Over at The Age newspaper, feature writer Katherine Kizilos has been writing an excellent series of articles relating to urban food production, with many friends of Eat the Suburbs featured — even myself today, in an article about urban weed foraging. This is a compilation of some of Katherine’s recent great efforts.

Perhaps my favourite is Blitzing the ‘burbs about our permablitz network cohorts:

Give over a few weekends and your backyard too could be the site of a remarkable transformation.

Dan Palmer, the 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.

[full article...]

For my money, the permablitz movement is one of the most exciting and fun movements around — and Dan is a visionary, do believe the hype! Permablitzes are antidotes to the paralysis of too much bad information. They make the effort of transforming a back- (or front) yard into food production fun, social and fast. A modern barn-raising network. Check out the rest of the article and the permablitz calendar, and consider getting on down to the next one.

Glenda Lindsay above and below with North Fitzroy Community School students, who share the land and the produce in Luscious Lane.
Photo: Rebecca Hallas

Our friend Glenda Lindsay was featured in a May article, Backyard Bliss. When I first met Glenda we were both (rather genially) crashing an after conference drinks session organised by the PR industry about how to tackle environmentalists using their own tactics, and she was handing out info about peak oil to all and sundry! I hope they didn’t read it or they might be truly dangerous by now. Glenda is a great character and a font of good energy. Katherine Kizilos wrote an article about Luscious Lane, the community garden Glenda started in her own backyard!

When the Lindsays renovated their home they converted the stables into a studio and dug up the bluestones and cement to make a garden. But Glenda Lindsay realised there was too much land for her to use productively; unless it was shared it would be wasted.

“I think I always held the belief that land is part of the commons,” says Lindsay. “It is a relatively recent notion to put a fence around it and call it your own.”

[full article...]

In September Katherine penned a rare and much needed call for more urban food production in a major newspaper, with this excellent article, Time to farm the suburbs:

A society in need of physical and spiritual nourishment need look no further than its own backyard.

…Growing food is not difficult but it does require time and labour. An advantage of community gardens is that your neighbouring plot holders are usually willing to share whatever knowledge they may have. You can learn how to garden on-site and meet your neighbours in the process. The loneliness of the suburbs, which so oppressed my father, can be broken down with a shovel and a hoe.

…I would like to back a proposition already put forward by local gardeners and environmentalists who are wondering if it is possible to harness the resources we already have in the city to solve the problem of food, gardens and water in a new way. What if we used our backyards to grow more of the food we need to live – backyard gardens use water more efficiently than commercial farms – or even shared our backyards with people who live in units and flats (an experiment that is already being tried in Fitzroy).

…Farming the suburbs isn’t a new idea, but in the present climate perhaps it should be examined more seriously by policy makers. Surveys of vacant land could be undertaken to see where food production is feasible, for instance. Greater water allotments could be assigned for local food producers. Local councils could encourage schemes for backyard sharing. Hardy fruit trees could be planted on nature strips. What is out of balance now could gradually be corrected. It’s surprising what can spring from the soil once the right seeds are planted – as any gardener will tell you.

[full article..]

The article features more EtS friends too, Chris Ennis and Peta Christensen, who’s reports from their world tour of urban food production systems has been a great source of inspiration to many of us.

Katherine has also written about her own plot at Veg Out, the St Kilda community garden,

And lastly here’s the one from today about my weed foraging, Where the wild things are:

Lord of the manna: Adam Grubb studies food that can be gathered for free in the city.
Photo: Rodger Cummins

One person’s weeds are another’s gourmet lunch. There’s plenty of bush tucker to be found in your neighbourhood if you know where to look, as Katherine Kizilos discovers.

On a sunny spring day Adam Grubb, self-styled weed enthusiast, is picking his way over stepping stones in the northern reaches of the Merri Creek. Clumps of watercress crowd the water’s edge, shaded by hawthorn and willows. On the surrounding banks rogue artichokes grow, along with dock, plantain, sow thistles, dandelions, wild carrot and periwinkle.

For the past four years, Grubb has been acquainting himself with the medicinal and nutritional qualities of these plants that thrive on neglect, often in poor soils, on marginal land. He is an urban forager: a student of nourishing foods that can be gathered for free in the city. On this glorious morning the weedscape looks idyllic: the hawthorn and wild roses are in flower and birds are singing in the tree tops.

[full article...]

I thought I better look up what manna means, since I’m now lord of it. Apparantly it’s the name given to whatever the Israelites ate during travels in the desert. There’s disagreement about what it actually was, but may have been ‘crystallised honeydew of certain scale insects’ according to wikipedia. Not even I’ve foraged anything that weird yet — but I’d be proud to. Anyway, the article starts with a bit about foraging and goes into the ecological roles of weeds, which I explored a bit more deeply in an earlier post.

So big thanks to Katherine Kizilos for her at once fair and inspiring articles.

And one bonus article, this one by another reporter, neither is it about urban food. It’s about another friend and bike repair legend Bill Bretherton of Human Powered Cycles, ReCycling.

Pedal power: Bill Bretherton sees bikes as a way to promote social justice.
Photo: Eddie Jim

A Melbourne man is using the humble push bike to create a greener, fairer world. Kathleen O’Connell reports.

…Each weekend countless people visit the workshop at the bottom of his garden, wheeling in their injured bikes. “Bill the Bike Man’s” reputation is far reaching.

…Bretherton realised early on that if you want to change the world, you have to start in your own backyard – or front yard, as in his case.

Armed with a dozen mates and endless cups of tea, the group set to work fixing second-hand bikes that they had scrounged from tips and hard-rubbish collections. The chain gang then rented out the bikes at different sustainability events around Melbourne but most were never returned.

“We soon realised that the system was never going to be sustainable. People were taking a bike even if they didn’t want or need them, so they weren’t valued. We realised we had to change the way we worked.”

The group found a workshop in Bretherton’s backyard, trained other volunteer mechanics and invented a pricing system that stayed true to their original cause of promoting cycling across all tiers in society.

[full article...]

Actually Bill and his dad Matthew’s place is a great example of urban food production too. It’s a remant old farmhouse located on the Merri Creek in the inner suburb of East Brunswick. My fellow facilitators and I took particpants on the Permablitz Intro to Permaculture course there on a quick field trip recently, the garden is so good, with fruit trees, chickens, bees, greywater and lots of roof water capture.

Big kudos to all mentioned, and to the reporters for sneaking some great articles in through the editorial cracks.