Tending - a place of piece and quiet to recharge and reconnect

As part of the soon-to-come transformative work, I started sorting out a few things in the garden, collecting stakes, regrouping pots that were lying around under ferocious couch grass, inventorying plants species that needed to be saved, starting analysing the site for upcoming permaculture design… A busy morning for me!

I also started assessing the amount of work and the tools needed to convince couch, kikuyu and nut grasses (and many more unidentified ones!) to recede and let us grow food instead of invasive runners!

So here is an appeal!

Can you please email me (alexia[at]tending[dot]net[dot]au) if you can lend us the following items:

• A robust whipper snipper – electric or petrol
• A robust lawn mower – electric or petrol
• A pig
• Failing that a flock of hungry chickens?

Pigs and chickens would do magic at controlling the invaders and helping us cultivate the soil. But for reasons you can easily anticipate, they may not be quite entirely welcome on the school grounds!

That’s all for now.

We’ll be back at Tending next Thursday!

Tending I - recorded for posterity

Tending II - new beginnings

I am Lexxie – I am a permaculture teacher, gardener, mother of one, jack of all trade and generally fun to be around ! More on me here. I’ve already met some of you and I hope to see you all soon in the garden.

You might have also met Jocelyn who’s a permaculturist and gardener, a community development worker, my dearest friend, and even more fun to be around ! Read about Joss here.

Together, we will be working on the Tending ‘make-over’ and we will be tending the garden every Thursday morning till lunch time. We’ll also update this blog as well as the board inside the courtyard.

Next Thursday (10 May) I will wipe the board off its current content and start anew. I’ll invite you to write your name and email address so that we can keep you posted.

We have great plans about Tending. And you’re an integral part of them!

The general idea is to help Tending…

• a fun place to hang around and have meetings or whatnot,
• produce copious amount of food,
• recycle some of the local waste (food waste for the café and the nearby gardens, etc.),
• be a space to interact with student’s art,
• teach gardening and permaculture to those who want,
• and make use of the space for something creative, productive and fun!

I will take my current permaculture design certificate students for a whole day (Saturday 19 May) of teaching and site analysis. Upon this visit, they will be able to exercise their design skills and propose several permaculture options for the site.

We will keep you posted of what’s coming next, but in a few words, we’d like to facilitate a design session (over lunch break) and hear your needs, dreams, visions for Tending.

So stay tune and see you soon,

Lexxie & Joss

Yikes, it’s been two months since the last blog entry!

Diego and I have been very busy, together and separately, which has (besides the events chronicled in the previous post) kept us away from our gardening.

We both worked our butts off recently on something else which, like Tending, was also of a “greenish” nature – the Green Bans Art Walks, in Woolloomooloo. Diego was our tireless project manager, and it was a huge project. It was our way (in collaboration with many others) of getting in touch with a small corner of Sydney’s spatial activism history. Via the Green Bans, The Builder’s Labourers Federation effectively put a halt to dodgy commercial building developments. These bans were first implemented in the early 1970s.

I’ve also been working on Yeomans Project with Ian Milliss (who, coincidentally, was one of the squatters on Victoria Street which collaborated with the BLF on the green bans).

And Diego’s begun a long-awaited site-specific project out at Casula Powerhouse Art Centre, called Wild Stories, which should see him involved in a manure-load of foraging, in the local environment, running weed-cooking classes, facilitating community skill sharing and story-telling.

And while we’ve not been around at TENDING much, it’s been growing itself quite well in our absence, thank you very much (and, it must be said, thank you very much also to Aanya, our local hero of Balmain who keeps popping in to plant and pick with her young son Rufus).

I was curious to see how the garden was going, and so it was pleasing to see this blog post by Kirsten from Milkwood, with the above photo and more.

Judging from Kirsten’s photos, the plethora of peas we planted with Aanya have become superabundant, and it looks like our broadbean planting has been going well too (though we won’t see the fruits of that investment til November). And I’m very curious to see how the large scale garlic crop is going…

Kirsten had popped in to visit Ross, our benevolent overlord, and talk through some possibilities for Milkwood to do some permaculture workshop teaching activities down at SCA and TENDING. I really hope that comes to pass!

Oh, and the other reason(s) I’ve been busy and away from TENDING are also, in a way, related to the growing of stuff. Lizzie (my partner) and I are having a baby! And we’ve moved down the coast to boot.

Anyway, TENDING we miss you! I’ve put in some tomato seeds down here, and hopefully soon Diego and I will converge (with seedlings galore) for a little spring plant-in day.

…’til then, Tenders!

..few things, first, last week I went along to one of the saddest moment of Tending (if not the only one): Betty, the manager of the Cafe’ at SCA didn’t get her contract renewed, so left the Cafe’!
On Thursday a number of people came along for a bite and a thank you. One last bite at Betty and staff’s food and a thnkyou, for that food, the laughs, the chatty times, the support, the hints and advises, and -as for Tending’s direct benefit- the plants, the compost, the coffee, the cakes, the recipes, the keen involvement and general great, outstanding support..
Now you understand why I feel sad about the departure..

But as they say, bad news never come alone, they come in triplets.
Second bad news is that Tending didn’t get the funding it applied for, which means we are now officially in limbo: the end of June marks the end of the year ‘contract’ originally envisaged by Ross Gibson, to start off this pilot adventure, and indeed it has been an adventure, and a far-fledged one on that regards too.
We are still waiting for another application lodged in which might rescue the research project, but as it stands we will have to cull our enthusiasm and hold back our dreams of food forests, effective integration of agricultural practices within an art curricula and definitely, most definitely, no wink at relational art as a legitimate tool for social interaction..
Third reason to be sad is personal, weeds.
As the news came in that we didn’t get the research grant, the campus management decided to act on some complains from the public, who allegedly were concerned for the safety of Callan Park, particularly in regards to the possible encroaching of weeds on the surrounding areas.
It was also felt that a general tide-up of the courtyard were Tending is hosted was due, to satisfy care-taking commitments in regards to Richard Goodwin’s artwork Carapace.
It is my experience as a crusader battling for the reappraisal of the value of ‘weeds’ (whatever that might mean), that most gardeners and ground keepers understand my concerns and appreciate the logic behind it. They are tightened up by the constrictions of presentation though. When something looks ‘unruly’ it is deemed to be messy, unhealthy, poorly managed and therefore un-economic.

The people coming over on the week-end did an amazing work, there was a lot of organic material in that back block, which got collected and removed. They went around and pruned the bushes, see here the cassia (I believe) and the frangipani.
Me and Michele were a bit concerned about the use of Round-up though, which apart from the fact that it is highly un-ethical to use the poison anywhere near growing vegetables, it is also illegal within the boundaries of the Leichhardt Council.. carefull guys, you might follow-up on some complains by a dissatisfied citizen, yet you might also be liable for using restricted products on public land..
With all due respect of course.
I’ll finish off with a cartoon I made to complement an article which hopefully is gong to be published on the Plant Protection Quarterly, the leading scientific journal from Australia featuring local and international original papers on all aspects of plant protection: