Visiting Milkwood Permaculture farm
Past weekend my partner and I combined fun and study, and went for a visit to the Milkwood Permaculture farm. Not only was it a beautiful experience to leave the city and spend a weekend under the stars, but we also got to meet many amazing people, including Nick Ritar and Kirsten Bradley.
I woke up on Saturday morning to the sounds of howling wind and rain. I though, “Oh man, this is the day we are visiting Sydney gardens!” I was tempted to crawl back under the warm blankets, but to my surprise the day turned out to be very mild, and even cozy.
On Saturday, September 4 2010, few gardeners from Glebe Community Gardens (including myself) visited two fellow Sydney Community Gardens in an effort to research their methods and understand what successes can be applied at our garden.
Angel Street Permaculture Garden and Newtown Community Garden are a mere 10-minute walk away from each other, but they could not be more different (described below) in their approaches to community gardening. Both are successful and productive, and both have lot’s to teach us about community and abundance.
Rhizome:
An expanding underground root system, sending up above ground shoots to form a vast network. Difficult to uproot.
The Rhizome Collective is a non-profit organization based out of a warehouse on the East Side of Austin, Texas. The Rhizome Collective operates an Educational Center for Urban Sustainability and a Center for Community Organizing. They are a consensus-run organization.
Rhizome’s purpose is the design and display of functioning ecological tools and technologies, created to give communities greater self-reliance over life’s basic resources: water, food, energy production, waste management, shelter and remediation of toxins. By having this systems open for the public to learn from and interact with, they hope to educate and inspire others to continue the work of building locally based, decentralized, radically sustainable infrastructures. By doing so, they hope to ease humanity’s transition into a post-petroleum future, and simultaneously undermine oppressive powers that maintain resource monopolies.
Colin Beavan decides to completely eliminate his personal impact on the environment for the next year.
It means eating vegetarian, buying only local food, and turning off the refrigerator. It also means no elevators, no television, no cars, busses, or airplanes, no toxic cleaning products, no electricity, no material consumption, and no garbage.
Robert Hart summarized his vision of harmonious living on Earth in the following quote,
Obviously, few of us are in a position to restore the forests.. But tens of millions of us have gardens, or access to open spaces such as industrial wastelands, where trees can be planted. and if full advantage can be taken of the potentialities that are available even in heavily built up areas, new ‘city forests’ can arise…
He identified 7 layers to a successful and productive forest garden: