Month: July 2009
Launch of Permaculture Sydney South
I’ve just received details on the upcoming launch of the Permaculture Sydney South group:
Permaculture Sydney South is the regional permaculture group covering the central, southern and eastern Sydney region. Currently it is made up of several local group hubs – City, Eastern suburbs, St George, Sutherland & Inner West. Come to celebrate our official launch with Geoff Lawton and join one of our local groups.
Geoff Lawton, international permaculturist has travelled the globe for almost 30 years, sharing the teachings of permaculture with individuals, families, communities, cities and nations. His consistent application of permaculture principles has transformed environmental, social and economic systems globally.
Hear about the same principles that Geoff applies in diverse settings: from greening the desert in Jordan & transforming Macedonian refugee camps into self-reliant communities to designing sustainable cities in the Middle East and The Americas.
When: Tuesday 18 August 2009. 6.45 for 7pm-9.30pm, supper provided.
Where: Leichhardt Town Hall, cnr Norton and Marion St.
Cost: Free for Permaculture Sydney South members, otherwise $10.
RSVP: Thursday 13 August 2009 via email to vicki.f@hotmail.com
Membership: Phone Peter 0412679215 or email Vicki vicki.f@hotmail.com
I’m not a member of the permaculture movement (yet!), so I’ll be going along to find out more…
Rainwater harvesting workshop
I attended an interesting workshop this evening on rainwater harvesting, presented by John Caley, a sustainability consultant. This was organised as part of the Marrickville Council water tank rebate program.
A few notes from the evening:
- It makes sense to connect as many uses as possible to the tank, because that will leave more space for the rain to fill back up (greater usage can be more effective than a bigger tank).
- We get approximately 1,200mm of rain per year in East Sydney (3.3mm per day on average).
- Multiply out the square metre area of your roof by the 3mm/day figure to get an approximate figure for litres per day. In an ideal world, the household consumption would fit within that.
- Water usage from the hand basin and kitchen sink are not significant in the scheme of things.
- The best strategy is to increase the area of the roof that water is collected from, rather than increasing the tank size. This gives a much greater benefit for the effort (and cost).
In general, the workshop highlighted the value of working out:
- average amount of water that can be harvested per day from the roof
- expected household usage of water
- size of the tank to match
(Not that we did this, we just fit in the largest tank that was practical in the available space, and hoped for the best!)
Urban Permaculture in Action
A quick note to say that I’ve signed up to attend the Urban Permaculture in Action course, organised by Milkwood Permaculture, to be held in Sydney on 22-23 August. This should be great fun:
You’ve perhaps learnt or read a bit about Permaculture, but where do you start with actually putting all those design principles and techniques into action? This course gives you the confidence and enthusiasm to put all that theory into practice. Over this weekend you will help design and implement a Permaculture system for an inner-city backyard using simple, effective techniques and basic materials.
During this course you will learn how to apply pro-active, sustainable design techniques specifically to the urban habitat. Aspects covered include intensive, small-scale organic food production, waste re-cycling, catching and storing water in your system and designing effectively within the constraints of the urban backyard.
A dynamic mix of theory and practice will see the participants of this weekend course transform one small urban backyard from a patch of scruffy turf and pavers into a functional Permaculture system – all ready to roll.
This will be my first serious introduction to permaculture, and as a novice I’m expecting to learn heaps. I’m excited by the specific focus on the urban environment, so that those of us without a 20-acre block can still do something useful. I’ll report back after the workshop.
Carrots!
Luckily I had a second pair of eyes looking through the garden today. The carrots have been growing for some time, but I’d thought that the relatively small amount of greenery above ground meant the carrots still needed time below ground.
How wrong I was. Scraping away the soil around the base of the leaves, the tops of carrots some 15-20mm across emerged. Very exciting!
We pulled the first one out, and it’s a midget, wide at the top but very short. The next few were a little larger. Then we pulled out a real, full-sized carrot. Plenty more where they came from…
Carrots were always in the “hard basket” for me, and seemed dauntingly difficult to grow. Lots of stories about needing the “right soil” and “perfect conditions” to get full-sized carrots. Now I’m not saying I’m now a prize-winning grower of carrots, but it has turned out to be pretty easy. I used seed tape to lay out two rows of carrots, and all that was needed was a little thinning out. And some patience.
