About a year ago I mentioned here about the small but significant gesture that is Feral Fruit Mapping... and now it's that time of year again (southside of this planet, anyways)... things are blossoming left, right and centre, and it is therfore a most excellent time to get your Feral Fruit Map going and map out where fruit is overhanging fences and growing roadside in your area, in preperation for the potential harvest to come...

Since I posted about this subject last year, I've discovered a bunch of folks both in Oz and abroad who are collating and sharing knowledge on this sorta subject in a variety of formats, which is great! However, I cannot help but be a little amazed that it isn't happening more visibly, more often... ah well - perhaps one of the potential upsides to the recent economic downturn is that more people look to their back lanes and roadsides for some old-fashioned sustenance, rather than doing their hunting and gathering gathering only from their supermarket shelves...

At anyrate, here's what I've stumbled across so far in the last year - please let me know if you know of other examples...

FallenFruit.org - LA based fruit mappers/artists: "Using fruit as our lens, Fallen Fruit investigates urban space, ideas of neighborhood and new forms of located citizenship and community. From protests to proposals for new urban green spaces, we aim to reconfigure the relation between those who have resources and those who do not, to examine the nature of & in the city, and to investigate new, shared forms of land use and property." Go Kids. The site includes simple 'how tos' on mapping etc. Here they are on Facebook and even at Ars Electronica.

Urban Orchard projects - Loose but wonderful affiliations of residents who share and swap surplus fruit and produce once a month... sorta Feral-Fruit-Comes-to-U... You show up with lotsa lemons and you swap for apricots and some beans. Obviously the majority of the participants have their own tree of some type in their yard, but who's to complain if you show up with a load of fejoas that you gathered from that abandonded house next to the railway line? There seems to be a Melbourne contingent hosted by Ceres, and the Sydney one is starting up via Alfalfa House. Also, a How-to guide for setting an Urban Orchard up in your community...

Weedy Connection - Diego is a Sydney based artist who had created a damn fine 'useful + edible weed' database and regularly holds weed workshops around Sydney and beyond... he's apparently keen to start on a Sydney Feral Food map so I'm hopeful that mentioning it here will give him a proverbial poke. Remembering that a weed is, by definition, only a plant out of place, there's alot more to be gleaned in your local park than you might think...

And then there's folks like Leda who commented on the last Feral Fruit post with; I've been using the Google maps function on my iPhone to map the fruit trees here in Brooklyn, NY. I just bookmark each tree with a description and a pin on the map. Works beautifully! I also include a note about the date that particular fruit was ripe.

I've also hear rumours of State-based initiatives to map the feral food of a community for that communities use... especially in Melbourne - but as yet I have no proof that I can pass on. Oh and lastly there's the National Post of Canada, who decided to do an article on this subject and quoted us... 

But surely that's not it? Anyone got any other leads? Or maps? Or community initiatives? Perhaps, as my own mother pointed out (who is a feral fruitier from way back) some folks keep the location of their secret peach trees to themselves... but I say that resource shared is a resource expanded so... any other leads on like-minded projects?

As a kid growing up on the seaside at Kiama (a pretty bit of the south coast of NSW) there was what would now be called a nature reserve between our house and the beach. When I was small it was just a bit of grassy space with a swamp at the end of it, and was where all the newly built households along that stretch came to dig out vast quantities of sand, to cart it back to their quarter-acre blocks for their kid's sandpits... despite the fact that there was are rather larger sandpit (ie a BEACH) right there for their kids to use whenever they liked... ever noticed how private pools figure largely in the backyards of beach-side houses? Same psychology, i think...

Anyway. My Dad decided that we would plant a costal forest on this sorry little strip of grass at the bottom of the hill, and endless sticky summer days were spent carting buckets of water to resuscitate all manner of seedlings that our family planted all up and down this open space - Norfolk Island Pines, Ti-trees, Coral trees, Banksias, more Banksias, more Ti-trees and later on a couple of Morton Bay Figs and even a costal Quince or two. This planting and watering cycle went on for most of my childhood, interjected with Dad rushing down the hill every now and then to intercept marauding kids who meandered up from the car-park at the other end of the beach  and attempted to trash the plantings. Good, clean fun.

I remember Dad telling me once that the avenue of Ti-trees we had planted that day would one day reach far above my head and create a tunnel that I could walk through, down to the waves. And I remember thinking that there was NO WAY that could ever happen, as I looked at those pathetic little seedlings already half lost in the long grass - yeah sure Dad - and I moped off feeling both resentful and tired after a day of hauling water from the little swamp on my fat little 5-year-old legs.

