So I’ve been busy launching and working with my friends Dan, Paul and Nathe on our new business: Very Edible Gardens (VEG).  Dan is the founder of permablitz and Paul has designed more properties for blitzes than anyone else, and Nath has been into permaculture since the early 90s.  We’re running courses, doing consultancies and designs, and selling raised vegie beds which we can fully install including timers so people can water legally without getting out of bed at 6am.  We’re still all heavily involved in the permablitz movement in a mostly volunteer basis.  We want to provide meaningful employment for people keen to gain skills in urban permaculture design, implementation and maintenance, and help the city transition to a far more sustainable place which means dealing with a lot of our needs more locally.   Lots is happening at the moment, and there will be updates on the VEG site soon!

I made the website, which I hope is my last one ever! Check us out at www.VeryEdibleGardens.com

A film by Tanya Curnow, 2006.

EAT THE SUBURBS takes the oil debate from the bowser to the backyard and follows Melbourne’s “permablitzers” as they prepare for the end of the oil age… one garden at a time.

Made 2006 but online for the first time now.

It’s an excellent 9 minutes, the only short film I know of which deals specifically with peak oil and food issues. Eat The Suburbs received its world premiere at the 2007 Hot Docs International Film Festival which is one of the most prestigious in the world. I got undue credit at the end, as other people speak a lot more than me including the uncredited, and most wonderful, Megan Floris and Matt Daniele.

My only minor misgiving is that Tanya happened to film it at the first young activist crowd dominated permablitz, whereas usually there isn’t a single culture or age group that dominates the blitzes. One of the things I like about them is that they do get you out of cultural ghettos and meet people from lots of backgrounds and ages. Not that I have a problem with youngish activisty crowd, some of my best friends etc etc…

Note: The film happens to take its name from this blog, and I helped Tanya a little bit develop the idea but there’s no formal connection.

Links:
Richard Heinberg: www.richardheinberg.com
Permablitz: www.permablitz.net

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.

One of the great challenges for Australians over the next years and decades will be feeding ourselves, and doing it sustainably — ie. in a way that doesn’t collapse. Home gardening offers all the benefits of reduced food miles, no packaging, healthier fresher food, food security, low level excercise and the joy of gardening. But most importantly it can be sustainable and soil improving in a way broad scale industrial monocultures simply are not. The biointensive agriculture methods developed by John Jeavons and his forebears are one of the best ways of getting lots of production out of suburban sized food plots and small market gardens. Here’s a great story about one of its proponents in the US. To quote, “according to Dr. Amen, a family of four can be fed on a quarter-acre lot or a 30×30-foot plot, with enough space to rotate the crops. What makes it work are the techniques of biointensive gardening, which produce maximum yields on a minimum of land while leaving the soil better off.”

The garden beds where I’ve been staying in Hepburn are managed in a biointensive inspired method, producing all the fresh vegetables and potatoes for about four people on about a quarter acre. (Dr. Amen is refering I presume to an empty quarter acre block.) Each Australian suburban household has more like one tenth of an acre available on their house block as growing space. Directing roof and path water, we can make this smaller space a highly productive food gardens. Even in this smaller space we can provide for all of our fresh vegetable needs as long as there is good light. But the availability of this space is shrinking as documented by the Urban Research Program at Griffith University in Prof. Tony Hall’s paper, ‘Where Have All the Gardens Gone? An Investigation into the Disappearance of Backyards in the Newer Australian Suburb‘ (PDF). Hall concludes:

Within the past 10 years private amenity space has largely disappeared from the rear of new suburban houses in Australia. This is characterised by an increase in plot coverage from 30-40% to 50-60% or even more. The change appears both permanent and uniform… It appears to be confined to Australia, in other parts of the world where back gardens have been standard features, North America, New Zealand, Northwest Europe, this trend is not to be found. The outer suburban landscape in Australia has ceased to be one of large gardens with trees. Such landscapes are now confined to the inner suburbs. This trend represents a loss that has serious ecological implications. It also raises important questions about lifestyles changing for the worse, a trend rendered permanent by the changes to the housing stock.

Are these changes permanent? I’m more hopeful, of a sort. In an energy descent future these outer-suburban ‘estates’, with no public transport infrastructure, large cheaply-built and difficult-to-maintain housing, with minimal growing area, may become hugely devalued. Those communities which remain after the forclosures may scavenge materials from and eventually knock down many of the houses, using the materials for repairs, and growing food on the resulting space. The image on the left comes from a BBC story documenting the vandalism of 1000s of abandoned houses in Cleveland, part of the current US housing market crunch. History is full of examples of people reclaiming unused land (and during WW2, golf courses) for food production in times of hardship, and it’s going to happen again.

