Category — Australia

Imagine strolling the rows of a fruit orchard or lettuce farm while children clamber over haystacks in an agricultural haven just metres from the heart of the bustling Adelaide CBD.

By Alice Monfries
Sunday Mail
January 07, 2012

Excerpt:

Converting our western parklands, skirting West Tce, into a 50ha “city farm” is one of the innovative ideas being raised by urban experts and the community for the future of inner Adelaide as part of the 5000+ project.

Run by the Adelaide City Council and State Government, 5000+ calls on city residents, shoppers and workers to submit ideas to help shape a long-term vision for the greater CBD.

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Roof garden presently grows watermelon, rockmelon, tomatoes, eggplant, pumpkin, garlic, kale, rocket, herbs, corn, blueberries, peaches, pear, apple, goji, rhubarb and more, as well as a living wall of strawberry bushes.

Health messages include healthy eating, the importance of physical exercise and the dangers of smoking

By Adam Dwyer
Senior Project Officer – Primary Health Services
GP Plus Health Care Centre Marion

Description of the project:

The clients were involved in the planning of the building, through engagement with the landscape architect commissioned to design the roof garden. The building was designed to include the roof garden due to the success of a previous community health engagement/food garden development with these clients. The community engagement is based around healthy lifestyle choices (food, physical activity, stress/mental health, quit smoking/substance abuse), promoting access to free health services, empowerment and social inclusion. Actively growing food brings a lot of these together.

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Eighteen diverse kitchen gardens, from subtropical Queensland to the arid zone of central Australia, from the suburbs of Adelaide to the countryside of rural Victoria and Tasmania.

By Kate Herd
Penguin Books Australia,
28/02/2011
Hardback, 232 pages

Excerpt:

Twenty years ago my stepfather was horrified when my mother planted corn in our ‘nice’ and ‘respectable’ front garden in the Melbourne suburb of Kew. For him it was embarrassing; it smacked of urban peasantry: ‘What will the neighbours think?’ Thankfully, vegie gardens are again a more accepted part of the urban landscape. Groovy inner-city cafes boast their own potagers and there are monthly neighbourhood vegetable ‘swap-meets’ where fresh unused or excess backyard produce is swapped for the different surplus of others. The busy city family doesn’t even need to get its hands dirty to benefit from its own garden any more – you can pay companies to install and maintain your vegetable garden for you.

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Indira Naidoo embarks on a mission to transform her tiny thirteen-floor balcony into a bountiful kitchen garden. Penguin Books Australia, 31/10/2011, Paperback, 224 pages.

The Edible Balcony charts a year in the life of Indira’s balcony garden and gives a season-by-season account of the triumphs and challenges she faces.

Roslyn Grundy
Sydney Morning Herald
November 14, 2011

Excerpt:

Naidoo’s balcony vegie patch was an idea that could easily have withered on the vine. “A lot of people in apartments just automatically rule themselves out,” says Naidoo. “They just think, ‘Well, there’s nothing I can grow in an apartment so I won’t even think about it. I’ll fantasise about one day having a tree change or a sea change and having my little plot of land somewhere, but it’s not going to happen while I live in the city.’”

One of 261 people former US vice-president Al Gore trained in 2009 to educate the public on climate change, Naidoo is involved in communicating complex scientific and political concepts relating to climate change, carbon trading and consumer food miles.

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The Australian Community Gardening Movement And Repertoires For Change

By Claire Nettle
Bachelor of Environmental Studies Master of Applied Science (Social Ecology)
Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
School of History and Politics, University of Adelaide, December 2010
359 pages

Abstract:

There has been a resurgence of community gardening activity in Australia over the past decade. This coincides with increasing concern about food security, urban sustainability, social isolation and the preservation of community space. Community gardening has been adopted by divergent actors, from health agencies looking to increase fruit and vegetable consumption to radical social movements seeking symbols of non-capitalist social and spatial relations. This thesis contributes to a systematic research account of the Australian community gardening movement by considering community gardening as a site of collective social action.

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Growing Oyster Mushrooms at Home. Pleurotus species here at 1300m in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo. The growing medium is made of rice husks, sawdust and limestone. Paulina, she uses neither insecticides nor fungicides. She sells the mushrooms to Chinese restaurants in Ranau town See video how we do it more naturally in our Australian garden on our channel.

The Seed Savers’ Network

Bit by bit we have produced 350 video clips and uploaded them to Seed Savers’ Youtube channel. We were inspired by our visits to farmers and gardeners around the world and by Seed Savers’ garden of 1000 food species in Byron Bay, Australia. We show you how we save seeds, grow and process our food; people and produce on markets in several countries and food we glean on our travels.

