Tag: permaculture

Chicken with her favourite food in sight, native violets Poetry

The trouble with chickens

The trouble with chickens

A giant storm threatens

In the distance

Rumbles like waves on an angry beach

Thunder strikes

The dog barks

her anxiety unleashed

The chickens cower

I cuddle the canine

But the chickens lower to the ground

I cannot reach them

Human hands mean

Plucking to the air

Unfair restrictions

Awkward touch on feather

Do they feel

An unknown goddess

Thrashes the skies?

Do they feel

An eagle

Big as their dreams

Beats its wings

Over the heavens

Signalling their demise?

I cannot talk sense to them

Cannot say

This is storm

Infinite design of heaven

Sent by the mistress

They flail wildly

This way and that

Under the coop

Through the dust bath area, under stairs

Into their playpen

Filled with uneaten food

the angry goddess thunders

the skies

I cannot tell them

This will pass

Cannot hold them to me

Cannot reason

With unhinged chickens

Another bolt kisses ground

Booms the earth

The dog barks ballistic

The chickens in their

Screech and clamour

Forget to breathe

They squat

As if this giant

Will come and collect them

Obliterate them

And their feathery dream

Of unlimited grains, and greens galore

They cannot

Wipe the slate of the past

To understand this greater goddess

governess of the skies

She unleashes her Being

on the dry Desperate earth

Energising soils like Frankenstein

Only Greater

Across earth

No single monsters for her

Hers is a canvas worth the painting

First she splatters fat drops

Dust plashing

Then rivulets

First blase

Meandering the surface

Finding the cracks

Then

with growing confidence

Water pelts

more insistent

bathing caked soil

insisting

every edge

is filled

brimming

They cannot understand

She is the harbinger of life.

The chickens

Blind with terror cower

Unhinged to the miracle

Of an earth renewed

Permaculture

The power of diversity: together we’re stronger

The power of diversity: together we’re stronger

Almost two decades ago we started a project to build a garden with asylum seekers in Sydney. We had almost no money, a tiny space, and lots of shade. We, as organisers, didn’t have the skills we needed to construct our garden. Everything seemed stacked against us. But we had a lot of ideas and we had plentiful free materials, glass bottles available from nearby pubs and cafes that were just being thrown out. When we asked the asylum seekers and refugees if any of them had the skills we needed, they did. And together we worked to build our beautiful garden, for almost no investment, with lots of resourceful skilled people making it a reality. Together we came up with creative ideas for what to grow in shade and up walls and in the end, we had a beautiful safe space in which to sit and chat, grow a little food and just be. On the surface, it seemed like we didn’t have much. But when we really looked we saw we had an abundance of all that we needed, we just needed to be open to the possibilities. #valuediversity#valuethemarginal#permaculture

chicory Permaculture

The necessary nutrients

The chicory plants in our garden have gone mental.

Not that I love chicory, I’m not even sure I really like it that much. But a couple of years ago my local hardware store was closing, and I couldn’t resist the 50-cent plant specials sitting on the table. I knew that if I didn’t buy them on this last day, then the hardware store wouldn’t compost, or donate them, nor put them to any useful purpose. They’d just be added to a massive methane-spewing landfill, one more pollutant among many.

So I bought them thinking, a little chicory would be healthy, we don’t have enough bitter veg in our lives.

But since then, the chicory population in our garden has exploded. Through some miraculous mode of delivery, seed, spawn, alien-love, God-knows, from the back garden to the distant front, they’ve spread. Tiny seedlings soon turn into giant-rooted multi-leaved behemoths. A multitude more than we can ever eat. I keep pulling them up and potting them for any unwary passersby who expresses even the vaguest of interest.

‘What’s that weird thing crawling on that lettuce-looking plant…?’

‘That’s chicory, you want some?’

‘No not the plant, the insect. What’s that insect?’

‘I really think you should take some chicory, it’s really good for you.’

Sometimes I forget about the re-planted chicory, and they die in small pots. Or they seem to die.

Utterly brown and withered, seemingly bereft of life, the small pots sit in a saucer and it rains, and then a miracle occurs. From a dry leafless stump the chicory appears again.

So we’ve adapted.

We’ve learned to like bitter chicory, so long as we mix it up with the sweeter stalks of rainbow chard, and herbs like parsley, and the mundanity of lettuce, it’s fine. Life should be an interesting mix, shouldn’t it? How dull would it otherwise be? And how much less resilient, and less healthy would we be, if we all just ate iceberg lettuce?

That’s my theory about Nature too.

After all these years of working with her, I think that we’ve forgotten her in her pot. She’s wilted and in some places is seemingly dead, but if we give her the right ingredients, my theory is she’ll probably thrive again. Provided we haven’t polluted her beyond her tipping point.

Similarly, I have these questions about society. Could a disconnected society, when brought back to its origins, watered, fed, and reconnected with the right nutrients, thrive again?

I’d really love to know. Let’s look and see what people have done in local settings to achieve these healthier outcomes, and how we might replicate their results on a larger scale.

[An excerpt from my latest project. Do you want to keep reading? If you do, let me know. This could the start of a fabulous new adventure for us.]

marigold flowers Misc

Caught on the wind

At the asylum seekers centre garden it’s hard to get people to come along. They can been so traumatised by their experience fleeing, but also by what awaits them when they come here — years of detention, they say it’s like a gradual dying — that they don’t want to go out. If I can convince them to get to the garden, I often see a shift.

I see Mo from the middle east, and wave. He is at the end of his asylum process, awaiting a reprieve from the minister; his last and only hope. He is internalised, caved in on himself. Wrapped in a blanket of his own trauma and pain, he hardly speaks a word. I have to ask him a million questions before he answers one. So I learn not to ask. Sometimes even ‘Do you want to come to the garden?’ is too hard a question. His face screws up, lost in the confusion of his trauma-locked mind.

So I just say, ‘we’re going to the garden’. And sometimes he picks up his backpack and he comes.

Within 10 minutes of having his hands in the soil, cutting dead leaves off a plant, clearing weeds his energy shifts, and the most surprising thing happens: he starts to speak, of the foods that he ate at home, of the plants he grew, of his mother and how she would care for him. And then an even more surprising development: he sings.

The songs sound ancient, and I don’t understand the words, but they speak of journeys. Meandering though sad phrases, uplifting to happy family times. I am quiet in the background, pulling the grass from our veggie beds, entranced.

What more can I do to help him and so many others in this time of crisis? I can write more letters imploring the minister, adding to my ASIO file; already a foot deep. But more tangibly I can stop asking questions and just listen. I can provide a safe place in my garden, and I can revel in the moments where their beautiful voices catch, and for a short time, freely dance on the wind.