Tag Archives: Coffs Harbour

advocate, Backyard Gardening, Coffs Coast, Self-sufficiency

Self-sustaining systems for the backyard gardener

Sustainability in Korora

Nick Rose

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 11.6.11

Meet Steve McGrane. He’s the newly appointed Coordinator of the soon-to-be-inaugurated first-ever Coffs Regional Community Garden, to be constructed on 5000m2 at the Combine Street reserve.

Steve McGrane in his backyard garden in Korora
Steve McGrane in his backyard garden in Korora

Steve brings a wealth of horticultural experience and knowledge to this position, as well as a fierce passion for the principles of organic gardening and sustainable living. And not just the principles: Steve is a man who ‘walks the talk’, as anyone fortunate enough to visit his small (600m2) suburban property in Korora can attest.

He moved to the Coffs area in 2007, after working as a horticulturalist in Sydney and being involved at the community level with groups such as Permaculture North. His first intention was to set up a demonstration broadacre farm, but then it occurred to him that ‘actually it’s the domestic situation which is creating a lot of the waste [in our food system], and which is not really effective and sustainable in the way that we manage our resources.’

That realisation was the germ of inspiration for a seven-year project to demonstrate just what can be achieved, right here and now, in a 300m2 backyard, in terms of sustainable food production and biodiversity. And what Steve has achieved, largely with his own time, effort, skills and resources, plus some help from his neighbours, is quite remarkable.

When Steve talks about ‘sustainable food production’, what he means is a system that, after a period of time, doesn’t depend on purchased external inputs, i.e. it can sustain itself. His project isn’t about achieving self-sufficiency, which he sees as unrealistic and even undesirable. Rather, the aim is that after seven years, ‘the inputs which are producing the food here [will] be totally self-sustainable’, including ‘the water, the fertilisers, the mulch, and everything else’.

So how has he gone about achieving this goal? By applying permaculture and biodynamic methods ‘to prepare what was basically clay and shale soil’; and by researching what could be grown, with the aim of getting a ‘broad range of species’, especially those that would largely take care of themselves.

The starting point was to plant a lot of pioneer and support species, like acacias (Sally Wattles) and bamboo, alongside a large number of fruit trees. At first the ratio of support species to fruit trees was 90%-10%, and Steve’s aim is ‘through evolutional successioning’ to reverse that entirely over a fifteen-year period. Currently, after four years, the ratio is 60-40, support-fruit trees.

The pioneer plants have two main purposes: to fix nitrogen and improve the soil; and also as ‘sacrificial plants’ to produce mulch, via the ‘chop and drop’ method. Both purposes complement each other:

When you cut acacias and you trim the canopy, you also trim the roots, and that releases the nitrogen…Otherwise nitrogen’s not released until the plant is actually killed, and the nodules are broken open. So [this] is a way of releasing nitrogen as you go.

At the ground level, Steve’s put in other pioneers, like comfrey and vettava grass, which he uses as a border for his mandala vegie gardens.

Vettava grass is ‘used as a fodder in India for cattle’, says Steve, ‘because it’s very high in proteins, and it makes a very good mulch. It breaks down into straw, and that’s what I’m talking about in terms of not having to bring in inputs. So all I do is chop and drop it into the soil. It’s got nitrogen as well, and a high mineral uptake.’

The comfrey serves a similar purpose, and is also highly recommended for making a compost tea, together with a bit of seaweed, and the odd biodynamic prep. Another good ‘chop and drop’ is pidgeon pea, which also yields a crop of lentils. Other food-and-pioneer plants are sweet potatoes, which as a ‘ground cover [creates] a habitat for the microbes and bacteria to do their work’; and mint, which also deters pests.

The result of these years of soil preparation? ‘I now have six inches of soil’, says Steve, ‘which I didn’t have before.’

Talking of food, Steve has Decassis and Cavendish bananas, apples, peaches, pears, citrus, pawpaw, nectarines, almonds, macadamia, a dwarf pecan, hill gooseberry, South American cherry, passionfruit vines, and many other species. And that’s before we get to the vegies…

Steve’s new projects for his garden are the native bees, and aquaponics, which we’ll discuss in future columns.

