I’ve replied that I’ll donate a consultation and donate a copy of my book, Sustainable Food.

So . . . check them out, enter your curb and hopefully we’ll catch up when you win – or just make contact any ole how.

May the veggies be upon your curb,

Michael

Bronte sunrise, Friday 14 June 2013

Last Friday morning I swam in Bronte pool.  At 19 degrees the pool was clear amidst a clear sky, the light and the moment exactly like the moment Leonard Cohen sings of  . . . ” There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in . . . ” (Anthem).

Diving in, there was just silence in my monkey brain and pure sensual pleasure at being alive.

But after the gifted moments I got out of the pool and considered the sea.

Then I remembered walking a few days before down the street in Chippendale where I live past four workers and a truck.

They were spraying poison on what they called “weed’s in the recently built garden intended only to clean stormwater before sending it away, wasted, to pollute Sydney Harbour and thence to the ocean I was swimming in.  We use the ‘weeds’ to cook and make salads with but no longer from there but from our road gardens which we’ve managed to have exempted from the poison spraying.  Chickweed that’s shown in the photo below and which they were spraying is a food used in fine restaurants like Tetsuyas and in our own fine kitchens here in Chippo.

I smiled thinking of this silliness as I looked out over the pool and the ocean; how else to deal with arrant council naughtiness?  Cohen’s right here too where there’s ignorance – even in the spraying and the needlessly dying weeds-that-aren’t there is light getting in – you just have to go for a swim or breath out to find it.

Chickweed starting to die from Council poison that flows to the sea

Oh well, we’ll stop this useless spraying one day, won’t we?

Hang on ocean, we’re coming,

M

Citizens may give themselves  approval to garden in public in the road verge.

A new policy adopted by Council on Monday 25 February 2013 makes clear that Sydney citizens may self-approve their own road gardens.

“The Footpath Gardening Policy (the Policy) allows residents and businesses to put planter boxes on the footpath and/or carry out gardening on footpath verges outside their properties under certain conditions.”.

Let a thousand gardens bloom, and a thousand more . . .

Citizens – you may download the policy as a PDF (598kb) here.

M

This is a simple, easy-to-do way of getting water to your garden when a masonry or other hard surface is between your garden and your source of water.

We might sum up this method as, “digging with water”.

What’s not discussed here are safety issues which you’ll need to also resolve such as:  are there any electrical, gas or other services where you wish to put your drain?

It’s useful for pipes between 30 to 100 mm diameter.

You’ll need:

• polypipe or other piping to suit the amount of water and the length you wish to drive your tunnel.  For a typical household downpipe, for example, where the downpipe is about 70 to 90 mm, you’ll need the same or similar diameter pipe and the bits to join the pipe to the downpipe;
• if the length of the path is more than a metre you may need several lengths of pipe and bits to join the pipe as it’s fed below the path and across to the other side of it;
• a hose with good water pressure – mains water at least ie 120 kpa; the hose will need to be at least half as smaller in diameter than the pipe as the hose must fit inside the pipe and the remaining space must allow for soil to escape backwards past the hose.
• a shovel and pick

Step 1:  dig the hole beside the starting point for your tunnel – allow about 150 depth below the base of the slab or path and make the hole about 1.00 diameter – it will have to hold removed soil and allow you to dig that removed soil out as you go further under the path

Step 2: dig a hole on the other side where you wish the new pipe to end up, about 300 wide and about 150 deeper than the underside of the slab below the path or paved area

Step 3: put the pipe to go under the path against the soil below the path

Step 4: put the hose into the pipe and turn on the water

Step 5: as the hose washes away the soil and it spills back into the hole remove the soil and place it on a pile for reuse in your garden

Step 6: continue to water pressure away the soil and gradually move the pipe further into the soil until it reaches the waiting hole on the other side of the path slab

Possible other step: if your pipe needs to be joined you’ll need to join it then extend the pipe under the path and continue your ‘water drilling’.

Go you good tunneller. Go, too, the garden to be watered with your rainwater that’s fallen on a roof nearby . . . yes?

M

Note: my thanks to Tim of ecoburbia whose ideas this was.

Funny.  Why’s that?

The streets are the same.  The people, cars and other walkers – the same.

How can the familiar become strange?

James Joyce, self-exhiled to Paris, could describe the streets and names of most of his home town Dublin.  They were in his blood and inhabited his every fibre – his books say so loudly, and fondly, with a deep love of the life, the details of the currents there; streets can offer the small things – gifts, often, if we would only see them to savour, particularly a street dominated by pedestrians where people pause to talk.

When do we leave a place?

When the plane takes off?

But I’m still here.

Now, it seems parts of me are already gone.