Count me in for growing more carrots next season, once we work our way through this haul.
Growing our own mushrooms
Today I planted our first mushrooms. It’s so easy, you don’t even have to be a gardener to do it 🙂
You can buy a kit like this one, which comes with everything you need and a set of instructions (we bought our kit from Bunnings). Inside, you’ll find a packet of mushroom compost and a packet of peat moss.
All you have to do is make some holes in the bottom of the container, spread out the compost and then the peat moss, and then wait for your mushrooms to start growing. The box needs to be kept in a dark place and the comost needs to be kept moist. This is truely simple gardening!
Our current crop of greens
This is what we harvested from the garden over the last few days. There are four or five good handfuls of sugar snap peas and snow peas, plus a few modest heads of broccoli and broccolini. The broccoli is just coming into its own, so I expect we’ll have quite a lot of this over the coming fortnight.
As it is, this is more than enough to keep the two of us stocked up on green vegetables. And this is without harvesting the pak choy and silverbeet, which is ready and waiting. I might also pick out the two weakest heads of chinese cabbage this week, to give us something to eat, and to leave more space for the remaining plants.
All broccoli, all the time
I took a two-pronged approach when planting out in Autumn. I bought punnets of dwarf cauliflower, planting out two rows of seedlings. I then supplemented this with two rows of broccoli, planted from seed. At least, that was the plan.
As you can see from the picture above, this is broccoli, not cauliflower. In fact, everything has turned out to be broccoli. It must’ve been a mis-labelled punnet. Luckily we like broccoli!
Second planting into the nature strip
Our plan has generally been to put things into the nature strip that provide edible leaves, rather than fruit. That way the plants should be better able to withstand the local (encouraged) harvesting.
The bay tree was an obvious choice. Then the topic of kaffir limes came up in conversation with our next door neighbours, and we knew what had to go in next! A few weekends ago we sourced one from a local nursery, dug a deep hole into the clay soil, and bedded the tree into a whole bag of cow manure.
It seems very happy. It’s even started fruiting already, although I think the extremely bitter fruit are an acquired taste…
Policy on planting in the nature strip
I’m reliably informed that Marrickville Council doesn’t have an official policy on planting in the nature strip. In practice, they seem content to overlook any planting that does get done, presuably within sensible boundaries.
I was therefore interested to discover that City of Canterbury does have a nature strip policy. What I like about this is the explicit responsibility given to the householder: if you decide to plant the nature strip, you need to maintain it. There are also generally sensible guidelines on where not to plant (such as on a corner).
I only have a few complaints about this policy. Firstly, it sets the maximum height of allowed plants to 600mm, which rules out all shrubs and trees (even small ones). We already have a handful of trees on our street, presumably limited by council budget and resources. This policy would prevent us from sensibly planting additional trees.
The fee for gaining approval also seems needless, and out of touch with expected practices. Still, it’s great to see a formal policy (I believe that thanks needs to go to the Greens for kick-starting this).
I’d love to see a similar policy put in place in the Marrickville area, and I’ve already made contact with Councillors Max Phillips, Cathy Peters and Peter Olive. Add a comment if you’d also like to get involved in making this happen…
Helping out back in Chippendale
Yesterday I headed back to our old stomping ground to help out Michael Mobbs garden the nature strip along Myrtle St. A small but committed group turned up, and we cleaned up one side of the street, including planting a few more citrus trees. If you feel like you missed out, you can still help out next weekend (details to be posted shortly on the Food for the Future blog).
One of the highlights was chatting to Robyn Williamson, from the NW Sydney Seed Savers group. She also kindly shared some plants from their community garden, and I’ve now got chilli and celery in my garden. I was also very excited to get some Warrigal Greens seeds, which I’ll plant out in spring.
I’d love to rework our streetscape here in Lewisham, watch this space…
Lewisham House and Farm 