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.

I recently stumbled upon an excellent Sydney based site, WeedyConnection.com. It has a ‘useful weeds’ database, and a very pumping blog written in the second person about all things weedy and good. I’m an enthusiastic weed lover myself, and had a great email exchange with Nobody, the site’s keeper, and he’s published an interview with me. Nobody is a self described ‘trouble maker and a media jammer’, and has been involved with some very cool underground art and social projects like SquatSpace, Network of Uncollectable Artists and Unreal Estate (the latter a fake real estate agency set up for squatters in a shop window in Newcastle which ‘advertised’ empty buildings, complete with photographs and tips on getting inside.)

These days one of Nobody’s main interest is weeds; this from the Weedy Connection homepage:

This online resource focuses on Australian flora, giving information and insight into a number of non-indigenous plants commonly known as weeds. It also function as an exchange node for facts and stories.

The aim of this project is to rediscover the traditional knowledge, celebrate the multiplicity of cultures in botanical terms, and learn the legal status of such plants.

The framing of “illegal” and unwanted flora within a cultural context will draw attention to the concept of “permissible species” as a social construct. Weeds are defined by a nation’s law, and what is declared weed in one place may be a precious resource in another. There is a significant metaphorical connection between this definition of “weed” and the arbitrary restriction imposed on human migration by national governments.

I recommend reading Nobody’s Environment Week presentation at the University of Sydney which expands on these ideas and more, which you can also watch online. And check out the Weedkiller art project.

Here’s the interview with me:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

ON INTERVIEWING ADAM

One of the good things coming out of this online presence is that gives you the chance to connect.

Adam Fenderson came in contact with you the other week, suggesting to review some of his radio work, where he interviews various environmental practitioners.

You decided to interview him in return, a person devoted to spread an awakening towards a new environmental sensitivity, so much needed in this point in time..

Adam, could you please talk about yourself, where you come from and what drove you to commit your work to environmental activism?

I was involved in roughly the Melbourne equivalent scenes as the Sydney ones you are involved with (see SquatSpace.com n.d.r.), inc. media activism/prankster activities/warehouse space. Pretty tech focused. After 911 I got more deeply involved in peak oil research. I started energybulletin.net, a peak oil news clearinghouse, and it became quite enveloping, invigorating to help powerful ideas develop, but kind of sad and frightening too. I met David Holmgren who is now a friend, and got into his vision of permaculture. I tried to find useful ways of dealing with my fear, so I started organising self sufficiency gatherings, and learning a few skills.

What about your foraging practice? Why did you start to look at weeds with different eyes?

My interest in weeds and foraging stems from fear, and a desire to be less dependent on the industrial food chain as I learn more about how tenuous and destructive it is.
There are other reasons too:

• when supplementing my diet with fresh greens, seeds and fruit from foraging, I am living with less money, so I can work less.
• gardening becomes less of a battle, as things like chickweed, fat hen, amaranth, purslane, dandelion, milk thistle, fennel and nettle become welcome in my garden. A weed can be defined as ‘a plant that is not valued where it is growing’. A ‘useful weed’ is an oxymoron. There are two ways of weeding — one with your hands, the other with your mind.
• when I forage I am exploring the neglected and wild areas of the city and country, and finding value where others see none. This is a beautiful thing. I love the weedscapes of the merri creek.
  
• I begin to feel like I’m living in my environment, not just on top of it. When you recognise the plants around you, when you eat some of them, and return nutrients to the soil (i compost my shit too) you become integrated as a functional part of an ecosystem. There is a new level of information filling your vision as you walk around.
  
• Seeing weeds as wild nature. This I think I all got from David. Perhaps I was tied up somewhat in the nativist assumptions that we must protect nature’s essentially pristine and static quality. because I felt some liberation when I broadened my view of nature, when I began seeing weeds as most often healing damaged landscapes. (I like that Tim Low lantana quote on your site). Now I see nature as dynamic and self-recreating, not something to be ‘protected’ by locking it up, untouched, like a museum piece. Novel and fascinating new guilds and ecosystems emerge out of indigenous and non-indigenous species (ecosynthesis). Many people hate weeds no doubt because they themselves feel like part of an invasive species. There’s guilt, and an attempt to right wrongs, but the expression of this urge is tragically counterproductive.

We destroy self-healing landscapes and try to impose native-only species using military-industrial machinery and toxins. In fact, conditions have changed: pollutants now enter the system, the soil has been washed away, the climate is changing rapidly, the people that used to live in and manage the system were destroyed by genocide, and the megafauna were lost only a few millenia ago — but we think we can force nature back to an imagined and non-existent past. If instead we can see weeds as part of nature, and value their vigor and productivity, we can continue to identify with them, but change our philosophy about our potential ecological relationship with this damaged country. We are indeed like weeds, and we can heal the land too.

I’m very interested in your foraging tours too, could you please talk more about it?
where do you go? what you looking for? when? (as in do you do your foraging expeditions mainly in spring/autumn or whatever) what you find where?

I’ve only taken 3 formal weed walks so far. one along the Merri creek from Ceres in Brunswick, one in a community garden at a housing estate, and one at a backyard ‘permablitz’ (see here n.d.r.)
I haven’t prepared any notes for them, but have sometimes emailed participants a list of plants we’ve seen afterwards. They have been at different times of the year, with different species in each walk. Normally I bring reference books and hand them out. I can recognise most things we see, and people look up their medicinal uses (I can never remember much of this). There is a great out-of-print book by Gai Stern called Australian Weeds about useful weeds (there’s a link to a relatively cheap copy if you don’t have it yet) and one by Pat Collins, Useful Weeds at our Doorstep, and I also bring along with me some identification books, and herbal books. I have a North American produced urban foraging book too which has many useful garden species. Recently then I’ve found a Merri Creek re-vegetation book which mentions bush tucker uses of all the natives which have been planted. I have been experimenting with some of them and getting into edible fungi this year too. Also preserving fruit from wild trees – I bottled about 50 kilos worth of apples and quinces I think!

Adam produced a couple of great interviews of David Holmgren (here) and Pat Collins (here), where he drives the topics towards the lowly plants we usually dismiss in our gardens.

Weedy thanks Adam!