Good Wood

Apr 15, 2012 | community gardens, community op-shop, family, harvesting, homelife, play, recycling, social warming, transitional communities, waste | 5 comments

We found some wood, you see. A whole stack of old hardwood batons that were holding up the tiles of a roof that was being retiled in time for the winter rains. The tiler was thrilled when we asked if we could take it, saving him a trip to the tip to dispose of it.

Off we went.

‘But it’s my billy cart, Dad. If you’d like to use it, you have to pull me up the hills.’

‘Let’s stack the longer bits first and then the small bits.’

Toot toot go the cars as we wobble down the footpath towards home.

A few days later we decided to take the billy cart on another adventure: to our newly opened local community op-shop. In no time at all we had completed our autumn clean-out and had filled five big bags of goodies to recycle.

The Daylesford Community Op-Shop is based on a Swedish thrift store model: to provide local community members with what they need including electrical items, so they don’t have to shop outside of town or buy new items, and all profits are then put back into the community.

Local not-for-profit organisations can apply to receive the profits for a month. The month of May for example is for Hepburn Wildlife Shelter, which means that they promote that month as theirs. They can bring in their saved-up goods to be sold and their members volunteer at the op-shop.

Based on the size of our town the op-shop is forecast to inject $100,000 a year back into the community.

There’s also a community space where mothers can nurse their babies, a book nook, a seed bank and a chai lounge. Pretty amazing, huh?

A brief stop at one of our community food gardens to turn over the compost, and then on we go.

Back home and our day was not quite done. Inside our chicken coop, our birds have been flying over the low fence and have been digging up one of our vegie patches. We have been setting up more substantial fencing over the last few weeks. And after our recent score we finally had enough timber to make some gates.

We harvested the last of the potatoes and Jerusalem artichokes, dug the beds over, added compost and planted them out with heirloom vegies.

We planted broad beans, three varieties of carrots, kohlrabi, two varieties of beetroot, celeriac, leek and plenty of cabbage.

We are a bit obsessed with cabbage in our household. We love to eat it raw in salads but even more so, we love to lacto-ferment it into sauerkraut. Here is a jar of our latest batch.

And here is the final fruit of our labours: a stack of kindling wood ready for the winter.

Water Bubbler Audit

Nov 18, 2011 | bottled water, direct action, map, waste | 0 comments

Four years ago, Patrick spent a day walking through Melbourne auditing the drinking water fountains in the CBD. His walk revealed that there was one working bubbler per 40,000 people in the city. He charted his findings on a map which he made freely available:

This coming Monday the 21st November, Artist as Family will spend the day retracing Patrick’s walk through the CBD as we re-audit the city’s bubblers. We want to find out if the City of Melbourne is still committed to encouraging bottled water pollution or whether they’ve begun to transition to a sustainable and just free water supply by repairing all the broken bubblers and installing new ones for thirsty summer city dwellers.

Did you know that for Australians to drink bottled water, over 500,000 barrels of oil are required every year??

If you live in Melbourne, please feel free to join us for any part of our walk. We will have a mobile with us, so please call or text to lend us support or to find out our whereabouts: 0418 523 308.

Stay tuned for the findings of our audit.

Tip Trip

Sep 18, 2011 | play, recycling, travel, waste | 4 comments

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.

Garden Bed Intruder

Jan 14, 2011 | bikes, climate change, compost, waste | 5 comments

Last year, this news item broke which provoked this musical interpretation of it, which in turn provoked us to make this:

A Food Forest

Feb 24, 2010 | food, street food, travel, waste | 4 comments

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.

Thirsty Work

Oct 10, 2009 | bottled water, government, time, waste | 1 comment

Now that our Lock-Up exhibition has been and gone, today we relaxed somewhat. Meg and Zeph took to the streets on their bikes as sightseers and Patrick worked on the film.

The lady behind the counter of the kiosk at Newcastle Main Beach told us that the local council asked them not to sell any drinks in glass as they are likely to end up smashed and injuring someone. So instead they only sell plastic bottles that get left on the sand or placed into one of the many bins that go straight to landfill sites without being sorted. It’s a lose-lose situation.

Today as we navigated the beaches and streets, we were very impressed at how many water bubblers we came across – a fantastic council initiative to encourage people to rehydrate without having to pay money for a disposable bottle.

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Category: waste