Now whenever I go back to my parent's house I wander though this place, my favorite forest... the ground is deep in topsoil after 30 years of leaf litter mulching it, the trees stretch tall and there are many tunnels through which I can walk down to the waves. Under one of the special trees are the ashes of my Grandmother and also my Great-Aunt, with a legion of family dogs, goldfish and other little critters laid to rest here and there in the many groves. This little forest is a privilege and a pleasure to be in, and now that the ecology has found a kind of balance, all manner of native species are popping up, both plant and animal, that would have never, ever stood a chance here 30 years past, when it was just that little windswept strip at the bottom of the hill.

So lately what we have been mulling over is this: what is a suitable inheritance? What things can you bequeath to your children that will actually enrich the environment and deeply connect the child to country at the same time? The above example is one way. But here at Milkwood, we're planning for another.

I've been gathering a collection of flying rumors about trees as inheritance. Not the plant-a-tree-and-save-the-world type thing, nor the offset-your-guilt-about-X-by-planting-Yx100-trees type thing, though both those concepts have their merits. Im talking planting specific trees for a specific purpose, specifically for that particular child. For example, I've heard that in Poland there is an old tradition of planting a grove of trees apon the birth of a child. The species of tree is chosen for its superior qualities of structural timber. When the child 'comes of age', that grove of trees is used to build their house with. Or there is the Chinese tradition of planting a grove of trees for every daughter (on certain islands of the Yangtze), the timber from which will become her dowry. Or the tradition in the south of France, where a line of Lombardy Poplars are planted for every girl-child, for the same reason...

The reason I like this idea of trees as inheritance (not dowry, mind you, just inheritance) so much is that it ties the kid to the land and to the country in specific way. You grow, you watch your trees grow. You can sit in the middle of your own grove. You have stewardship of something and you have responsibility for something. The actual outcome and the implications of what having a grove means might not resonate with a 6 year old, but that's fine. They are just your trees. And one day when you need them, they can be turned into high-value timber; for you to build something, or for you to secure something else, depending on your needs and wants.

And when it is time to turn your grove into a resource, it's not just a matter of cashing in that long-term deposit. It's a process which is real and actually happening in front of you, and contains all the emotions of transformation from one state to another. You can see it happening, smell it happening, and most likely you'll be deeply involved in the whole process of taking this resource from tall tree to dressed timber. And though this concept implies a different sort of 'worth' from the usual forms of inheritance, but I thinks it's the one that we're going for... 

Milkwood basecamp with *new* no-dig herb garden, mulched path and puppydog  

Vegetable gardens are the ultimate in complex, layered systems which have implications that flow through every corner of your daily life. And, no, I'm not being dramatic - I really believe this to be so... even more now that we've had to take a couple of major backward steps in order to move forwards with one of the basics of life... growing food to eat.

In Nick + my usual style, we appoached the Milkwood kitchen garden (Mark I) with much gusto. We chose a large area close to the studio site, sculpted beds, re-sculpted beds, planned the ultimate vegetable manifesto and then set about bringing it to life... and, also in our usual style, bit off more than we could chew.

This winter past saw the defining of what you could say  as my 'comfort threshold'. And living in a teeny pop-top caravan with no insulation on a windswept hillside when it's -10ºC turned out, curiously, to be below that threshold. So we decamped to the current 'Basecamp' - a slightly insulated caravan behind the family shearing shed, over the hill from Milkwood proper. It's quite comfy - far from luxurious, true, but by the end of this summer we'll be in strawbale studio heaven (fingers crossed), over on Milkwood proper. 

Which means that, amoung other things, that the Kitchen Garden is nowhere near our kitchen, until further notice. Which means in its turn that we needed to re-think our food supply for this coming summer. A Kitchen Garden that is nowhere near one's kitchen ceases to be an immediate growing area, and becomes a far-flung field... which is great news for the wood-ducks and the rabbits, who can munch happily without immediate fear of repraisal, but not so good for our tummies. So we're starting again on a vege garden over at Basecamp, and this time we're actualy going to follow that very profound, basic tenant of Permaculture - Start at your front step and work your way out from there - a simple idea, but hard to hear and even harder to stick to... which is crazy, cause it's the most energy efficient way of building a sustainable system.

So! No-dig garden bed time... and might as well get the herb garden in gear. Herb gardens are something that are essential to life. Herbs = flavour. Herbs = medicine. Herbs = diversity and lots of insects. Hooray for herbs!