As for the relatively sustainable older suburbs, a couple of weeks ago I did a quick survey of ratio of food producing trees versus ornamentals in the front yards and public areas of Ringwood — one of the older suburbs. The ratio was roughly 1:30.

In general we can say that:

• the challenges for urban food production are gaining (not just reduced open space, but climate change and water restrictions, loss of gardening skill base, and longer work hours so less time for gardening)
• and yet the opportunities remain huge (huge existing resources being dedicated to lawns and ornamental plants)
• and the pressure is building (drought affecting crops and food prices globally, global financial recession looming, peak oil, China entering the global food market and so on).

EMPTY shelves in Caracas. Food riots in West Bengal and Mexico. Warnings of hunger in Jamaica, Nepal, the Philippines and sub-Saharan Africa. Soaring prices for basic foods are beginning to lead to political instability, with governments being forced to step in to artificially control the cost of bread, maize, rice and dairy products.

…The price rises were a result of record oil prices, US farmers switching from cereals to grow biofuel crops, extreme weather, and growing demand from India and China, the UN said.

“There is no one cause but a lot of things are coming together to lead to this,” the head of the FAO’s Food Outlook program, Ali Gurkan, said.

He said cereal stocks had been declining for more than a decade but were now about 57 days, which made global food supplies vulnerable to an international crisis or disaster such as a drought or flood.

That’s right. We’ve been consuming more grain than we’ve been producing as a globe for most of the last decade. You can track it yourself in the FAO’s biannual Food Outlook reports. Are Australians, with our rising dollar, immune to the implications of this? Can’t we buy the food we need? The troubling question of who would miss out aside, I wouldn’t count on it. In The Age today:

THE man responsible for investing $41 billion of the State’s money has warned mum-and-dad investors to prepare for a massive sharemarket crash.

He says a dramatic downturn is inevitable as the rapid rate of investment is unsustainable, and the repercussions of the $300 billion subprime lending crisis in the US are yet to be felt fully.

State Treasury has revealed that Victoria looks set to lose just $1.9 million directly from the subprime fiasco.

But the chief investment officer of the Victorian Funds Management Corporation, Leo de Bever, is taking no chances, telling The Sunday Age that he is managing the risk of further losses “as best as humanly possible” by shifting investments to safer options.

Mr Baillieu warned that millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money was at risk and accused the Premier of failing to come clean about potential losses.

“We know hospitals and local governments have been exposed, we know there is a level of exposure to the VFMC, and John Brumby won’t even provide a basic reporting process,” Mr Baillieu told The Sunday Age.

However, Mr de Bever — who oversees the investment of money from entities including the Royal Children’s Hospital, the Royal Women’s Hospital, the National Gallery of Victoria, the University of Melbourne and the Transport Accident Commission — described the subprime debacle as being “the least of our concerns”. It was the “roaring bull” market that kept him awake at night, he said.

The boom of the past five years could not be sustained and mum-and-dad investors stood to lose if they did not act now.

So even state assets are exposed to the collapse of the US subprime lending scams.

Note also that Australians have more personal debt in history, worse even than before the Great Depression.

I updated the Energy Bulletin Peak Oil Primer this week, adding this paragraph:

Already peaked? As of writing, there is mounting evidence that we have past not only the all time peak in regular conventional oil in May 2005, but also the peak of all-liquids in July 2006. A study by the German Government sponsored Energy Watch Group, oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens, and the former head of exploration and production at Saudi Aramco, Sadad al-Huseini have all recently supported this view.

Ie. oil very well may have peaked already, some very reasonable and influencial people think so. This is an example of the type situation which has James Howard Kunstler using the word ‘clusterfuck’ for a reason. Greater competition for scare food, meets global and local financial bubbles, meets an already declining energy base. Food security aside, did I mention there is more than one reason to Grow Your Own?

How much energy and greenhouse emissions can we save if we grow more home food? How much water? How much waste can we stop going to landfill?

Broadacre industrial agriculture uses 65% of Australia’s water. Our food system (including imports) consumes almost twice as much energy as personal transport, and thanks to soil carbon loss, methane and nitrous oxide emissions, the greenhouse impacts of the food system are disproportionately large. Meanwhile, according to the most recently available figures, most of Victoria’s household wastes going to landfill are organic materials.

Home food production can use existing resources and infrastructure, and use methods which radically reduce resource consumption. This suggests that the potential savings to be made if existing resources and infrastructure are used to increase urban food production are dramatic.

I’ve looked at the Havana example, and various estimates of how much food can be produced in suburban situations and chosen the aspirational targets that by producing the most energy and water intensive portion of our diets at home we can halve our resource use of both energy and water. This is possible because the most energy and water intensive crops — when grown on an industrial scale — are the ones best suited to resource efficient home gardening.

