While Meg and Zephyr have been tending the
Artist as Family's home garden, Patrick has been in Sydney looking at possible sites to plant the Food Forest. At one point today he was captivated by how wild nature goes about reclaiming urban environments to build habitat.
The following act of self-seeded brilliance is occurring at about 40cm above street level. The spider is a trusty companion, ready to gobble unwanted pests. Competition is often heralded as the main gig in evolution, but co-dependancy and cooperation are as much a part of evolutionary life. Working together and sharing resources and environments is key to interspecies survival.
Later in the day, Patrick and MCA curator Anna Davis arrived at
CarriageWorks where they met with the executive producer Jamie Dawson who showed them a couple of possible sites. CarriageWorks is such a beautifully loaded locality that brings with it an enthusiastic community that is showing much support for our project. However, it's a difficult site in terms of planting a forest outdoors, and the awesome space indoors, with great overhead light wells and rain collection opportunities, would sadly restrict the movement of helpful pollinators and predators – lizards, bees, spiders and frogs – into the forest. Jamie and his team would be great to work with, so we're remaining very open.
Next stop: St Michael's church in Surry Hills.
A community member, Heide, living near to the church, contacted the MCA when she heard our project was looking for a home, and mentioned St Michael's as a possible site. Dotted around the world church grounds are currently being transformed into community gardens, which makes good sense as there are often soup kitchens being run from them, and fresh organic produce goes hand in hand with such great initiatives. Also, old churches such as St Michael's generally have 'clean' soil from which heavy metals are absent. Not that a combination of the right plants, compost, biomass, fungi and microbial life couldn't detoxify the soil organically.
We are working with the MCA on a proposal tonight, which will be taken to the church Warden meeting tomorrow night.
There's one or two other things worth noting here before we sign off. Here's a link to William Blake's
The Garden of Love, which has been a precursory text for our Food Forest and for
Patrick's presentation this coming Friday as part of
Open Fields at UTS. Blake's poem is a kind of elegy for a lost erotic Eden; a lament about that which became divided. Rev Frances at St Michael's mentioned Eden too when we briefly met with him today. David Graeber (2007, p23), in a much broader context, bares this fruit on the subject:
Sexual relations, after all, need not be represented as a matter of one partner consuming the other; they can also be imagined as two people sharing food.
If you're in the area on Friday, come by and say g'day to Patrick at UTS. We'd love to hear your tips on what specifically keeps your garden or local environment full of wild love and reciprocity.
The ground was extra soft because of all the rain we have had, making the holes easy to dig.
This is Richard and Heidi. We only found this ground at all because of Heidi. When we had the idea to plant a Food Forest, we had great difficulty finding some land. Heidi, a local resident heard we were looking and suggested we approach St Michael's. The rest, as they say, is history. In the making. Thank you, Heidi!
After saying goodbye to Heidi and Richard we spent a few hours mulching the Forest floor, leaving a meter around the periphery bare so people know where to settle their plants during tomorrow's Plant-In.
Just before lunch we went out to the Marrickville Community Nursery and picked up some Pigface, Whiteroot, Coastal Rosemary and native parsnip, which we are going to plant tomorrow in the Forest's outer ring.
So people can identify what's what, we then wrote each plant's name on a small copper tag and hung it on the corresponding tree.
It's rained nearly every day we have worked on the Forest. But this afternoon's downpour was too heavy to work in, even for us Victorians. So it was tools down, and bottoms up at a hotel around the corner.
We will be on site tomorrow from 10am to 4pm come rain or shine. Come one and come all!