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Part 1

Produced by Friends of the Earth Adelaide, Australia

Tracing the history of food gathering and production on the Adelaide Plains, from the Kaurna Aboriginal nation to present day backyard gardens, An Urban Orchard is a celebration of growing and sharing good food.

In the inner southern suburbs of the city of Adelaide, South Australia, local residents meet to share the bounty of their backyards.

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Dave Ingham and the chickens he rents out.

For $100 plus we will supply you a fully equipped Eco-Coop complete with 2 hens and all their requirements. Six weeks to decide.

Rentachook is located in West Ryde, NSW, Australia

Rentachook started 6 years ago as an idea to encourage people to keep chickens – an environmentally sustainable pet. The concept is that you get to try keeping chooks without having to commit to having them permanently.

Like a try-before-you-buy option, what happens is you buy the Eco-Coop package outright (a chicken coop, 2 hens, feeder, waterer, food and straw) but have 6 weeks to decide if keeping chooks is right for you, your lifestyle, your garden etc.

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“The choko (sechium edule) is a real survival food, prolific and easy to grow, with multiple uses (although they can be a bit bland unless spiced up, unlike this site!). They do, of course, grow on vines not trees but we have an old orange tree which the choko vines grow up every year and this has been christened the choko tree. Thus the choko provides sort of a symbol for the intent of this site.”

Nevin and Linda Sweeney’s website is named “Under the Choko Tree”

By Nevin and Linda Sweeney
Website includes 161 articles on their experiences.

Excerpt:

Back in the late ‘70s I packed up my new bride and set off for the wilds of…………….. Western Sydney! Well it was a little bit wild back then. The estate had no shops and no public transport but the housing and the loans were cheap and so we found ourselves on a 600 m2 block with an east-west facing, brick veneer, 3 bedroom house.

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This private research aquaponics farm in subtropical Australia is producing Pak Choi using raft hydroponics. The sole nutrient is waste from Barramundi table fish. The yield is 1.5 tons of vegetables for every one ton of saleable fish. The Pak Choi shown here is three weeks old. Photo: Geoff Wilson, Aquaponics Network Australia.

Conference to be held in Brisbane in 2012

Integrated Urban Aquaponics
Conference and Workshops
in Brisbane in July, 2012.

May 26, 2011.

The world’s first conference and workshops focused on integrated urban aquaponics in “protected cropping” systems producing organic food, will be held in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia from July 25 to 27, 2012.

The conference and workshops will be organized by the Aquaponics Network Australia (ANA), solely-owned by Brisbane-based Aquaponix Pty Ltd., in conjunction with the Green Infrastructure Network Australia Inc. (GINA Inc).

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An E-book

By Sharon and Andrew Cooper
Queensland, Australia
3/31/2011

“The award winning horticulturists Sharon and Andrew Cooper from Queensland, Australia go public with their top secrets on how to easily grow a vegetable garden that provides maximum nutrition at a minimum price. Their newly released book, Our Vegetable Garden Secrets, is a simple, practical and complete source of information that provides all you need to know about preparing soil, caring for plants, protecting from disease and pests, and as a result, growing vegetables that are 40-60% more nutritious than their supermarket alternative.

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Wayne Wadsworth with his aquaculture tank in the backyard of the Reversing Greenhouse House in Goonellabah.

His 1000 litre tank can hold 10-20 perch or 40-60 crayfish

By Liina Flynn
Northern Rivers Echo
21st October 2010

Excerpt:

Wayne believes if more people can produce food in urban areas then rural land could be used for growing large-scale grain crops, or crops to make products currently made out of oil such as bioplastics, or hemp for clothes.

In the backyard in his 1000 litre tank, Wayne currently has a few perch, but said it can hold 10-20 perch or 40-60 crayfish. There are plant pots sitting in the pipes running around the tank, which are watered with the nutrient rich tank water. Deep-rooted plants are planted in the garden to pick up nutrients deep in the soil and are even used in the tank to filter the water. He has created a biological cycle where everything is used: from food scraps which feed the worms, which in turn feed the garden and the chooks.

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Produced by The Australian City Farms and Community Gardens Network

With researchers increasingly turning their attention to the social and environmental impacts of community gardening, the Australian City Farms and Community Gardens Network has just published a fully revised and expanded second edition of its Annotated Bibliography of community gardening research and analysis. The new edition provides a comprehensive summary of the latest research right up to August 2010.

The Australian City Farms and Community Gardens Network has produced the Bibliography in response to requests from students and researchers, and from gardeners seeking evidence of the benefits of community gardening to support their applications and submissions.

