Guerrilla gardening
Will we get macadamias this year?
The one request from the nuns when I started the guerrilla gardening of the convent land was to plant a macadamia tree. Apparently at a convent they stayed at in the country they had a wide range of fruit trees, and fresh macadamias were a particular delight.
The tree I planted 4 years ago is still small, perhaps 3m high. It’s had a rough time, with kids splitting the trunk early in its growth, plus various periods of drought conditions.
Nonetheless, this year has produced a good number of fruiting spikes this year. So hopefully this year will be our first macadamia harvest!
(The good news is that the shell of the nuts is so hard that even the rats can’t gnaw their way in…)
Home-made olives
On the back of our verge gardening, a neighbour from down the street asked if it would be reasonable to plant an olive tree next to their house. Of course I said: go for it!
Fast forward only a few years, and the small tree started producing olives. They sat on the tree, ripening, and eventually starting to fall onto the street. So you know me: I hate seeing something go to waste…
So we took a small ladder around, and harvested about half a bucket’s worth. Not a huge amount, but still quite a few.
Now olives can’t be eaten fresh, as they contain a very bitter substance that needs to be treated away. A bit of Googling found an excellent resources from the University of California titled Olives: Safe Methods for Home Pickling.
It outlines seven different methods, and I chose the kalamata-style approach.
This involves soaking/fermenting the olives in water for 20 days, changing the water each day.
After that, the olives were pickled in a mix of brine and red wine vinegar. (My home-made vinegar, by the way, created from left-over bottles of wine.)
Now I don’t actually like olives, but I’m assured that the results were excellent (a ‘very mild’ flavour, and ‘the best olives I’ve had’). Now I can’t confirm the veracity of these statements, but it was a fun process, and actually not very labour intensive.
All in all, it was a good proof of concept, and I think I’ll give it another go next season, if there’s a good crop…
Making progress with our railway plantings
The key to guerrilla gardening is to be indifferent to the survival of any one plant, while remaining passionate about the success of the garden as a whole.
In the year since I last blogged about our guerrilla gardening along the railway line, there has been plenty of progress, and a fair share of setbacks.
First the challenges:
- The railways folks decided to replace the electricity substation right next to the garden, leading to trucks being squeezed down the pedestrian pathway, crushing a pile of plants. (Their reworking of the security fence also killed off a bunch more.)
- Pretty much all of the groundcovers were wiped out by the big hailstorm.
- Local kids keep stealing the stakes used to hold the plant guards.
- Plants are randomly damaged, by dogs or passing people.
- Some plants simply don’t survive the harsh conditions.
But the good news:
- The garden has been progressively extended, and it’s now 10+ metres in length.
- The more established plants are now growing strongly, including all the acacias and callistomons.
- I’ve grown most of the plants from cuttings, so the cost has been minimal.
- Surprisingly few plants have been stolen.
The key is to keep planting each weekend, to replace the 2-3 plants that are damaged, and to then get slightly ahead. Over a year, this makes a big difference, and the pace should progressively increase.
I’ve had plenty of great comments from the locals, and it’s an enjoyable challenge. While it’s still early days, I think I’ve proved that one person can have an impact.
What can you do in your local area? 🙂
Second try needed: straw bale garden
When I came across the idea of straw bale gardens, it seemed like the perfect way of getting greater productivity out of the guerrilla-gardened food forest out the back.
As can be seen in the photo above, the garden didn’t work out well in practice. There were two main reasons: the hailstorm, which wiped out most plants; and the local birds who ate the rest.
I had a second attempt by planting a new round of seedlings, but we were then deep into winter.
So I decided to call it quits — but this is where straw bale gardens deliver their second benefit — by providing free mulch to spread around the garden.
It was easy to break off ‘cakes’ of the straw, and to layer them around the fruit trees. Fifteen minutes of work, and it was all done.
Of course, the chickens thought this was great! So within a day, they’d re-spread the hay so it was evenly covering everything. With a bit of rain, this is all breaking down nicely.
The idea of straw bale gardens remains sound, even if the first attempt was a dud. So I’m going to give it another go, this time earlier in the season. I’ll report back…
Kicking off a straw bale garden
For a long while now I’ve wanted to do two things: grow sweet potato (kumera), and have vegetables in the guerrilla gardened land behind our house. When I stumbled across the book Straw Bale Gardens, it seemed like the perfect answer to both desires.
Straw is the bundled stalks of harvested wheat, and it acts like, well, straws, sucking up and holding onto moisture. I sourced six bales from the friendly folks at Kensington Produce, piling them into my ute.
The concept is a simple one: lay out a number of straw bales, with the ‘spiky side’ facing upwards. These act as the base of a no-dig garden bed.
For the first two weeks, the straw bales get a few handfuls of fertiliser each day, and plenty of water. This kicks off the breakdown of the bales (straw by itself has very little nutrient).
Before planting anything else, I nestled a number of sweet potatos (kumera) into the straw (these babies are the main reason I created the garden). In theory I was supposed to let them shoot first, but I couldn’t wait — fingers crossed it works!
A soaker hose was then laid out across the bales, and then the bales are covered an inch-thick layer of potting mix. I then planted seeds of a mix of different quick-growing vegetables, including lettuce, green beans and amaranth, plus some strawberries.
The straw bales are already encouragingly warm, so hopefully this will encourage seed germination. I’ll report on progress over the next weeks and months.