The findings are that the average Victorian household has the potential to reduce landfill waste by around 1.5 tonnes a year by composting, which represents 64% of household total. This resource can be used to enrich urban soils. Further landfill savings would be made ‘upstream’ because there would be less industrial wastes and packaging involved in feeding the household, although no figure has so far been arrived at for this.

Meanwhile, we can drop the total water we use at home in Melbourne by around 100,000 litres with a 10,000 litre rainwater tank, which amounts to 35% of the average household use. Most of the water we use isn’t at home directly, it’s embodied in the food we buy. Through home food gardening we can potentially save a further 410,000 litres of ‘embodied water’. So that’s a potential saving of 510,000 litres per household in total.

Potential energy savings are impressive. Without any authorative Australian studies, I’ve adopted estimates based on a 1993 study of the US food system that around 10 units of fossil fuel energy go into producing every one unit of energy in the food we eat. There’s no evidence to suggest that the Australian system is any better. By these estimates, each individual can save the equivalent of about four barrels of crude oil, or around 1.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions every year by home food gardening. Each household could save about 3.75 tonnes of CO2 annually on average, out of about 20 tonnes per household (about 18%). These CO2-equivalent figures may be conservative estimates, as they do not consider the extra non-CO2 greenhouse emissions associated with agriculture.

For these reasons it seems that home and urban food production will be a major ingredient in peak oil adaptation and climate change mitigation and reduction strategies.

More details and an explanation of these respective figures follows.

Water

Australia is the driest continent on earth, with an increasingly dire outlook due to climate change.

The average Australian household directly uses 285,000 litres of water every year through the tap. [1]

Roof area of average home is 175 square metres in Melbourne.[2] With our rainfall since 1980, that’s on average 156,000 litres available every year.[3] We can’t capture 100% of that rain, but we could easily fill a 10,000 litre tank 10 times over, reducing our overall draw on mains water by over 35%. Combined with water saving gardening techniques, such as water harvesting from paths, mulching, and dripper irrigation, we can drop it even further. A quick review of the scientific literature (eg here, here) suggests that soil water retention can be doubled with mulch alone. The Food Forest in South Australia, using permaculture designed water harvesting and storage techniques (including within the rich soil), uses one tenth to one fifth of the water used by a comparable conventional orchard system.[4]

However we never even see much of the water we use. We have to also consider ‘embodied water’ — the water it took to grow and process the food we buy. In 2004-2005 Australian agriculture used 12,191 GL of water, 65% of our total water use, down from 70% a few years earlier. [5]

Figure 1. Water Consumption in Australia. Source: National Water Commission

In their 2001 study, An input–output analysis of Australian water usage, Manfred Lenzen and Barney Foran applied the methods of embodied energy accounting to do the first embodied water analysis for Australia. “Australia’s annual water use of 22,000 Gl is dissected using input–output techniques, showing that 30% of Australia’s water requirement was devoted to domestic food production and a further 30% to exports, compared with 7% required for direct consumption by households.”

Incidentally, in 2005 Australia exported enough grain — 95% of it wheat — to provide the basic calorific requirements for 40 million people. Wheat is relatively low in terms of it’s irrigation requirements however. [x] So, according to Foran and Lenzen, about half of agricultural water goes to domestic food, half to exports.

If we were to take the 2004-5 figure of water use by Australian agriculture, halve it so that we’re ignoring exports, and then divide the remainder by Australia’s 7.4 million households, it equates to 823,000 litres per year per household. So the potential savings are still huge. Lets say that we produce the most agriculturally water intensive third of our food at home, using tank water and water efficient gardening techniques. (Ie. the kind of thing which we grow best at home: fruit and vegetables. We could roughly halve our embodied water use. That’s a saving of up to 400,000 litres in embodied water per household per year.

For more on the water efficiency of garden agriculture as opposed to industrial agriculture see David Holmgren’s Garden Agriculture: A revolution in efficient water use (PDF).

Landfill and waste

The average Australian household sends 2.4 tonnes of waste to landfill each year. [6]

A 2000 report by the Victoria Auditor-General’s office reported that kitchen waste, greenwaste, paper and cardboard contributed to most of Victorian household waste — 64% in total. See figure 2. These three components are easily used as sheet mulch or composted on site — representing the potential of saving 1.5 tonnes of organic material from going to landfill, and instead using it to enrich our gardens! [7]

Figure 2. Composition of Municipal Landfill Deposits (% tonnages)

Commercial, industrial, building & demolition waste amounts to another 2,790,000 tonnes per year in Victoria (total household waste is 2,133,000). [8] What percentage of this would be saved if we halved our dependence on the industrial food system? Further breakdowns aren’t reported so we can’t be sure. But every saving we make at home may well be matched further up the industrial supply chain.

