National Permaculture Day – 30/04/10
Tomorrow is National Permaculture Day. I first heard about permaculture over a year ago when I read a beautiful book by Jenny Allen called Paradise in Your Garden. Its full of stunning photos of her garden and the edible oasis she has created. That book inspired the slow and continuing conversion of our small surburban garden to a place that delivers food for our table. Its given me such pleasure to find out what tomatoes are supposed to taste like, to learn how capsicums grow and to watch the mardarins ripen on the tree outside our kitchen window. But this journey was a solo one until until, thanks to www.livelocal.org.au, I discovered there are permaculture clubs right across Sydney. So I joined one. Two weekends ago I did an Introduction to Permaculture course and learnt about how to capture and utilise the water that falls onto our property, to create guilds of plants that will support each other growth and negate the need for chemical fertilisers and I also found out why my worm farm wasn’t much chop. I’ve loved learning about ways that I can make a sustainable difference literally in my own backyard.
But what I wasn’t expecting was to find a thriving local community. I joined Permaculture Sydney North and the local branch is here on the northnern beaches. In preparation for National Permaculture Day, several of the members have been readying their gardens to be open houses, allowing the public to come in and see what’s possible in a normal back yard. On of the members of our local club who offered her home as an open house had to have surgery and couldn’t do the preparation she had wanted to do. So last Saturday, seven permaculture club members went over and spent four hours getting everything ready; planting up new beds, trimming back trees and basically working hard. A few nights later, just as everything was starting to look great, rats raided the garden by chewing a hole in the fence and destroyed everything. Within 24 hours, the club members had rallied to share their seedlings and come around at the crack of dawn on National Permaculture Day (so the rats wouldn’t have a second bite of the cherry) and redo all the planting.
When I lived in Africa, I learnt the value of community and how it is only friendships and these social networks that keep you strong. You can have insurance policies, risk management frameworks, or even wire fences but when bad things happen, its your friends and neighbours that help make a heavy burden light. Building and investing in community is the best insurance policy there is.