If you would like to visit Steve’s garden in Korora, please put your name down for a tour with the Coffs Coast Ambassador programme, 6648 4676. For those interested in finding out more about the Coffs Regional Community Garden, please visit www.coffscommunitygardens.org.au, or contact Adam Curlis on 0424 989 979.

advocate, Coffs Coast, Collaborative cultures and networks, Fair Food systems, Food sovereignty, Local and regional food economies, Retailers

The Happy Frog

Nick Rose

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 14.5.11

This is the second of a two-part interview with Kim Towner, owner and manager of Tangellos and Happy Frog, and Coordinator of the Sunday Harbourside Markets.

Happy Frog was born two years ago, because Kim felt that Coffs Harbour was lacking a place ‘where you can go and buy the local fruit and veg all the time’, and help build a culture of sustainability – both social and environmental.

Kim chose the Frog because ‘it’s a measure of environmental health. I wanted to get everybody here, not just the vegetarians. I thought, let’s replace two meals a week with vego stuff, and let’s not have bottled water, let’s just look at those two things. And see what we can do differently.’

Happy Frog, Coffs Harbour
Happy Frog, Coffs Harbour

She gets as much local produce as she can, but not as much as she would like. At first, she bought largely direct from growers, but eventually logistical difficulties meant she had to rely on the services of a local wholesaler: Phil at A & D down at the Jetty. She speaks very highly of him – ‘he’s honest and fair and passionate’ – as do other businesses that preference good quality, fresh and reliable local produce.

The business has been very successful since opening – ‘people latched on to it really quickly, [they] heard about it through word of mouth’ – but Kim feels it’s still ‘really difficult to get people to buy here, and not buy in the supermarket’, even though the produce compares well on price.

‘I remember when we’d opened a few months’, she says, ‘and Woolies were offering a huge discount – 30 cents a litre on petrol – if you spent $300. I went and looked at their tomatoes and cucumbers, and worked out that if you bought tomatoes and cucumbers here, which were both local and beautiful – you would have saved $8, just on that one purchase of a kilo each of those two items. That [just] blew me away.’

The most profitable part of Happy Frog is the café. Thursday is always a busy day, because of the city centre growers’ market; Kim says other local businesses should ‘stop whingeing’ about it and look at their turnover on a Thursday.

One recent popular option has been a take-away dinner offer of $25 for four people, which is excellent value if you have tasted the many salads, lasagnes, lentil patties and kofta balls the café offers. The menu for the week is sent out each Monday to her growing email list of 150 people.

Kim and her team are now looking to expand on this by moving into catering: ‘We do party salads in bulk, and also funerals, and from that we do lots of meetings. This is a growing part of our business. It introduces a lot of people to the taste, and to the vegetarian thing.’

Kim is full of ideas for the future, both for Happy Frog and the region. There’s local value-adding: ‘We’ve just started our own dukkhas, semi-dried tomatoes, and I want to do jams, and relishes, and salad dressings.’ She also wants to ‘get in to school canteens…at Toormina High School – I’d love to do a Jamie Oliver-type thing, we could do some really good stuff, with the crew we’ve got.’

Her ‘favourite vision’ is to create a ‘shopping centre with a difference – a blend of shopping centre and markets. So that you had everything there – great big kitchens that made pasta, and bread, and jams, and you had a nursery, and a healing section where you got your hair cut, a massage – and you open the whole front of it up, with glass – and you played live music every day, and you had a kids’ playground there. And you had hand-made shoes, and clothing, and it was all there so people good see it. I reckon that would go so off – it would be like, this is how can you do it, a community shopping centre, but modern, and cool and funky.’

Her other big dream is ‘to see a hemp and bamboo industry [for Coffs Harbour’.