Energy and greenhouse emissions

To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever done a comprehensive study of the energy which goes into our food system in Australia, but we can look elsewhere for some guides.

According to Worldwatch Institute, nearly 21 percent of fossil fuel used goes into the global food system. [x] Ecologist Folke Gunther’s research suggests that, in Sweden, food is the single biggest energy cost for a household — and the one with by far the biggest potential for decreasing energy use, as illustrated in the following graph. [9]

Figure 3. A rough breakdown of the energy use of a family of four in Sweden. The single largest energy user is the food system which is where the largest potential for increased energy efficiency (grey part of the bars) to be found.

Is the same true for Australia? Former Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson certainly thinks so, based on his recent comment that, “We’re pouring as much oil into refrigerators as we are into our cars”. of a similar scenario here in Australia. [10]

To figure out if he’s correct lets consider David Pimental’s 1994 study into the US food system. Pimentel traced all the fossil fuel inputs into the food chain and found that it takes around 10 calories of fossil fuel energy to deliver every calorie of food to the shop. He didn’t even consider in his calculations the transportation back to homes, and home refrigeration, preparation and cooking. [11]

Say you have a roughly average Australian intake of 13,500 kilojoules a day. If we assume that our food system now is about as energy intensive as the US food system was back in 1994, the food system consumes equivalent of 8 barrels of oil to feed you every year. [13]

So how does that compare to car travel? In the year ended 31 October 2004, Australia’s 10.7 million registered passenger vehicles travelled an estimated 148 billion km, each averaging 13,900 km per year. [14] The average fuel use was about 11.5 litres per 100 kilometres, so each car used about 1600 litres. [15] There’s about one car for every two Australians, so we each on average use about 800 litres worth of petrol each year on car travel — about 26 million BTUs of energy. Eight barrels of oil — how much energy we each consume indirectly through our food — contain 46 million BTUs of energy. So John Anderson was right — we really do put more fuel into our refridgerators than into our cars — almost twice!

This also squares with the Australian Conservation Foundation’s Consuming Australia study which found that food consumption is responsible for 28% of the average Australians’ greenhouse gas pollution, whereas personal and public transport accounts for 10.5%. Note that a great deal of personal transport and home energy is related to food procurement, storage and preparation.

How much food can we grow?

John Jeavons the guru of biointensive gardening and his followers shows how we can grow the complete diet for a human on less than 4000 square feet of land, or 1/10th of an acre, including growing material set aside for compost. David Holmgren has pointed out that suburbia is a similar population density as high intensity Asian self sufficient cultures.

However it’s more realistic for most of us to be aiming to provide about half of our diet by weight, focusing on fresh greens, vegetables and fruit. The average house block size is something in the ballpark of 2/10th of an acre (although new blocks average less, especially in Melbourne where they are down to about 0.14 acres on average, whereas houses are growing to about 250 m2 or 0.6 of an acre [x]). But on average each household has access to about 1/10th of an acre of potential food producing area. So enough to feed a single person. But since we’re focusing on nutrition rather than energy crops, we can actually grow a larger percentage of a person’s diet by weight, since it is the energy crops which tend to be more demanding of space. My experience suggests that on a decent sized suburban block we can expect to produce all of our fresh vegetables for a family of four, perhaps 10 percent of our carbohydrates via potatoes and jerusalem artichokes, and a good deal of our fruit — especially if we both eat more seasonally and home preserve.  (From a barely head-height untended, unwatered quince tree in an abandoned neighbours yard in one of Australia’s worst ever drought years, I bottled over 10kg of preserved fruit earlier in the year).

The fresh foods are actually those which involve the most energy in transport, because they’re more easily crushed and spoiled, so must be stacked more sparsely, moved more quickly and kept refrigerated — and these are exactly the things we can easily grow at home. Of course freshly picked organic vegetables are much healthier, so much so that you need to eat less of them.

So really it’s the most fossil fuel intensive half of our diet which we can grow. But to be conservative, lets say that we reduce the energy costs in the food we eat by just 50% with intensive home food gardening. Shopping local, attending farmers markets, buying local organic produce and unprocessed foods could all help drop the remaining 50% significantly.

But just considering the home gardening component, every household on a suburban block could save the equivalent of 4 barrels of crude oil, or around 1.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.[16]

Home gardening inputs

It may seem a simplification to assume that home food gardening consumes no fossil energy. And of course it is one, given that almost everything we do within an industrial society directly or indirectly consumes some fuel. However, if you save seed with friends, build composts from on-site or locally harvested materials, practice water conservation, there’s no particular need for high energy inputs. The biggest energy costs are the embodied energy in the infrastructure of tanks and hoses. In a future version I hope to consider this.

