Category Archives: Permablitzes

Community-run edible streetscapes

Community Spirit alive and well in Sawtell

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday 24th November, 2012

A quiet revolution is underway in Coffs Harbour and its nearby towns.

Supported by small grants from Coffs Council, first under the Local Food Futures Project and now via the ‘Our Living Coast’ Regional Sustainability Program, several primary schools and child care centres have established productive gardens for their children over the past year.

These intiatives build on longer-established school veggie gardens, such as those at Toormina Primary School and Casuarina Steiner School.

And now school veggie gardens are becoming edible streetscapes, with the planting of around 30 ctirus trees in two locations in Sawtell. First, on Friday 16th November, kindergarted and class 5 students from Sawtell Public School planted trees on the school’s boundary. Then, on Sunday 18th November, over 30 local residents of all ages worked for an hour and a half to plant lemonades, oranges, mandarins, lemons, limes, cumquats, grapefruits and blood oranges on the road verge off 18th Avenue, adjacent to the Richardson’s Park sporting oval. Thus was born the very first ‘Sawtell Community Citrus Grove’.

The Sawtell Citrus Orchard team!
The Sawtell Citrus Orchard team!

Both these initiatives were spearheaded by the Sawtell Healthy Homes community group, with the organising energy provided by Peter and Erika van Schellebeck. Advice on species selection and soil preparation came from Juliet Thomas, of the Coffs Harbour Regional Community Garden. Over the past year Juliet has worked with the school principal, Michael Cheers, as well as staff, students and parents, to set up a beautiful fruit and veggie garden inside the school.

 

 

Erika highlighted the social and community-building aspects of the citrus tree plantings. “The project has been a great opportunity for us to get to know our neighbours, and I hope that the grove will become a community space where neighbours meet and walkers and cyclists stop for a rest and some shade”, said Erika. “This pathway is very popular, and so we designed a pathway through the grove to encourage people to move through it and enjoy the space. We also designed a small circular space in the middle that hopefully will one day have a seat and table to encourage neighbours to meet up in the space – maybe for Friday night drinks.”

 

Sawtell Public School kids planting citrus trees
Sawtell Public School kids planting citrus trees

Planting and caring for fruit trees also brings clear health and educational benefits for children. “I hope that the nature strip planting at the school will build on all the work the school is already doing to educate the students about healthy eating, and growing fresh fruit and vegies”, said Erika. This is part of raising levels of food literacy amongst children – an understanding where food comes from, how it’s grown (and raised), what healthy eating involves, and the importance of composting food scraps, so that soil fertility can be maintained and enhanced.

Erika hopes that these initiatives in Sawtell will help inspire other groups of residents in other parts of Coffs Harbour and its surrounds to also get behind the push to make this region ‘edible’ – and for the Council to support them with small grants and making the paperwork easy.

“The grove already looks great – it has turned an unloved and unused piece of swampy land into a space for the whole community to enjoy, and, in a few years, to enjoy a wide variety of free citrus. I hope that the grove and school nature strip planting will encourage Council to consider the merits of growing food in public spaces.”

This work in Sawtell builds on the Bellingen Edible Streetsacpes project begun in 2011, as a collaboration of Northbank Rd Community Garden, the Bellingen Chamber of Commerce, Transition Bellingen, and with funding from the Local Food Futures Project. Bellingen Council has also embraced the spirit, with a raised veggie garden at the entrance to Council Chambers.

Further afield, the trail has been well and truly blazed by Yorkshire café owner Pam Warhurst and her army of volunteers in the market town of Todmorden, with the Incredible Edible Todmorden project.  In Pam’s words, “I wondered if it was possible to take a town like Todmorden and focus on local food to re-engage people with the planet we live on, create the sort of shifts in behaviour we need to live within the resources we have, stop us thinking like disempowered victims and to start taking responsibility for our own futures.”

Amazing things have been achieved in Todmorden, and they’re just getting started. Makes you wonder what’s possible for Coffs Harbour, with our climate, water and soils.

For more info on Incredible Edible Todmorden, search for Pam Warhurst’s TED talk on www.ted.com.

Kids and vegies

Permablitz in Perry St

A version of this article first appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday  1st September, 2012

Last month, the Coffs Coast Local Food Futures Project, funded by the NSW Environmental Trust, concluded after three years.

The centrepiece of this project was the establishment of two wonderful community gardens, in Coffs Habour (Combine St) and Bellingen (Bellingen High School). Both very different, each of these gardens has already made an important contribution to community education and cohesion in their respective localities, and will continue to do so for years to come.

The Local Food Futures Project has left many other legacies, and many great stories to tell. One of the most recent is the holding of a permablitz at the Gumnut Cottage Child Care Centre in Perry Drive, Coffs Harbour.

Gumnut Cottage is a community-based, not-for-profit centre, run by the parents of the approximately 70 families who use it.

Recently a key focus for centre has been the promotion of sustainability, says Director, Donna Easey, with the installation of water tanks and a solar system.

Because the Centre supplies all the childrens’ meals and cooks for them, they have been wanting to to ‘get the kids a lot more involved, by growing [their own food], and getting them to pick and eat it themselves’, says Donna.

‘So that’s why we applied for the green grant from the Council. We’ve had gardens before, but they didn’t work, so we thought, how can we improve on this. When the grant became available, we thought, this is an opportunity to do it bigger and better, to optimise our resources, get more garden space up and running.

With a $1600 green grant from Coffs Council, and a further $1000 of their own funds, they decided that the time was right to build a great edible garden for the kids in their care.

The key ingredient  was knowledge and expertise, and that was provided by the Local Food Futures grant, in the form of a stipend for permaculture designer Matt Downie, who is an active member of both the Combine St and Bellingen High School community gardens.