These plants grow abundantly, ‘they make beautiful fabric and great sustainable products. Coffs Harbour for ever has been flogging this tourism thing. I’ve got nothing against tourists – but it goes up and down, and changes. But let’s have something that’s really sustainable, for the long term….We could come up with some great name for hemp clothing that was made here, and exported to the damn world!’

These dreams will probably be for someone else to bring to reality, because there’s only so much one person – even one as energetic and visionary as Kim Towner – can do. But she and her team are living proof that the future here can be very bright indeed.

advocate, Co-operatives, Coffs Coast, Fruit growing

Unity is power

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Bananas in Coffs Harbour – will the Big Banana be all that we have left?

Nick Rose

This article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 2.4.11

Bananas have left their mark on Coffs Harbour. Our local credit union, the BCU, was established by banana growers in 1970, by members of the Banana Growers Federation who, according to the BCU website, ‘found it difficult to get finance through the banks of the day [so] they pooled resources, and formed a credit union, locals helping locals’.

Forty-six years ago, the Big Banana was inaugurated as one of the first of Australia’s ‘Big Things’ attractions. The very first, according to Wikipedia, was the Big Scotsman in Medindie, Adelaide, built in 1963.

Isn’t Wikipedia a goldmine of information? A wonderful modern resource at our fingertips, perfect for finding out all the facts about obscure and not-so-obscure people, phenomena and places. But beware: you can’t always trust everything you read in Wikipedia.

Take its entry for Coffs Harbour, for example. It says that the town ‘is the hub for a thriving banana industry’. The page was last modified on 16 March, 2011.  Whoever the contributors are to that page, they obviously haven’t spent much time – or any time – talking to a local banana grower, or looking at what’s been happening to the industry.

Coffs Harbour was the hub for a thriving banana industry – several decades ago. Today it’s the hub for what some are saying is an industry in terminal decline.  South Boambee grower Ted Knoblock, with over 30 years’ of experience in the local industry, is phasing out the last half dozen acres on his family property, because, despite Cyclone Yasi, ‘the long term future for bananas here is zero now’.

Ted acknowledges the role played by the mega-production in North Queensland in the local industry’s decline, but he also says that the local growers have to shoulder some of the responsibility for their current predicament:

“[The decline is] not all do with North Queensland, it’s to do with the incompetence of growers here who just won’t move on. They won’t use new ideas, and new ways of marketing. They want to be individual, but unity is power – and they won’t accept that, so they get stung every time in the markets.”

Unity is power – the phrase that echoes down the centuries, and is still rich with meaning today. For the alienated youth and workers of the Middle East, it means millions of people in the streets of Cairo, Alexandria, Damascus and Sana’a, bravely staring down the guns and tanks of repressive dictators. For fruit growers on the Coffs Coast, it means organising into cooperatives, agreeing a single marketing strategy and sticking to it, so you can be price makers, not price takers.

That was the role played for 71 years by the Banana Growers Federation. At the time of its winding up, seven years ago almost to the day, long-time Woolgoolga grower Jim Limbert said that ‘without the BGF, the banana industry in NSW could not have prospered…The BGF was essential for the establishment of the industry in this state’.

There was no more powerful symbol of the decline of the banana industry than the decision by the-then remaining 428 members of the cooperative – down from 30,000 in the early 1970s – to wind it up in 2004. As to what’s replaced it, Ted Knoblock says that:

“We’ve got a marketing group at the moment – but one’s dropped out, and a couple don’t have any bananas. We’re not big enough to have any effect… If Yasi hadn’t come along, the industry would have been dead by the end of March this year. It’s that bad, nobody can afford to put fertiliser on ‘em…We used to put up to 800 cartons a week out of here – now we’re struggling to do 80…its uneconomic to irrigate them, with the high price of power.”

Can anything rescue an iconic industry that appears to be one step away from the grave? Ted reckons that a fair price for the grower might – if it was achievable:

“You’d need $16 a carton to make it viable, with the consumer paying $2.50 a kilo. Which is no different to what they’re paying now. But somebody in the middle’s getting a lot of it.”