References

[1] Calculation is based on 7.4 million households (in 2001) using 2,108GL / year
Sources:
http://www.water.gov.au/WaterUse/Waterusedbytheeconomy/index.aspx?Menu=Level1_4_2
http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/ProductsbyTopic/0AAC8BFAE9DD3241CA2568A90013942A?OpenDocument

[2] http://www.enviro-friendly.com/tank-water-savings.shtml

[3] ibid

[4] http://holmgren.eatthesuburbs.org/DLFiles/PDFs/WaterJournalOpWeb.pdf

[5] http://www.water.gov.au/WaterUse/Waterusedbytheeconomy/index.aspx?Menu=Level1_4_2

[6] Calculation is based on the number of Victorian households in 2001 (886,000)
Source: http://www.greenhouse.vic.gov.au/CA256F310024B628/0/A55E3A4F916BE3D2CA256F620014A6A1/$File/YQA+-+Households.pdf

The total amount of solid landfill waste per year in Victoria is:
Household: 2,133,000 tonnes
Commercial, industrial, building & demolition: 2,790,000 tonnes
Source: http://www.environment.gov.au/soe/2006/publications/report/human-settlements-2.html#table7

[7] http://www.audit.vic.gov.au/old/par65/ags6504.htm

[8] http://www.environment.gov.au/soe/2006/publications/report/human-settlements-2.html#table7

[9] http://www.feasta.org/documents/feastareview/guenther.htm

[10] http://www.eatthesuburbs.org/2007/09/john-anderson-on-food-shocks-oil-dependency-and-drought/

[11] http://dieoff.org/page69.htm

[13] 1 barrel(42 gallons) of crude oil = 5,800,000 Btu
Source: http://www.eia.doe.gov/kids/energyfacts/science/energy_calculator.html

[14] http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/productsbytitle/18830D3F1604281FCA25723600056557?opendocument

[15] http://www.ptua.org.au/myths/efficient.shtml

[16] Assuming that the greenhouse gas intensity of the fossil fuel inputs into agriculture are about the same as crude oil — about 384kg CO2 per barrel. <http://tothetarsands.ca/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/kealans-greenhouse-gas-research.doc>
The truth is we can save more greenhouse gas emissions by reducing our dependence on soil destroying agriculture — and focusing on soil building home gardening. Methane loss and nitrous oxide from agriculture are major contributors to climate change, and this has not been considered in these calculations yet. Recent research suggests that industrial agriculture and chemical nitrogren fertilizers contribute far more to climate change that was previously thought. <http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2007/September/21090701.asp> Rebuilding the humus content of soils is actually a major carbon sink, so we have the potential to have a positive impact on carbon levels.

John Anderson is the former leader of the National Party, Deputy Prime Minister and Federal Minister for Primary Industries and Energy. He’s retiring at the coming election to go back to the farm. As Deputy Prime Minister in 2004 he was one of the first significant politicians globally to acknowledge peak oil. He’s now making the links between climate change, peak oil and food security, and made the following comments on ABC Radio National, Sept 26 2007:

“It’s not beyond the realms of possiblity that we’ll see a food shock in the next few years. We talk about oil shocks, but we go on assuming that the supermarket shelves will be loaded.”

“The global situation is a serious one… We’re pouring as much oil into refrigerators as we are into our cars. Now, oil and energy dependency for the production and distribution and preparation of our food is really very worrying.”

Download the full interview [mp3 / 2.4MB]

Note: Anderson promotes GMOs as part of the solution — but we should be dubious about this as it puts control of solutions into multinational corporations, is inherently dangerous, and the industrial model of farming associated with GMOs is much less effective than small scale biodiverse permaculture systems with water harvesting systems. Because of the clumsyness of GMO technology, basically every cell in the body of the GMO produces proteins from the introduced gene, even in areas where they are not needed, or indeed may be toxic to the plant. This represents a metabolic overhead unsuited to tough conditions such as drought.

Slice food bill, avoid drought: grow vegies
Lucinda Ormonde, John Elder in The Age
September 23, 2007

RIP out your camellias and plant carrots instead.

That’s the advice of the Australian Vegetable and Potato Growers Association, which says growing your own vegetables could help combat rising food prices and a potential shortage of fresh produce because of the drought.

“We’re seeing a shortage of carrots and we could potentially see a shortage in potatoes. Lots of growing areas are very short of water,” said the association’s chairman, Michael Badcock. “While there’s a bit of product around, you might want to put some away for the future. I think Australian families should be freezing their spare vegetables, and planting some of their own in the backyard.”

Mr Badcock said food companies McCain’s and Simplot (which produces frozen and tinned vegetable brand Edgells) are unable to get enough supply to meet their orders. “This means they will not be able to utilise their entire factories, and this makes for a more expensive product — and retailers who have to charge more for the product,” he said.

Calls to McCain’s media office were not returned.

