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Food Forest Bee

Hello Sydneysiders! We hope to see you soon.

We are heading your way for a two-day working bee at the Food Forest on Saturday 17 and Sunday 18 December.

The bee will involve some general maintenance, composting techniques, water conserving strategies and planting sessions.

Local residents, church goers, Artist as Family groupies and Food Forest friends are all invited to attend this free event. Come for as long or short as you’d like between 10am – 4pm on both days.

BYO seeds, seedlings, garden tools, friends and picnics.

The Food Forest is located at St Michael’s Anglican Church, (Cnr Albion and Flinders), Surry Hills.

We hope to see you there!

Tip Trip

It’s been nine months since we sold our car and we have loved every minute of it. Yes—even walking in the pouring rain in winter. We agree with British adventurer Ranulph Fiennes who said “There is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing.”

But there is much to be said for walking in the sunshine, and today we said it as we walked to our local tip. We wanted to get rid of some unwanted goods, and have a fossick to see if there was anything we had use for at home.

We fossicked high and we fossicked low. And we fossicked around and around the Earth Ship demonstration wall we built earlier in the year with waste warrior Michael Reynolds.

We test rode all the bikes,

we sniffed out hidden treasures

including 30 metres of tangled chicken wire we are going to use to keep our five hens and one rooster out of a new garden bed.

We spent the better part of an hour pulling it this way and that until

it was ready to roll up and

roll all the way home.

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.

A Food Forest

As a result of the project we did in Newcastle, we are very excited to share the news that we have been invited to participate in the In the balance: art for a changing world show at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Sydney from 19 August to 23 November 2010.

In preparation for our project, we have visited Sydney twice in the last month. The first time we travelled by plane, but after measuring our carbon footprint between Melbourne and Sydney we decided to travel by car on interstate journeys henceforth; by bike on local journeys and by bus, train and tram on any subsequent journeys. In fact we have made the decision never to fly again until air travel is fuelled by non-polluting renewable resources.

Click for bigger.

The project we have proposed for the MCA is a community food forest. Although we will have a presence in the gallery for the show, the main part of our work will comprise fruit and nut trees planted amongst vegetation that is indigenous to Sydney; bush plants that the Cadigal, the traditional owners of the inner Sydney city region, relied on for food.

As you can imagine, one of the most important elements of a project like this is finding the right location. On our last two Sydney trips, we have ventured all over the city in search of just the right site.

We visited Murralappi, the Settlement Neighbourhood Centre,

Frog Hollow,

Fred Miller Park,

and numerous other parks, but the one we have our fingers crossed the most for is Ward Park, in Surry Hills.

This is the corner of the park we hope to plant out. It’s roughly 300sqm.

Before we drove home, we went to Ward Park once more to measure up

to pick up rubbish

to sketch our proposed food growing area

and to imagine the nearby residents looking down at the forest to see what fruit is in season.