Matt’s design was put out to consultation amongst the Centre’s families, and attracted a lot of interest and enthusiastic comment. Not only did it involve the construction of a highly diverse edible garden, but it also addressed some long-term structural problems the Centre had been experiencing, such as the formation of mudpits due to the slope and heavy rain.

Donna was surprised by Matt’s knowledge of species and varieties, like chocolate sapote, ice cream bean and taro, that now form part of the edible garden for the Centre.

Twenty people rolled their sleeves up and worked from 9 am to 3 pm to build six 2.2m x 1.3m corrugated steel beds, as well as extensive trellising and a further railway sleeper raised bed.

 

Vegie bed construction at Gumnut childcare centre
Vegie bed construction at Gumnut childcare centre

 

 The garden has already got the children inspired and engaged. ‘On a daily basis, the children can’t wait to come in and water the plants, and see how they’re going. It’s very exciting.

Many parents who weren’t able to attend the blitz itself have been coming in to help out. ‘The kids are very excited when mum or dad comes to pick them up in the afternoon, and they say, come and look at the garden, look at what we’ve planted’, says Donna.

There have been many donations of plants from families, and grandparents have come in to share their gardening skills with the children.

Donna is very excited about the potential the garden brings to the Centre: ‘I think it’s going to be great, for children to go and pick things for themselves. But also looking at what’s in our garden, and how we can use it – for older kids, thinking about recipes, and then cooking and eating the food themselves.’  

As well as healthy eating, just being involved in the garden has a calming effect, especially for those children who are quite active.

And it’s inspired several families to start growing food in their own homes.

Donna sees a return to previous values and practices with this sort of local food growing. ‘When I grew up, we had big vegie gardens, and you had things that you don’t see anymore, like marrows, and big squashes. They’re hard to come by these days, but we had them on our table every night’, she says.

Making the suburbs edible – one backyard, one school, at a time

Bellingen Primary School Permablitz, 2010
Bellingen Primary School Permablitz, 2010

Permablitz – what’s it all about?

Nick Rose

This article was first published in the Coffs Coast Advocate, 20.11.10

First there was ‘guerrilla gardening’. In the dead of night, hard core local food activists would surreptitiously sow brassicas, leafy greens and even the odd citrus tree on urban nature strips.

Now there’s ‘backyard blitzes’ or, more commonly, ‘permablitzes’. So what is it with all these psuedo-military metaphors to describe new variants on the gentle art of gardening for food?

According to the www.permablitz.net, a permablitz is “an informal gathering involving a day on which a group of people come together to achieve the following:

  • create or add to edible gardens where someone lives
  • share skills related to permaculture and sustainable living
  • build community networks
  • have fun.”

Permablitzes are the inspiration of Melbourne-based permaculture designer Dan Palmer and a South American community group. Since their beginning in 2006, over 100 permablitzes have been held throughout Melbourne, and now the movement is spreading across the rest of Australia.

Permablitzes are typically held in a private household, and indeed half a dozen permablitzes took place in people’s homes in and around Bellingen over the last 12 months.

The Coffs Coast Local Food Alliance however decided to expand the concept by working directly with local schools, using the design and labour-sharing that a permablitz offers to help schools construct a school garden or improve and expand upon an existing one.

And so the first LFA Permablitz was held last month at the Bellingen Public Primary School. Thirty-five enthusiastic volunteers – students, parents, teachers, and the principal, as well as friends and supporters – turned out to transform the bare lawn at the school’s entrance on William Street into a food oasis. The day was a fantastic success, and it was a sheer joy to be there and just experience how much a group of people working together to a shared goal based on an excellent design can achieve.

Boys with barrow, Bello Public Permablitz Oct 2010
Boys with barrow, Bello Public Permablitz Oct 2010

Relieving school Principal Elizabeth Mulligan spoke movingly of the ‘huge community spirit’ she witnessed on the day. “It’s just so good to see parents here with their children, also community members, with no attachment really to the school, but who have come to find out about permablitz”, she said. “And then people from organisations who are here to help us to learn about the whole procedure, and how it can be useful and good for us.”

The design was prepared by long-time permaculturalist, land-carer and market gardener Charlie Brennan, together with his son Bede, a former student of the primary school. Charlie celebrates the emergence of permablitz as a new wave of permaculture community activism.

The team - Bello Publc Permablitz, Oct 2010
The team – Bello Publc Permablitz, Oct 2010

“It’s great that permaculture has come back in again”, said Charlie. “For about 5-10 years I was really involved with permaculture here in town. We had a permaculture group, we had working bees, we had events like this – then it seemed to go quiet for a while – and now it’s back with a vengeance”, he added.

Liz Scott with students at the Bello Public Permablitz, Oct 2010
Liz Scott with students at the Bello Public Permablitz, Oct 2010

The next LFA permablitz will be held in Boambee on Saturday 4th December, at a private property. Anne, the host of this permablitz, also attended the Bellingen Primary event with her partner Tim. “We’re really keen to be involved and get some permaculture happening at our own place, so it was really good to come to the school and participate and learn, and meet other people’, Anne said.

Anne Montgomery's Permablitz, Boambee, before shot
Anne Montgomery’s Permablitz, Boambee, before shot
Anne Montgomery Permablitz, after shot
Anne Montgomery Permablitz, after shot
Anne  Montgomery permablitz, the team
Anne Montgomery permablitz, the team
Anne Montgomery and daughter, enjoying the harvest
Anne Montgomery and daughter, enjoying the harvest

A short video of the permablitz at Bellingen Primary, put together by local short-doco maker Mick Parker, can be viewed at the LFA website – http://coffscoastlocalfood.ning.com/.