The prospect of departure may bring with it the long goodbye inside well before the ground of home is left a long way below.

With my Kindle loaded up with Gulliver’s Travels, Shakespeare, Ovid, Homer, James Lee Burke, St John of the Cross, Dorothy Parker, and so much more – all (except the wordsmith Burke) free! because they’re ‘classics’ and noone buys them anymore, perhaps – I’ve been famialiarizing myself with the mechanics of the Kindle.  The first chapter of Gulliver’s Travels, set on the Island of Lilliput, has Gulliver describing himself as a stranger in a strange land.  The chapter almost caused a riot when published.  Aside from it’s political dimensions, though, wonderful as they are, there’s an unnerving power in the writer, Jonathon Swift, to convincingly describe the street and social life of the world he imagined on that made-up island.

Strange streets there, too, but believable because of the detailed descriptions.

So many writers, and all of us, writers or not, absorb so much from the streets where we are.

Yet, ‘same’ as they may be it’s surprising to me the extent to which we can see them, sense them so differently tho’ they change not a jot.  We find different meanings in the street at different times.  You know, it’s in the songs; “I have often walked down this street before, but the pavement always stayed beneath my feet before . . . ” and more;  Highway 61 . . .  and on they go.

The great gardens of Italy – great to me because they master the use of water with the plants – are like streets, laneways – they invite you down their paths that are interesting, the design of the water ‘talks’ to your eye and your senses. And their great delight, for me, at least, is to sense the respect  the designer has conferred on the public and private mix of intimacy – it’s there in a disciplined way.  Sometimes in some of those gardens it’s as tho’ the designer is alive there, still, saying gently, “Don’t you love water?”  Or, “This matters – do you agree?”  That is, the gardens talk to us.

Perhaps that’s why we feel more human in streets with water, plants, trees than in the hard surfaced places car parks and shopping centres are; there’s simply more sensory complexity with this greater mix.

I notice that it’s more so in car parks, shopping centres and less so in planted streets that the streets seem strange to me, that parts of me are already gone.

Perhaps this is true for most of us; a part of  any of us ‘leaves’ when we go to shopping centres and places solely cement, tar and cars.

And we don’t have to be catching a plane to feel like that.

The Total Environment Centre and Jeff Angel today launch their national Cool Streets Campaign, or as their news release puts it:

Luminous Chippendale

Here’s a note to me by a designer and gardener, Chantelle Matthews, about the road art and gardening she’s doing in Chippendale.

Chantelle being luminous

Ahh. Wonderful.  Thank you, Chantelle,

M

Anyway, to Fremantle where the rest of the day was a succession of delights.

Studio room at The Painted Fish

I reckoned I’d died and gone to heaven when I saw my room; a glassed studio called, The Painted Fish, a short walk from the ocean.  It’s on the web.  The owners, Shani and Tim showed me their two B E A Utiful and gentle goats, and the whole of their street, Hulbert Street, planted out to gardens.

Olive tree in gabion wall in Perth’s Urban Orchard and one of my hosts, Jana

Then by train from Freo along the coast to the Urban Orchard in the heart of Perth; imagine looking out at the ocean then landing at a station where there’s food growing, water bringing peace and all on top of what was once a car park.

Wetland as part of the urban orchard on top of former car park roof

On the way in and back by train we saw a pod of dolphins, feeding in the one place of the river for some hours; must have been lots of fish there.  The photo below shows where they were but you can’t see them because my phone camera and I can’t find out how to zoom in quickly on a train yet . . . but it’s reassuring to know, to me, at least, that dolphins may coexist there with all the port infrastructure.

Dolphins were feeding in the river

Then the best part of the day and something you just gotta try; Shani, who with Tim, owns and runs The Painted Fish, put me in the bike cart, me sitting up like a little lucky boy with a blankey over my knees, and she biked me into the New Edition book shop for the In Conversation with Mayor Brad Pettit which Peter Newman of CUSP (more on this later) compered.

Good space, a civil society

Bloke Sans Blankey, Mayor Pettit, Peter Newman

Standing room only and a sweet spot night of civilised conversation with those in the room, Brad and I.

Shani, boy in cart, blankey

After, laden by seafood cooked with respect and Italian hospitality, Shani biked me back to The Painted Fish, me sitting there again with blankey, holding an LED light for headlights, while we tootled through the cold night air, cars and buses whizzing by us, me videoing it, the road at my feet and the walls of the utes n buses whiskers away.

Being spoilt, packed in by Driver Shani; Let’s go . . .

I would say it’s one of the best things that you can do – a tinge of danger, a thrill of calling out to other bikies, the looks of amazement and smiles.

Ahh, you gotta love this lovely, lovely Earth; mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

And so it goes,

M