset change to recognise the value of non-monetary activity having economic value. Women, of course, have been advocating this ides since the 1970s in regard to child care and housework.

Localising Melbourne’s food – without clearfelling Mt Dandenong

In Melbourne, says David, there’s a significant amount of public open space that could, with great social and ecological benefit, be transformed for food production.

“Public open space is about 12 percent of the Melbourne metropolitan area. We might not actually want to cut down the forests on Mt Dendenong or, maybe, log the botanic gardens and turn them into food production”, however there remains plenty of urban open space that could be used for garden agriculture.

“The Melbourne metropolitan area is nearly 9000 sq km. That includes quite a lot of land that’s not built over. On the fringes, it includes quite large areas of forest and parkland. There’s almost three and a half million people in this area, a density off 388 people per square kilometre. The area of land per person is 2500 sq metres, about a quarter acre per person. How much of this is built on I was not able to find out.

“I am not suggesting that Melbourne should produce all of its own food, but John Jeavons claims that biointensive, vegan agriculture at its extreme is capable of supplying total food supply on 300 sq metres per person. I think that’s about the top limit and maybe its theoretical.

“My estimate for a permaculture omnivore is about the 700 to 1500 sq metres per person. This is less than the total area that is not built upon and paved within the Melbourne metropolitan area. So we do have the capacity in the cities to feed those cities”.

Towards an urban agriculture – allotments, glasshouses, preserving, recycling nutrients

Just what would an urban garden agriculture that made greater use of public land look like?

“Firstly, allotment and rooftop gardens. The key thing about these is that they provide maximum solar access in higher density residential areas where individual gardens at ground level next to buildings often really lack product. One of the really great things about allotment gardens is that they aggregate plots together so that can get solar access.

“Greenhouses with minimal bottom heat for seedling production, to get an extension of the growing season, is a reasonable compromise to purely eating what will grow in the outside environment. In this climate it can provide basic winter salads, although that’s a lot easier in to do in Melbourne than where we live (Hepburn)”.

Then there’s home food processing. “Preserving and fermentation using low energy means is an incredibly important part of how we stabilise that huge seasonal flux in food production. Spring is what I jokingly call the famine time. We need methods that use minimum energy to even that out”.

The recycling of nutrients to fertilise our urban garden-agriculture is another thing that can be achieved with a little imagination. Worm farms, deep litter systems for poultry, reedbeds for treating greywater and composting toilets are important, simple, biological technologies for nutrient recycling that we can do within urban areas.

“Mushroom production on compost and wood in shaded areas is something missing in Australia, in part on account of our Anglo heritage. But it has huge potential in urban areas to produce food from decomposing material.

“Poultry and eggs in deep litter systems, chicken tractors – this idea that has been popularised through permaculture – and orchard range systems. Poultry is a key and appropriate form of animal protein in urban areas.

“I think rabbits for meat production, fed on urban lawns and weeds, are another very important and efficient use of wastes that comes as a by-product from those systems.

“There’s neighbourhood goat dairies managed on public land. It didn’t go down very when I suggested this in 1989 during a review of a ten year strategy plan for CERES – the idea of goats munching along Merri Creek. But I think we’ll get there… eventually.

New role for city parks

“Once we get intensive gardens covering significant urban areas, the demand for local organic materials will become quite significant. We can look at public landscaping as a source of organic matter and also for conversion into food systems.

“We recycle everything in gardening, but highly productive food systems need a net input of some organic material from lower-intensive systems. This is a common pattern through sustainable, low energy societies where there’s a larger range of forest woodland that supplies fuel and organic material to support very intensive areas of food production.”

Wastewater a huge opportunity

“I think stormwater harvesting is a huge opportunity in urban areas. We can use this water for low-input pond aquaculture going beyond the sort of wetland systems that are being designed at the moment for stormwater in urban areas.

“We can retrofit those systems for food production… while harvesting weeds, windfalls and surplus wildlife as free food from nature.”

The importance of small, local food markets

“I want to mention food marketing because the cost of current, centralised systems makes this is important. We need to look at how the surplus from gardens can be distributed and how local markets can develop that don’t cost the earth.

“When you shift to subscription agriculture, community supported agriculture (CSA), local supply… there’s really only the producer and consumer and there are benefits for both.

