Roaming

We have a big week of planting ahead of us, so we decided to take the weekend off to roam.

Even though it wasn't on our agenda, each day we started off at St Michael's to check that everything was as we left it.


The wind was chilly, but the sun was out. Perfect weather for drifting.

Good night. See you on site tomorrow.

Tools Up

We got up early today. The bobcat was due at 7am and we wanted to edge the Forest before it arrived.

Our OH&S officer was standing by.

And then it arrived!

And got to work right away.

So we found other things to inspect.

Such as our first shipment of trees to arrive. Want to know what they are? Come back next week and we'll show you, when we make them feel at home in the soil.

But we can show you what arrived next: 4 cubic meters of steaming fresh compost mulch and 10 cubic meters of top soil. Now that was a satisfying dump..

Before adding these arrivals to the mix, we still need to weed and remove all the debris we find, such as the buried treasure we uncovered this afternoon.

But by far, the best arrivals of the day, are the passers by who stop to ask what we're doing, and the friends who drop by to say g'day.

And the most satisfying aspect of the day? Seeing the shape of things to come.

Day One: Forming the Forest

It might have taken us a whole day to get from home to Sydney, but once we arrived on site it didn't take us long to:

Contemplate the space,

hammer in the stakes,

have a look around,

catch up with old friends,

lay out the hose to get the shape right,

do some painting

and

decorating.

Then we stood back and contempled the space again, that won't look like this for much longer.

Cross-community purposes

Back in April, when we were desperate to find a home for the Food Forest, CarriageWorks tried really hard to accommodate us; we just couldn't find enough raw dirt to work with for our particular project. But while visiting CarriageWorks we got to see what the community was able to grow in terms of food, high up in the air, and it was pretty damn exciting. There are peeps all over the world growing food on balconies, rooftops and in sunlit living rooms. Projects like the CarriageWorks Kitchen Garden show us that you don't necessarily need a plot of land to relocalise your food supply.

Find out more here.

Here comes everybody

Augmenting the spirit of our forthcoming Plant-in Day:

Alexandria permablitz in Sydney. A course taken by Milkwood Permaculture. Picture taken by Lucas Ihlein, a participant of the course and another artist whose work will be featured in In the Balance: Art for a changing world.

And, the joyous Angel Street Permaculture garden in Newtown:

Plant List

After several weeks of sourcing available food plants we have come up with the following list, which we have ordered from several nurseries in NSW and Victoria. We would still like to find a pistachio, so if anyone knows of one in Sydney please send the details to us. Also we welcome those of you in Sydney to come along to the community plant-in day on Saturday 10 July, between 10am - 4pm. Please bring a picnic and a clump of something edible, beneficial or herbal from your garden, or gleaned, that you'd like to see growing in the Food Forest. We're particularly looking for strawberries, thyme, mints, lavender, comfrey, borage, calendula, nasturtiums, sage and any annual or perennial vegetable seeds or seedlings you'd like to plant.

Bush foods and local Cadigal plants:

Pigface

Native parsnip

Coastal rosemary

White root

Dianella caerulea

Lomandra longifolia (Matt Rush)

Westringia fruticosa (Native rosemary)

Podocarpus elatus (Illawara plum)

Acmena smithii (Lilly Pilly)

Riberry

World food plants:

Tangelo

Apricot Moorpark

Necatrine Goldmine

Nectarine Fantasta

Peach Red Noonan

Peach Anzac

Fig Black Genoa

Mulberry Hicks

Multi Graft Plum Satsuma/Mariposa

Cherry Morello

Spanish chestnut

Indian horse chestnut

Pecan Desirable

Almond

Citrus lemon

Citrus lime

Citrus orange

Rosemary

Feijoa

Guava Brazilian

Guava Hawaiian

Grapefruit Rio Red

Kumquat Calamondin

Avocado

Cherimoya White

Lemon Grass

Lemon Verbena

French Sorrel

Mushroom Plant

Loquat Seedling Nagasakiwase

Olive Azapa

Permission to plant

We have just received a wonderful letter of support from the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council (MLALC), the legal custodians of the Food Forest.

"We hold great pride and respect for our culture and fully support the way in which the food forest will educate the wider community on Aboriginal history and culture." Rebecca McHugh, MLALC

Today we also spoke to Helen from Marrickville Community Nursery, a biodiversity nursery that specialises in plants native to the Cooks River in Sydney. Many of these plants are also native to Surry Hills, so we'll be making our way there shortly to buy bush food plants for the forest.

A list of Cadigal Wangal Edible Plants will benefit any Sydney food garden. To produce food while renewing local ecology is a significant principal of permaculture, and this can be achieved on a balcony, in a backyard or on a farm.

