Our Place

In September 2009, I spied online what looked like my dream country place. Low price tag, enough land to play with and most amazingly an old house that looked to be in a fairly liveable condition. Tim and I had agreed upon what we wanted for our budget: a watercourse, even if only running in winter, a shed or basic structure, close to a train line and suitable for m permaculture wants, food growing and a few animals.

What we got: An old house with town water and power connected, storm water outlet running onto property, plenty of sheds, old pigeon coops, a couple of old pear and plum trees.

Challenges: Storm water coming onto the property had created an erosion gully that had been overrun with gorse for the last 20 years. The property had been overgrazed and then neglected for years. Rubbish, car parts and broken glass were strewn everywhere. The first focus was on cleaning up and using whatever resources we could find in sheds and strewn about.

We started work to retrofit the house for energy efficiency, attack the gorse forest without the use of chemicals, utilise the storm water more effectively to tackle the erosion problem and find the pipes that bring mains water to the house.

A lucky resource was the years of pigeon poo that had collected in the pigeon coops over the years. It was old, dry and very dusty, but a fantastic resource. I set to work almost immediately to start composting the pigeon poo goldmine. I used the Berkley method, and made a pile using a a mix of straw, newspaper and pigeon poop. This I turned after four days and then every second day til 18 days had passed. Check CSIRO's publication 'Composting - Making Soil Improver from Rubbish' for a guide to mixing your materials for the right carbon/nitrogen ratios, downloadable here.

Concord School Garden

Concord School is a special school in Melbourne's north that's seeking to feed the entire school with the produce from their school garden. The design brief was six beds, two sleepers high - a bed for each group of students. It was a fairly cramped space to work in, but the beds have been staggered to maximise space while creating interesting flows around the space. I made the most of vertical growing opportunities by placing garden beds up against fences. I was pretty impressed by the transformation. There's ample room for wheelchairs, wheelbarrows and two people to walk side by side around all areas of the garden.


We built it over the Easter holidays, so the kids came back to school to find a brand new set of garden beds to work with. The year 10 and 11 horticulture teams are working in the garden and managing food production and composting. As we worked, grounds maintenance were making mulch out of trees that had been felled on the school grounds to be put down on the pathways. That's the kind of cycling of materials you hope that schools can implement for projects like this one.



Concord School decided to do away with their tumblers and compost bins and do all their composting in a bay system. We set this one up which looks pretty damn fine! That's me. I'm feeling good to be body tired and covered in a layer of fine dirt after a hard days work.

The Food Project, Boston City Farm

From Lincoln we jumped on trains and buses and headed for Dorchester. We couldn't miss their excellent painted office at West Cottage and Dudley streets.

We met up with Bob, who showed us around the 3 urban lots that The Food Project grows their produce on. The neighbourhood bore a striking resemblance to the artistic interpretation featured in their office.


Their West Cottage site features a composting system built by the university. It spins, it aerates, it spills out the bottom.


One of the most exciting things about visiting North American gardens was seeing produce that isn't commonly grown in Melbourne. These tomatillos are pre-packaged beauties.

I'd been wondering what Callaloo was after seeing it in a Jamaican restaurant. It's this beautiful green vegetable you see before you.

The Food Project's urban agriculture has had an astounding effect on the neighbourhood, with many people beginning to grow in their own urban lots. This resident looks out on his corn field from his back porch. We passed lot after lot of cornstalks. I wonder how they deal with cross-pollination with so much growing in just a few blocks.

One of the great things about these kinds of projects is the carry on effect they have on the neighbourhood. As we were walking back to the office, a man came up to Bob and asked about some of the people he had known at the Food Project. He was looking for landscaping work and needed a reference. He spoke so highly of his Food Project experience that we almost could have believed that Bob had set the whole thing up. (which he hadn't)

As Cammy from the Lincoln farm explained, supplying fruits for the Farmer's market can be difficult as the Food Project grows mostly vegetables. However, they've taken over management of a heritage orchard at the historic Shirley-Eustic House in Roxbury.

The Food Project was staffed by the most generous, committed, unpretentious people. They really went out of their way to pass their knowledge on to the Australians who rocked up on their doorstep.

Red Hook City Farm, Brooklyn

The Red Hook Community Farm is situated on an asphalt basketball court in Red Hook, Brooklyn. They supply food to local restaurants, along with a fruit and vegetable store nearby. Like a lot of community farms, they have youth interns over summer. One advantage of the US academic year is the three months of summer. Enough time to really throw yourself into a project and learn stuff.There are huge piles of compost at Red Hook Farm and as I was walking around I wandered if they'd dug any of the asphalt up, or if they were growing food on top of it. As they explained to me, digging up the asphalt was too big a job. They get manure from the Bronx zoo and green waste from the city for free. The only costs to the farm is transporting this material to the site. So they even have fruit trees growing on top of the asphalt. Eventually they may break through, but until then they seem to be doing quite well.As I visited during summer holidays, there were lots of school buses waiting around.
Red Hook is like a big yellow school bus hangout.