“CSA has enormous benefits for consumers because it provides food security, it connects them to a seasonal food culture and it gives them influence over the production system. They can actually talk directly to the producer.

“For producers, CSA provides a capital base and some sort of market certainty. It stimulates polyculture and tends to stabilise production peaks and troughs. CSA and subscription farming drive the system towards polyculture and away from monoculture, as shown in Japan where farmers grow many varieties of vegetables.

“It also develops the potential for a seasonal labour pool and, also, understanding consumers who are prepared to understand the position that the producer is in.

“Farmers’ markets are useful as local sources for consumers and for distributing seasonal surplus from home processing and preserving. They encourage gardeners to become producers. People who are good at what they do get into creating this new economy.

“Another part of food marketing in that we need restaurants and food stores that provide set menus to reduce waste – this is the food that’s available, we can’t get it much cheaper, there isn’t any waste, this is what it is.

“Local and regional currencies also encourage this local production and consumption.

Needed: sensible policy for local food

“If we had public policies that are sensible towards urban food security they would focus, first, on production of local food for local people.

we need ridiculous health and environmental regulations that constrict garden agriculture to be removed

“Secondly, they would remove health and environmental regulations that are impediments to garden agriculture. Just as the corporate world is constantly demanding that government remove the impediments to what they want to do, we need ridiculous health and environmental regulations that constrict garden agriculture to be removed.

“We need to remove the tax impediments to barter and non-monetary economies.

we can extend organic certification to include embodied energy and water

“Of course, this is a very radical agenda. We’re not necessarily going to see this but we should be articulating what would be sensible public policies.

“I think we can extend organic certification to include embodied energy and water. It would show the benefit of local systems. I believe the Soil Association in Britain is looking at the issue of food miles in organic certification”.
Food miles are a measure of the distance foods are transported and the consequent emission of greenhouse gases”.

Needed: government to get serious

“If governments really want to get serious about understanding alternative policy options, they need to go beyond the tools we have at the moment and start using things like energy accounting, which go well beyond things like ecological footprint, to try to understand the relative impacts of different possibilities.

“How does the use of energy and water in the food system compare to housing and personal transport? How large an improvement could we get by redesigning the food system and how does this compare with redesigning our housing and transport system?

“There’s a scarcity of information on this.”

Swedish research, David explains, indicates a huge saving coming from the redesign of the food system.

“This is why permaculture is focused primarily on food.”

Reform needed: water rights for urban garden agriculturists

In Sydney, households account for around 48 percent of the total water budget in supplying the average household’s food supply. This dwarfs any other category.

When restaurants are included, says David, “It probably means that over 50 percent of water consumption is actually being used to supply people’s food”.

Just as forward thinking people are looking at the energy embodied in the production of our food supply, so too some are starting to consider the volume of water used to produce it.

“This concept of embodied water (ed: also ‘virtual water‘) – all the water that is used to make a product – if we look at figures on embodied water from CSIRO researchers – litres per dollar of value, which is a better way to evaluate something in many ways than per kilo weight – we can see how huge growing rice is in Australia. We’re growing rice in completely the wrong places. When I’m dictator we’ll move rice out of the Murrumbidgie Irrigation Area and up to Northern NSW and Queensland and we’ll close down sugar cane and replace it with rice where it can work quite well”, David jokes.

“Sugar cane uses a surprising amount of water. Fruit and vegetables are 103 litres per dollar of value. Meat products are fairly high. Dairy is 680 litres per dollar value.

“I’ve done some rough calculations on our one hectare property at Hepburn Springs. Our own honey, as far as I can see, uses only two litres per dollar value, mainly in washing the equipment. Sue’s two-goat dairy uses a similar amount of water, about a 300 fold saving on going to the supermarket. Our fruit and vegetable production looks like it’s about five times more efficient than food from the supermarket.

“So, the conclusion is we should use water at home to produce food. Don’t let anyone, including the authorities, tell you that is environmentally irresponsible.

Developing our skills – now is the time

“The living soil is the water and carbon bank for future food security,” David says.

“We need to develop the skills – gardening, food processing, small livestock husbandry – and I think we can use permaculture as an organising framework for that skill development.

“There are some technical skills that need to be scaled-up tremendously. There are a lot people in this room that I see, over the next ten years, extending those skills to a lot of other people.”