Sergio Canale, executive general manager of supply chain at Simplot, would not say outright if there was a shortage, or which products were affected. “It’s not as simple as more demand than supply, but we think we can cover it for the moment. In another few months it may be a different case. If need be we will source from overseas and this can be sourced at competitive prices.”

Mr Canale added the company “has other options” but wasn’t prepared to divulge them. He said: “We do try to use local product as much as possible, but not all crops are available in Australia.”

Ausveg has had a long-running gripe with Simplot and McCain’s over wholesale prices — and the fact that so much overseas stock has, for years, been used in canned goods.

Mr Badcock describes the state of vegetable growing as “not a pretty picture”. Winter rains provided hope, and there was a boost in leafy vegetables such as broccoli, cabbages and cauliflower. “But there is not enough rain to sustain many of those crops and irrigation restrictions don’t help, either. We won’t lose total production, but we will experience a fluctuation in prices.”

As for his grow-your-own advice, Mr Badcock notes that it’s a good time for planting.

“Vegetables that grow above the ground such as cabbage and cauliflower will tend to get eaten by bugs. But if you plant vegetables such as potatoes, parsnip and carrots, they will absorb the moisture and continue to grow. “

As for freezing your produce, he advises: “Blanch your vegetables and then freeze them on a tray before putting them in a plastic bag. Your vegetables should last for up to 12 months.”

Dealing with stage 3 water restrictions so early in the season, and faced with even tougher ones in the coming months, I am reminded of a cartoon that had a huge impact on me as a child.

It was about a little girl, stuck indoors on a wet day, gazing out the window and wishing that the rain would go away forever. In true cartoon fashion, she got her wish. The rain stopped, and so did the water that had always gushed freely out of her tap. She gasped in panic as she squeezed the last few drops into a glass and was about to drink it when she noticed a flower outside, wilting in the sun, ready to keel over. She raced to rescue the flower but before she got there she tripped and the last of the precious water spilt, instantly being absorbed and evaporated by the thirsty earth.

Recently Sharon Beder, writing in The Age, pointed out the inherent unfairness of using ability to pay as an indicator of water-worthiness, but I wonder whether uniform and severe restrictions on everyone across the State — regardless of situation, type of outdoor usage or needs — is any more fair, or a better solution.

Gardens mean different things to different people. People in suburbs rich in parks and public spaces, for instance, may have less psychological, spiritual or therapeutic need for that little patch of daily-tended greenery.

And while someone who works long hours outside the home will probably feel the loss of their garden less than someone home all day with young children or with a disability, they are much more likely to be able to afford equipment to help bypass the restrictions. Automatic tap timers and watering systems, outdoor lighting so you can water late at night (hard to do in the country when your garden is pitch dark by 8 pm), tanks, pumps, and greywater storage systems all cost money, and often aren’t options for people who rent, or easily affordable to those who live on small incomes. (Not to mention high fences that might keep the occasional violation from the eyes of prying neighbours.)

Indeed, restricting outside usage of water seems to have been chosen not because watering your garden is in itself, or is necessarily, the most wanton use of water in our society at present, but simply because it is the only one that can be cheaply policed (by eliciting a charming and community building, deeply Australian, dob in your neighbours system).

Certainly, stopping all outside usage of water in private homes — which has happened already in some country areas, and is rumoured to be scheduled for introduction to most others by November — is a useful shock tactic to make us take water seriously, and may even help get us through this summer without running out. But is this kind of blanket prohibition useful in assisting us to make the type of changes required if we are to get through every summer from now on?

I’m all for telling people to give up their exotics and summer annuals, choose water-efficient and hardy plants, allow their lawns to die off and their gardens to be naturally browner and more muted. But even natives in a harsh season may need the occasional squirt to stay alive. And even well-mulched vegies need to be watered more often than twice a week.

Instead of encouraging people to garden differently, the restrictions this year seem to be encouraging people to abandon the idea of having a garden at all, and in the current climate, I’m not sure this is a good thing.

The significance of backyard gardens for greener, cleaner, more temperate cities and towns, and their function in harbouring and feeding the surprising amount of native wildlife that still lives amongst us is being increasingly recognised.

The bottlebrush in my garden that is still finding its feet in clay soil is not a luxury to the birds that feed from it, nor is the tiny pond a luxury to my local frog population. We could save a bit of water if we abandon these, but maybe in the long run we’d use even more water producing extra chemicals to control the insects that proliferate in their absence.

Biodiversity and the successful multi-use of small spaces takes time and care to establish, and often a judicious use of water to maintain. And I’d be hard pressed to believe that the salad that comes directly from my garden onto my plate uses as much water as the lettuce I drive to the supermarket to buy, produced as it is in large monocultural batches and watered by aerial spray or irrigation.