From field to forest

When you get right down to it, there are few agricultural practices that are really necessary - Masanobu Fukuoka

While Meg and Zephyr were digging up more potatoes and tickling the first garlic shoots up out of the frosty Djadjawurrung soil in the home garden, Anna Davis (MCA) and Patrick met with the St Michael's church wardens late last week to finalise the agreement to allow the Food Forest to go ahead on this ancient Cadigal site in Surry Hills, Sydney. Here are the set of working drawings Patrick presented to the group on behalf of the Artist as Family. (click for bigger)

Some members from the local community, including both church and non-church groups, have now been asked to choose from this plant list their more desired fruit, herbs and nuts. If you wish to participate in the development of this Food Forest please comment below your desired food plants and we'll see how we can include your suggestions as we begin to source plants. But be quick as we aim to start planting in the first week of July, pending approval from the traditional owners.

Anyone wishing to help us with the planting in July please follow this blog and we'll keep you informed as to the when and how. Indigenous locals and non-indigenous residents who can help build information relating to Cadigal plants and medicines, your input is highly sought after.

Drawing the Food Forest into being

Elevation impression.

Plan view.

Click on images for greater detail.

Love from Peter Tyndall too

A little while ago we were required to ask for support letters to apply for funding for the Food Forest. We naturally asked members of our local community – permaculture co-originator David Holmgren and seminal conceptual artist Peter Tyndall. Both David's and Peter's letters were very generous, to say the least.

Patrick, Meg and Zephyr are thoughtful, energetic, articulate and engaged members of this rich local community. What they live and learn and practice here they also offer, as the Artist as Family, for the consideration of others. Last year, I followed them, via their several blogs, through a residency at Newcastle’s This is Not Art festival. I hope to be able to do so again during their participation in the MCA’s In the Balance: Art for a changing world. I recommend them and their application for your support. Peter Tyndall

(Blush, blush, thank you Peter). The Food Forest is a fusion of art and applied ecology, therefore to have this level of support from these two good and brilliant folk gives us much strength and focus as we head closer to realising this work. The union between the conceptual and the ecological is not only about providing interesting (we hope) public art and free ethical food in one combined work, but to make a work that participates in what it represents in healing the apparent rifts between the mind and the body, nature and culture.

For the connoisseur, Peter Tyndall's blog:

Choosing the plants

We've been writing up a long-list of suitable plants to use in the Food Forest. A short-list selection will be based upon three criteria.

1. the local Cadigal food plants for ecology building.
2. the taste buds of the local community to determine desired foods.
3. the availability of plants from local nurseries.

This short-list palette of plants will help complete the design. In other words, the three plant zones (as seen in the previous post) will be filled in using this diverse palette of edible flora.

1. ground covers, herbs and beneficial flowering plants will skirt the exterior ring of the forest.
2. mid to large sized shrubs and small trees, such as citrus and guava, will predominant.
3. small copse of larger trees such as avocado and macadamia will complete the skywards gradation.

These three zones together will constitute a dynamic polyculture.

What are your favourite edible plants, and do you think they'd grow well in Sydney? We'd love to hear your suggestions.

Re-imagining the city

Michael Leunig, SMH, May 2010

The Artist as Family, St.M, May 2010

Great News!

After months of searching and writing proposals, it looks like we have a site, and a beautiful site indeed. Yesterday we heard back from St Michael's and they agree in principal to Food Forest being planted in their front lawn. So, we will be busy over the next week compiling a plant list for the community, making drawings of the proposed work, and putting together an agreement outlining the scope of the work, while identifying the responsible parties.

Patrick swung by to measure up the site this morning, take some more photos and sketch out the footprint of the work. It seemed to suggest a kidney bean shape as we'll have to keep away from tricky underground plumbing services.

Here's an east view of the site and the awesome ficus doing a magnificent job.

Afterwards Patrick walked into the city and had tea with Tessa and Karl, two Sydney artists who are also involved with In the Balance.

Their poetic exhibition Make-do Garden City is on until 8 May at the Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Tessa and Karl's website can be found at Makeshift.

Upstairs in the gallery was the following drawing. It was pretty compelling, recalling Avatar and indigenous folk everywhere, pressurised by the growing needs of expanding technocultures. Apologies to the artist, but a wall label couldn't be found, nor a catalogue, or even anything on the gallery's website to properly credit this detailed work.

Next stop: Marrickville, to have lunch with some family members. After stepping off the bus Patrick came across this beautiful micro-forest front garden and stopped to admire the structure and health of it.

This really is close to the sort of feeling we want to create with Food Forest, only packed with edible and flowering plants.

Possible Sites

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.

Compare This:

"No, no, no sickness really, only clean one. Because they lived on wild honey and meat. They have been living on bush tucker. Nothing. No tea, no sugar, no ice-cream or lollies, nothing. Only been living on bush honey, bush tomatoes, bush raisins, edible seeds and grass seeds. Any kind of seeds. They lived on yams. No sickness. Nothing, all good. Nothing, they were good living in them days. They only got sick from a cold. Only catching a cold, that's all. No more. No sickness, nothing. Because they living on different food. Yeah, different food bush tucker".