As a final note, I’d strongly recommend the Straw Bale Gardens book. It’s a simple concept, but clearly and powerfully communicated. Joel’s garden design is more evolved that the simple version I’ve created, so I’d encourage you to get a copy and start planting!
Fifty plants now in around Lewisham Station
Since my early native plantings around Lewisham Station, I’ve been steadily adding to the collection, mostly by planting a few of my hand-raised cuttings each weekend.
I’ve now reached the milestone of fifty plants. These are planted closely together — typically about 30cms apart — to create a dense “bush pocket” effect.
While that might seem like a crazy amount of over-planting, it’s all to a plan:
- At the back of the strip, a canopy of small trees, including acacias (wattles) and callistomons (bottle brushes).
- A mid story of native bushes, including westringias (native rosemary), correas (native fuchsia) and prostantheras (mint bushes).
- A bottom story of strap-leaf plants at the front of the strip, and a mix of hardy groundcovers throughout the rest.
I reckon there may be 30-50 more plants required to fill it all out, but I’ll continue the slow-and-steady approach.
So far only two plants have died, and they were struggling as cuttings even before I planted them out.
Fingers crossed the rest will keep on going strong!
(Not) guerrilla gardening around Lewisham train station
The area around Lewisham train station is a desolate wasteland. Other than a row of large palm trees, there’s a disintegrating raised garden bed, and a long strip of browning weeds. Hardly a joy to behold.
Following a casual suggestion from a neighbour, I guerrilla gardened in a number of gymea lilies, underneath the palm trees. These are extremely tough, and will grow to a size large enough to visually fill in the gaps along the fence.
That got me started, so I continued on to plant a small patch of native plants at the start of the pedestrian walkway that runs alongside the train line.
I’ve since expanded this a little, and it now consists of a mix of acacias (to start enriching the soil), hardy native shrubs (westringias, etc) and strap-leafed plants (lomandras, dianellas).
This has not been without some challenges:
- The railway put in a huge new vandal-proof black fence, and the workers trampled some of the plants in the process (although most survived!).
- The regular railway workers tend to roll their trucks over the garden every once in a while.
- Kids keep stealing the stakes, so the plant guards blow away.
- It’s only rained once in the last 3 months, so hand watering is critical in this early stage.
Despite this, many of the plants, particularly the bushes, are already growing rapidly. I’ve also got a heap of cuttings that should be ready for planting out soon.
Why do this?
A few people have asked me “why bother doing all this, it isn’t your problem?”.
There are a few reasons:
- It’s nice to live in a lovely local environment, and the current station environment is far from lovely.
- It’s also good to increase the local biodiversity, encouraging more birds, insects, etc.
- This land belongs collectively to us, as the local residents. The Council is just the steward of the land, looking after it on our behalf.
- This gives us a responsibility to participate in sustaining and improving the environment.
- Someone should be doing it! The Council, even with the best of wills, can’t do everything for us.
- It’s enjoyable and satisfying to see something grow and prosper.
It’s now official
I also struck up a conversation with the lovely folks at Marrickville Council, who have endorsed the use of the land as a low-maintenance community native garden.
So it’s no longer guerrilla gardening … it’s official gardening. Where’s the fun in that! 😉
Watch this space for updates as the space (hopefully) starts to bush up and spread out…
Planting natives into our verge
When we first moved into the house, we brought with us a bay tree that was living in a pot. One of our first actions was to guerrilla garden this into the verge, along with a lemon-scented tea tree (Leptospermum Petersonii). They’ve been happily growing there for the last 3+ years.
Inspired by the Council’s recent efforts, we decided to take the next step, and to strip out all the grass in the strip of verge.
This was surprisingly easy to do with a mattock, and the grass was all out in a little over an hour.
We then planted in a mix of hardy natives:
- Lomandra longifolia
- Lomonda hystrix
- Dianella caerulea
- Pennisetum advena ‘Rubrum’
- Grevillea
It’s not much to look at right now, but give it six months and it will be lush bush pocket!
Our first apples
Some years ago, we started guerrilla gardening some of the convent land to make it into a food forest. This included nine different varieties of apple trees.
Much to our surprise, the trees started flowering after only a year, although they produced a very small amount of fruit. (All of which was attacked to death by the fruit flies that year.)
So the apples above represent our very first harvest. They’re not the biggest of apples, and frankly, they’re not the best. But they are ours 🙂
It’s been a tough year for the trees. After a very wet summer, we then went into 6 months of drought, with less than 50mm per month. (Until the skies opened up two days ago, dumping 150mm on Sydney.)
The ground was parched, and even the weeds were brown and dying. The trees only survived by weekly bucket watering, which is far from ideal growing conditions.
So we’ll enjoy these first apples, and look forward to an even better harvest next year 🙂
Seedballs: from Fukuoka to Green Guerillas
Milkwood Permaculture have posted a great piece on creating seedballs, for guerilla gardening or just plain efficiency. To quote:
The poetry of the Seedball concept is simple, yet immense. Encase a seed (or seeds) in a protective jacket of clay, creating a Seed ball. Distribute Seedballs across ground, not worrying if this day, or this month even, is the best time to ‘sow’. Protected from insects, buirds, heat and sunlight until the time is right, the seedball activates with a rain event which is sufficient to soak through the clay coating to germinate the seed. Which incidentally is the sort of rain event that you want to have directly following the perfect seed sowing day. And that’s it. But that’s not all.
I picked up some seedballs at a local event recently, and I’m trying them out in our garden. I’ll report back.
Lewisham House and Farm 