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Photo by by donkeycart. The Urban Orchard is a homegrown fruit and vegetable exchange established by Friends of the Earth Adelaide and the Goodwood Goodfood Co-op. It meets on the first Saturday of every month to share surplus backyard produce, conversation and skills. Visit website here.

55 minutes of audio discussion on Australia Talks

ABC Radio National
April 5, 2010

Agriculture in Australia accounts for less than five percent of GDP – about the same as the creative industries – yet the world’s food supply faces unprecedented challenges from population growth, and climate change. Could urban food production be a possible solution? Join us for a special edition of Australia Talks recorded at the Queensland State Library with contributors to the latest Griffith Review: “Food Chain”.

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Out of the Scientist’s Garden – A Story of Water and Food

By Richard Stirzaker
CSIRO Publishing
January 2010

Out of the Scientist’s Garden is written for anyone who wants to understand food and water a little better – for those growing vegetables in a garden, food in a subsistence plot or crops on vast irrigated plains. It is also for anyone who has never grown anything before but has wondered how we will feed a growing population in a world of shrinking resources.

Although a practising scientist in the field of water and agriculture, the author has written, in story form accessible to a wide audience, about the drama of how the world feeds itself. The book starts in his own fruit and vegetable garden, exploring the ‘how and why’ questions about the way things grow, before moving on to stories about soil, rivers, aquifers and irrigation. The book closes with a brief history of agriculture, how the world feeds itself today and how to think through some of the big conundrums of modern food production.

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Illustration by Robin Tatlow-Lord

By Elise Harris
Email: eliseharris2@gmail.com
An Honours thesis submitted as part of a Bachelor in Urban and Regional Planning School of Natural and Built Environments University of South Australia
October 2008

Excerpts:

Abstract

Community gardens have been shown to have positive social, nutritional and educational benefits for their users, and improve the amenity, safety and patronage of the surrounding area. They also tie into wider themes of sustainability and food security. Despite these benefits, urban planners, as the keepers of land and determiners of land use, have had little to do with community gardens. This thesis will explain the benefits of community gardens and detail planning policies throughout the world that support community gardens. Lastly, recommendations will be made on how the South Australian planning system can better support community gardens.

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Photo by aardvark. CERES Market Garden, Melbourne, Australia

There’s a growing city appetite for what we once had down on the farm

JULIANNE SCHULTZ
The Sydney Morning Herald
January 23, 2010

When I was growing up, in the 1960s, the supply of food we ate was tangible – outside the dining room window. We had cows for milk; sheep that grew from suckling lambs to Sunday lunch; chooks whose eggs we ate, and whose feathers we plucked, when their recently headless bodies stopped the mad dervish dance; vegetables that still had clods of dirt on them.

Our animals were not pets – they were creatures that fed us and that could be trucked to the saleyard to pay pressing bills. It was smelly, dirty, unrelenting hard work, even on the fertile plains of Victoria’s western district.

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See larger image of the Farm plan here.

By sydneycityfarm
18th November 2009

Sydney siders are one step closer to having a City Farm and Sustainable Living Centre with the unanimous support of the City of Sydney Environment & Heritage Committee to fund an investigation into potential sites and models.

City of Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore spoke in support of the proposal which goes before a full sitting of Council on Monday November 23.

“City Farms provide real, hands-on experiences to teach residents, businesses and schools about sustainable living. City Farms demonstrate the simple ways that everyone can Live Green and give the community access to local organic produce.”

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Dan Palmer, the permablitz visionary.
Photo: Shaney Balcombe

Permablitz: new word, noun

1. An event in which volunteers use permaculture principles to transform a suburban garden into a place that produces its own food. A combination of the words permaculture – a design system for sustainable living and land use – and Backyard Blitz a television program in which backyards receive a makeover.

The rules of a permablitz are simple: if you want a permablitz crew to turn up to your place, you have to help out on at least two other working weekends before they will do so. In addition, Palmer defines a permablitz as a day in which “two or more people come together to:

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Costa’s Garden Odyssey

Six episodes of Season One are now on-line in brilliant colour. See what’s happening in the city of Melbourne. You must see these shows! (Mike)

Examples of stories from the show:

Collingwood is an inner city suburb of Melbourne and it’s the home of the Collingwood Children’s Farm, a special place where children enjoy the opportunity to have some “hands on” experience with farm animals. It’s also a community garden where Costa meets people like 70-year-old Harry Haralambos who grows wonderful produce for his entire family here as well as Joy McGaffrey who introduces Costa to the taste of “Worm Juice”.

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