Indeed, when eighty percent of a nation’s fruit crop can be wiped out overnight by a bad frost or extreme weather event, is this really a good time to actively discourage people from tending their backyard fruit trees and vegie patches? Could we instead perhaps educate and encourage each other towards permaculture and water efficiency by more diverse and varied restrictions?

Gardening is also becoming an important tool in educating children towards good nutritional habits through the experience of growing and cooking their own food. Stephanie Alexander’s project at Collingwood, as described in her recent book, is just one example that it would be a pity to see halted.

For the girl in the cartoon from my childhood, the wilting flower was a life that needed to be saved. Her dilemma, how best to use those last few precious drops of water, seems to me to strike at the heart of what is happening for us.

In the contemporary world, we make choices every day, countless times over and over, about what is valuable, what is precious, what should live and what should be allowed to die, even when we don’t realise that we are doing this. For every choice we make about what and how we consume has effects.

Whether it’s choosing to sacrifice the two-hundred year old redgums on the Murray that are dying because we choose to wear water-greedy cotton instead of hemp, or a rainforest in another country so we can eat cheap beef burgers, or our own forests so we can toss away the paper carton the burger comes in, or the plants in our backyard and the creatures that feed on them so we can have long showers and keep our hair squeaky clean.

The water authorities have decided that commercial practices are to continue unrestricted, but that gardens – and the beauty, peace, wildlife, healing and food they bring – are a luxury we can do without. But like the little girl in the cartoon, I’m not so sure.

email your feedback or comments

Some useful links:
(thanks to those who sent these in)

Regarding the use of veggie gardens in schools to teach children about nutrition: http://www.theage.com.au/news/epicure/children-learning-as-they-grow/2006/10/02/1159641238776.html

Teachers for Forests website has a great page of links about water politics and policies: http://www.teachers.forests.org.au/waternatnews.html

Permablitz
www.permablitz.net

Eat the Suburbs! website
www.eatthesuburbs.org

Energy Bulletin
www.energybulletin.net

Len’s Gardening Page – lots of advice and info on permaculture and organic gardening
http://www.gardenlen.com/

Centre For Research and Education in Environmental Strategies (CERES)
www.ceres.org.au

David Holmgren’s article, ‘Garden Agriculture: A revolution in. efficient water use’
http://www.holmgren.com.au/DLFiles/PDFs/WaterJournalOpWeb.pdf

and a great description of ‘Luscious Lane‘, a communal garden in the inner city Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy, sent in by Glenda Lindsay

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Beth Spencer is an essayist, writer of fiction, and radio producer. Check out www.DogMedia.com.au and www.BethSpencer.com

An edited version of this piece was published in The Age, Opinion, 19th October 2006 as ‘Healthy gardens are just the start for a healthy community’

David Holmgren recently estimated that for the amount of water used in the production of milk products per dollar value on his property was around 1/300th that of commercial agriculture (those figures from memory).

What are permablitzes all about? How did they begin?
A permablitz is basically a permaculture-inspired backyard makeover where people come together to share knowledge and skills about organic food production in urban gardens while building community and having fun.

The basic idea is that by converting their lawns into organic food producing gardens, people will be able to back away from a dependence on industrial agriculture and the shipping of food back and forth across the world. At the same time, it makes organic eating accessible to more than just the upper-middle class. 

The whole permablitz thing started with a group called Codemo (Community Development Multicultural Organisation), a local community group composed primarily of South American immigrants. A permaculture geek named Dan Palmer started hanging out with the Codemo crew and after hearing him rave about the wonders of permaculture and the joys of having a backyard full of practically free organic vegies, and going round to see the amazing and beautiful permaculture system Dan and his housemates, Cat and Adrian, had created in their infamous Thomas Street backyard, some of them expressed interest in growing food in their own backyards.

The first permaculture backyard makeover was held in Dandenong at the home of Vilma from El Salvador. And permablitzes have been spreading all around Melbourne since.

Do you think permablitzes and similar DIY projects have the ability to enrich local communities and culture?
Definitely! Permablitzes involve a combination of learning, practicing and socialising. I'd say the social community-building aspect is just as important, or even moreso, than the garden makeover itself. In our socially atomised suburbs, with our tall fences separating our yards from our neighbours', its rare to get to know those living closest to us.

The permablitz I had at my place last Sunday gave me an opportunity to introduce myself to the old Greek couple next door and invite them round to share some of their gardening skills. A guy down the street who has a concrete yard has even been dropping his food scaps over so i could build up the castings in my worm farm in preparation. And a local lawn mower was dropping off his clippings at my place for the compost building workshop. On the day itself, I met quite a few local people for the first time who had heard about the blitz through the grapevine. On top of this, because it was Codemo who seeded off the permablitz concept, they have also offered fantastic opportunities to meet and spend time with a fun and diverse bunch of people – 76 year old Willie from Chile, for example, has been one most regular blitzers.  He's also one of the hottest dancers of the 'permasalsa' — most of the Codemo permablitzes end with drink and a dance.