Joe, Ali Curung elder, NT, from Message Stick, series 12, episode 11: The Artists of Ali Curung, ABC iview, April, 2010.

With this:

"According to the archaeological evidence, [early] farmers were more likely than hunter-gatherers to suffer from dental-enamel hypoplasia – a characteristic horizontal striping of the teeth that indicates nutritional stress. Farming results in a less varied and less balanced diet than hunting and gathering does... Farmers were also more susceptible to infectious diseases such as leprosy, tuberculosis and malaria as a result of their settled lifestyles... Dental remains show that farmers suffered from tooth decay, unheard of in hunter-gatherers, because the carbohydrates in the farmers' cereal-heavy diets were reduced to sugars by enzymes in their saliva as they chewed. Life expectancy...also fell... The settled farmers are invariably less healthy than their free-roaming neighbours. Farmers had to work much longer and harder to produce a less varied and less nutritious diet, and they were far more prone to disease".

Tom Standage, An Edible History of Humanity, Atlantic Books, 2009.

With this:

"We want to bring together in this work current ecological philosophies and permaculture activisms, and show the corresponding ties with pre- or less mediated societies – societies who have possessed a land-based intelligence devoid of anxiety, self-harm, material entitlement, depression, food disorders, self-loathing, alienation, hypochondria, mood disorders, cancer, tooth decay, mental illness, diabetes, organised violence, memory loss (or blindness to violence), division of labour and subsequent ecological estrangement".

The Artist as Family, more notes on the Food Forest, April, 2010.

Rocks, logs and leaf litter

Some notes on the food forest:

1. Create many habitats for predators, such as lizards and frogs.

2. Create a site of intense biodiversity – flora and fauna – to help allay pests.

3. Allow fruit, nuts and berries not consumed by humans or non-humans to be left to compost on the forest floor.

4. Allow plants to seed, fruit and regenerate naturally by open pollination.

5. The food produced must remain uncapitalised and free from pesticides and other synthetics.

6. The intent of the forest is to trigger a foraging vibe for humans and non-humans local to the site.

7. To design the forest so it becomes self operating, self feeding and self watering.

8. Combine indigenous and exotic flora.

9. Create a 'green pharmacy' with many herbs.

10. Plant companion plants in close proximity to one another.

11. Bring in much biomass, top soil and compost to help create an organic base for the site.

12. This work is a fabrication, an artwork, based upon biomimicry. It participates in what it represents: a reunion of the conceptual with the corporeal; the mind with the body; man with woman; human with non-human; food with ecology; poetics with pragmatism.

Letter of support from David Holmgren

My support for this project comes from my expertise in the sustainability of our food supply system and positive design based responses at the household and community level that rebuild local, low impact ways of providing food. David Holmgren.

Read on by clicking on this image.

Invitation formally accepted

Click for bigger.

New pioneers, old future

The ontological shift for an ecologically sustainable future has much to gain from the worldviews of ancient civilisations and diverse cultures which survived sustainably over the centuries. Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development

Thanks for this Detroit link, Anna. We've now watched Requiem for Detroit too. Bonza!

Open Fields

Please come along to this if you're in Sydney on April 30. Patrick will be outlining our project to date.

Click for bigger.

For more info go to Open Fields.

A Direct Action

The problem with so much of the art we see today is that it is reduced to the symbolic; it is a mediation, and is not really of the world.

What we are trying to do with our food forest project is say: abstracted life has lost its appeal, it has caused too much division and separation. With a forest of food as a public art work, we aim to show how art can again be of the world, a part of it and not merely a symbol of it. It can put back in, not just take and make waste.

Our systems, based on growth capital, have failed – resource wars, divided society, pollution, class wars, mental illness, alienation – and however glaringly obvious the fact of all this is, the level of denial remains in the symbols that surround us. Be they on billboards, television, online or in galleries, our symbolic medias are powerful and manipulative, they collectively report back to us that we are advanced and thoughtful people who can live in a world unrelated to the microbial world below our feet. This is ecological disembodiment, and the ramifications for this separated, abstracted life are proving to be disastrous for the planet.

As a mass culture we have been flattered by a sense of our own progress and sophistication, and artists and ad people have worked hard to keep this middle-class myth alive, but beyond the seductive veneers and images, progress, and the mediation of progress, is concretely killing us.

If we are to re-embed ourselves in the cycles of wild nature, and by doing so have a chance at surviving what lies for us on the horizon, then our symbolic and domesticated states have to be confronted. Our symbolic, mediated, head-only orientations require interventions by our bodies, and those things that are essential to life – air, water, food, soil, dynamic ecology, habitable climate – become again the things most highly valued and respected.

The project of world peace, to think big, is the project of dismantling the spells of mediation, symbol and image that annul, disempower and calibrate us to the dominant ideology.

Art requires a direct action that's no longer ironising and cowardly, no longer self-conscious, anxious or innovative, but rather real and essential; a re-embodiment of natural systems.