Jerry meets up with a guerrilla gardening group taking over empty public spaces to grow food for those that need it, sharing growing skills to increase community resilience. Subscribe 🔔 http://ab.co/GA-subscribe
Over the pandemic lockdowns, many of us were alarmed by images of empty supermarket shelves and supply shortages. Rather than running out and hoarding toot-roll, a group of young people saw it as an opportunity to provide for the vulnerable in their community and rethink how public space was being used.
Al Wicks says they’d “always had the pipe-dream of doing community gardens…over covid me and my friends started getting worried about food security for vulnerable people in the community”.
One of these friends was Ruby Thorburn, who says “there was an overwhelming sense of fear, seeing these empty supermarkets. We wanted to produce food overnight…to avoid red tape and bureaucracy and use direct action”.
In response, they formed “Growing Forward”, a community organisation dedicated to setting up guerrilla community gardens in underutilised public space. We’re visiting a site they’ve successfully converted from forgotten space to thriving community gardens with a purpose.
What started out with a bit of rule bending, has now garnered support of the whole community – including the council.
“We looked around and found a plot of land that was owned by the state government, but had been abandoned for over 90 years. Our neighbour works in council and looked into contamination reports that had been done on the soil and found it was good” says Ruby.
Leaning on Ruby’s permaculture background, they conducted a site assessment and identified a tap for water supply and a promising full-sun aspect. “The goal was community food resilience, and to get people thinking differently about food”.
After speaking with local indigenous elders to gain their permission to use the land, the group studied successful guerrilla community gardens to try to replicate what factors had made them work.
The first was wide community consultation. Every house in the surrounding area to the proposed garden was repeatedly doorknocked, to canvas any issues or concerns with establishing the garden- and identify anyone who was willing to help. Flyers were also distributed.
The next was rapid implementation. “Our goal was to set it up in 2 days, to skip the uncertain period where people are not sure what’s going on” says Ruby. “We just went ahead and did it” says Al.
“We brought in about 20 m2 of soil, and spent our personal money on it” says Al. “It took about a day to get it all in, there was a lot of community support”. While a lot of elbow grease went into the set-up, there’s no permanent infrastructure, which helps avoid the ire of bureaucrats
The first garden is at West End, in inner-south Brisbane, and it’s been a total success. Occupying around ¼ acre, it’s ringed by edible native plants with mounded beds of vegetables inside.
Everything grown goes back into the community to feed those who need it most. “The founding principles were doing free work for the community, and the produce is free”. “We have signs saying this food is going to vulnerable people, and it seems to work”.
At West End the produce goes to refugees living in the community, so Al and Ruby asked the refugee community organisation what they would like to eat. Accordingly, the fare is a little more diverse than what’s on offer at the shops, with sweet potato, okra, cassava, elephant foot yams and papaya thriving. It’s also become a place for meetings and picnics.
The approach has been a big success, regularly supplying food to community organisations and those most vulnerable, as well as building local connections. The program has expanded.
Featured Plants:
PAW PAW - Carica papaya cv.
SWEET POTATO - Ipomoea batatas cv.
CHILLI - Capsicum cv.
PUMPKIN ‘JAP’ - Cucurbita maxima cv.
OKRA - Abelmoschus esculentus cv.
Filmed on Turrbal & Yuggera Country | Brisbane, Qld
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Jerry is north of Brisbane to visit a home gardener who has built a remarkable food garden over a decade, that enabled her to avoid food shopping for an entire year. Subscribe 🔔 http://ab.co/GA-subscribe
Around 15 years ago Sonia and her partner Rob decided they wanted to start building a food garden. “We never did a plan. We just did it bit by bit. We based it on convenience; we walk here so let’s plant here. It just evolved over time.”
In 2019, Sonia set out on a remarkable challenge to eat 100% of her diet from her garden. “It was just to see if I could do it.”
“I did go to bed hungry a couple of times, but only a couple. It was challenging at times. I really missed bread, but it was really amazing the connection I felt to the garden. I’d love to do it again one day. Especially now that I have honey!”
Growing enough food to live off is a huge achievement, and the fruit trees here would have helped immensely. This area holds a litany of temperate, subtropical and tropical fruit trees; loquat, wampis, bananas, citrus, mulberry and peaches to name just a few. The food forest understory is edible too, with smaller cover crops like pepino and nasturtium.
Sonia has a rare passionfruit species to offer Jerry to try. “It’s a Japanese hard-shelled passionfruit (Passiflora maliformis). You crack the shell with a hammer like a nut, and the flesh is a really creamy passionfruit flavour.”
Nearby, Sonia has an entire area of the garden dedicated to native food plants. Here you’ll find native nutmeg (Myristica insipida, ground kernel used as spice), Fraser Island Apple (Acronychia imperforate, small sweet yellow fruits), white aspen (Acronychia oblongifolia, aromatic white fruit with a pine/mango flavour). She points out the native mulberry (Pipturus argenteus) as her favourite.
Adjacent is an area that Sonia has converted from annual crops into perennial, ornamental natives. Since taking up beekeeping (both stingless and European), Sonia’s been conscious about including more year-round flowering plants in her garden, and to this end, has callistemon, banksia and grevillea planted to help out her growing collection of hives.
Sonia’s not only managing to line her own belly, she’s providing a resource for her community. Out the front of their place she’s set up a stall selling her excess produce, and it’s become very well known in the community. The honesty-based payment system has been such a success, it’s funding Sonia’s holidays, and she feels like people may be putting in extra money - such is the appreciation for her produce.
“We had hard clay at first. It was terrible. We get free mulch from the tip and we have a big trailer. We’ve put down about 150 loads of mulch, and the soil’s improved.” Also enlisted in the soil-improvement effort is a compost bin painted like a pig. “We call her Gloria the compost pig. When she’s full we say ‘it’s time for her to spill her guts.’“
Sonia’s built an impressive food garden in her backyard and achieved something most only dream of by living off it. Her can-do attitude echoes Edmund Hilary and shows the power of starting with what you have, where you are and working bit by bit.
Featured Plants:
WAMPEE - Clausena lansium
LEMONADE TREE - Citrus cv.
BANANA - Musa cv.
PEACH ‘TROPIC BEAUTY’ - Prunus cv.
JABOTICABA - Plinia cauliflora
TAMARILLO - Solanum betaceum cv. *
PEPINO - Solanum muricatum
NASTURTIUM - Tropaeolum majus *
PASSIONFRUIT ‘JAPANESE HARDSHELL’ - Passiflora cv.
BANDICOOT BERRY - Leea indica
EMU BERRY - Grewia latifolia
BIGNAY - Antidesma bunius
WHITE SANDPAPER FIG - Ficus fraseri
CITRUS ‘RED CENTRE LIME’ - Citrus cv.
NATIVE MULBERRY - Pipturus argenteus
* Check before planting: this may be an environmental weed in your area
Filmed on Kabi Kabi Country | Morayfield, Qld
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