After hearing about the permablitz idea, the coordinator of Jika Jika, a community center in Westgarth [an inner Melbourne suburb], has also requested a mini-permablitz be held in the gardens of a local public housing estate. The people who live there are supposedly pretty socially isolated so it will be interesting to see what comes out of holding a blitz and building a community garden with them. [I went along to this, and the tenants rock and are keen to get some tomatoes in, and we're going back to work with them some more next weekend. -AF]

Do you think it's important for people in urban areas to have an engagement in food production and learn how to grow their own food?
Living in a 'modern' society promises that we shouldn't actually have to think about our food, or any other basic necessity. We've 'developed' to the point that we now get to spend our time thinking about modern issues like ring tones and tax returns. So today the majority of the food we eat is grown by a handful of huge agribusinesses and sold in a handful of supermarket chains. Through this process, aside from disconnecting us from our food and all that its been through to get to our plates, we have also become completely dependent on multinational corporations for our basic necessities, and therefore have lost the very foundations of political autonomy.

I think that growing food, along with rebuilding community (to counter the individualisation and social atomisation faced in this corporate-driven society), are some of the most important and subversive activities we can do today.

“Political independence and the ability to engage in society has a lot to do with from what position of autonomy do we stand. And if we stand totally dependent on a one or two or three day food supply chain we don't really have any position of political autonomy.”
— David Holmgren, Permaculture co-orginator (quote taken from greening the apocalypse)

"If your experience is that your water comes from the tap and that your food comes from the grocery store then you are going to defend to the death the system that brings those to you because your life depends on that; if your experience is that your water comes from a river and that your food comes from a land base then you will defend those to the death because your life depends on them. So part of the problem is that we have become so dependent upon this system that is killing and exploiting us, it has become almost impossible for us to imagine living outside of it and it's very difficult physically for us to live outside of it."
— Derrick Jensen

Where's permaculture at at the moment? As a movement is it as vital as ever?
To be honest, i'm only just starting to learn about permaculture after having been working on issues around trade in food and agriculture so I don't think I can really give much insight here. Personally, though, while searching for alternatives to the global industrial agriculture system, I've become excited about what permaculture and food localisation (producing and consuming food in the same area) have to offer. But then when adding peak oil and climate change to the mix, and the likely consequences of these on today's food and agriculture systems, it looks like food localisation using permaculture principles and design is going to offer more than an 'alternative' — it will become a necessity.

Do permablitzes attempt to take permaculture out of institutional settings and straight into our homes?
From what I understand, the permaculture movement has made a conscious effort to be taught and shared primarily outside of institutional settings. The idea of permablitzes, though, is to make permaculture more accessible to those who live (and rent) in an urban environment, rather than just those who own a couple of acres of land out bush. The message is that as long as you have a yard (even if its covered in concrete), or a verandah, or a rooftop then you can produce food, and that by using permaculture principles and design, it can be reasonably easy.

Are permablitzes also about getting permaculture into, not only the backyard, but also the front manicured lawn, the medium strip, the roundabout?
Yes yes!! I'd love to see more edible front yards, nature strips and roundabouts! Di from Box Hill held a permablitz at her place, which was held mostly in her backyard, but that was because her whole front yard was already brimming with vegetables and chickens. It was designed really beautifully with lots of different coloured vegies making it seem like an ornamental garden until closer inspection (and until you heard the squawkings from the chicken dome in the corner)… who needs daises eh?

Favourite pick of the crop this season?
We didn't have a very happening garden until the blitz last sunday so the only things ready to eat at my place at the moment are the green leafies – rocket, spinach, different lettuces, silverbeet, and the herbs. Post-blitz, though, i'm probably most looking forward to the raspberries and strawberries, ooh and sweet corn.. and snow peas… and capsicum… water chestnuts… passionfruit… mmm… basil… we even planted some watermelon seeds… i think i'm mostly looking forward to being able to wander around my garden and just bite at random plants.

She coined the term 'permablitz', a contraction of permaculture backyard blitz. (Backyard Blitz is the name of popular gardening and lifestyle show in Australia involving rapid backyard makeovers).  Dan defined it thusly:

Permablitz: A informal gathering involving a day on which a group of at least two people come together to achieve the following:

• create or add to edible gardens where someone lives
• share skills related to permaculture and sustainable living
• build community networks
• have fun

At a recent peak oil and food security conference in Melbourne with David Holmgren and Richard Heinberg, the permablitz concept was one of the most enthusiastically talked about ideas amongst participants.

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