At the moment, our gardens being what you could call itinerant, we definitely need FOOD but it is probably not the best idea to be building the most spectacularly intricate and permanent gardens that the human race has ever seen. After all, this time next year, we won't be living here at Basecamp. And henceforth, we only need gardens here that will see us through this summer. 

So - this info could also be useful to you if you're: renting, squatting, long-term camping or otherwise in some situation where you will not be there forever, but still need to grow food. 

No-dig garden beds are the answer! The no-dig method is, in short, a method of creating a garden where you make a lasagne of good stuff which will coalesce to form soil quick-sticks. In our case, we created the herb garden via the following method - and it took me about 4 hours:

• loosen soil with a garden fork (or I tried to, anyways)
  
• water ground
• put down layer of cardboard (plonk it down on the grass that's there) + water well
• slop on 20cm of wetted sheep poo or other well-rotted manure (wet down)
• cover with 20cm layer of lucerne straw (this stuff has an awsome Carbon to Nitrogen ratio, and will break down into yummy compost all by itself, with a bit of watering) + water well (until stuff runs out the bottom of the bed)

Ta da! It's an itinerant No-Dig garden bed... then to planting:

make holes in mulch and slop in some compost / potting mix / growing medium of choice...

sprinkle on a mix of herb seeds (I used a bunch of different ones that are frost tolerant, plus some flowery type things)...

 cover with square of WET hessian - this will keep seeds moist, prevent them getting blasted away when you water them, and generally protect them till they're germinated and off and running... then remove hessian and yr off to a flying start

 And lo, for it was a herb bed, and that was that.

This planting method was assuredly more lo-fi than our usual methodical approach to all things green and growing, but I am wanting to make sure that lots of things get planted a.s.a.p. around here, so that we can start eating homegrown tucker... think of it as 'quickie gardening in transient housing'... and I'm sure that's a familiar concept to many.

In a way, I'm enjoying this interim time - I've always thought of gardening and growing food as a long slow plodding towards the promised land of abundance and fecundity, to be reached in many years time... but, as usual, I've been seeing it in an over romanticized fashion. Nature, on the other hand, doesn't give a hoot. Give her something to grow in, and she'll grow - so I might as well make sure she's growing what I can eat, rather than something i can't (or, in the case of grass, I could eat, but I'd prefer not to if there's an option)... I want to be overwhelmed in a surplus of organic greens by this time next month... fingers crossed...

 
"The Transition Handbook: From oil dependency to local resilience" - front cover 

 The reason I am brandishing this book about at the moment is *not* because it crushes the reader with an avalanche of undeniable evidence. I feel that we've all been beaten about the head a fair bit with how the media portrays Peak-Oil and our society's utter and complete dependence upon this black sauce. Not to mention Global Warming. And/or a potent combination of the two. It's enough to make you go and find a large rock to wedge yourself beneath.

The reason I am brandishing this book about at the moment *is* because it is a template for community-level solutions. It ain't a call to run for the hills, nor is it a treatise on how to greenify your life. This book describes (and very well, I think) possible ways to set up structures for community awareness, organization and implementation of action that will make a community more resilient to massive change.

Rather than simply pottering out a list of examples of village life as it used to be (with those 'old-fashioned' tenets on local food, locally-owned business, community participation), or explaining how you too can grow vegetables in your bathtub, The Transition Handbook serves a couple of very useful, and very fundamental, purposes. It discusses ways to ready a community for change, and how to facilitate that process so that it is born of and by the community in question, rather than being some imported wall-chart-solution of tips and tricks. The other thing that this book does is something that I really haven't seen any other text of its ilk pull off: it discusses the impact that information (in this case, rather bad news) can have upon a person, and explores how we can move beyond that immobilizing state of AAAAARRRRGGGGGG! (followed by crawling under aforesaid rock). 

Most of the 'call to action' texts and films i have gobbled up over the past few years around such topics as Peak Oil and Global Warming and Food Security and Re-Localization have been, for the most part, rather bleak. This may be because the information involved is just sooooo bloody important that the filmmakers/writers themselves haven't got very far past the immensity of the situation. Fair enough. But some people, like Rob Hopkins (and many others that I can now think of, actually) are doing something lovely. And that is looking beyond and indeed, getting beyond, the big scary facts of the situation. So I would recommend you read this one. It will, I think, give you some good ideas on how to move forwards.

Transition wha? - go here and have a look at the concept of Transition Culture and Transition Towns  

Getting a copy for yourself, your freaked-out brother-in-law and one for the local library while you're at it:

• The Transition Handbook - Australian source (Home > Publications)
• The Transition Handbook - UK source (and Rob Hopkins' site)
• The Transition Handbook - the ubiquitous Amazon option