One poet visits another...

Benjamin Laird's excellent trek through various zones of my poetical biota.

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Animals – us, them and usthem

Last Saturday morning I was woken by an ABC radio producer and a minute later I was on air spruiking for a series of lectures on animals that Melbourne Free University are hosting throughout May.

Here's the brief, rather sleepy radio interview with Hilary Harper regarding my Week 6 (May 30) talk concerning the accountable killing of animals.



The central question I am pursuing in my talk is how do we reclaim an ethico-animal accountability in an era of pacifist-sanctioned corporatism? In the way in which we kill or have others kill for our resources (whether we be vegan, vegetarian or omnivore) how do we move from mass-death industrialism to one-on-one ecological killing? How do we 'fess up to being creatures again; 'fess up to being both predators and prey in a highly abstracted and ecologically estranged culture?

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A new season of foraging walks

Today I took the first group out for a new season of foraging walks around Daylesford. We identified about thirty-five edible plants and a few mushrooms over a four hour walk.

Half way along we stopped for autumn fruit-and-acorn cake that Meg had baked for this inaugural and lovely crew – current students from the Castlemaine Permaculture Design Course. The cake was made from forest and/or garden ingredients – honey, olive oil, acorns, eggs, plums, peaches, quince, apple and rain water. These ingredients came from our home garden or nearby small businesses (Kyneton olive oil and Daylesford honey). Baking powder was used, but this is optional. (See earlier Artist as Family acorn cake recipe. A video showing how to turn acorns into flour will appear on this site shortly. Also please see my videos for turning hawthorn berries into fruit leathers and making dandelion coffee).

Patrick Jones foraging walks 2013

Students were each given notes that I have compiled that give details and uses for over eighty edible and medicinal plants, mushrooms and some fauna common to temperate Australia.

Walks run every Saturday from April 20, 1-5pm (all weather except for torrential rain). A minimum of six people each walk, $30 per person. For bookings call Daylesford Neighbourhood Centre on 5348 3569 or email. 

I will also travel to your community to take foraging walks. Email me for more information. Minimum of six people required.

Some of the edibles we came across today included mallow, plantain, sow thistle, honey fungus, lomandra, chickweed, watercress, slippery jacks, rosehips, hawthorn berries, acorns, sticky weed (cleavers), clover, gorse, dandelions, hawksbeard, dock, fathen, kangaroo apple, wild fennel, black nightshade, vetch, sheep sorrel, calendula, yarrow, wild radish and rocket.

Thanks to student foragers Felicity, Michael, Rita, Em, Natalie and Grace for making the first walk such a joyous occasion.

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The Real Through Line

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First draft, sent...

My supervisor/editor, Kate Fagan, received today the first draft of my manuscript Walking for Food: Regaining Permapoesis. After three and a half years the work is by no means over, but it feels like a significant achievement.

First draft, Walking for Food, 2013

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Walking a poemline

Artist as Family are planning to walk to Melbourne from our home in Jaara country and we wish to do this respectfully acknowledging the elders and traditional communities of the country through which we slowly travel.

The walk is to celebrate the completion of my manuscript, ‘Walking for Food: Regaining Permapoesis’. My manuscript and AaF's five day walk to Melbourne both attempt to raise issues around food and energy sustainability and environmental ethics. The book heavily quotes Aboriginal voices and sensibilities relating to the respectful treatment of country.

Artist as Family's five day walk to Melbourne 2013

On the fifth day I will present the last chapter of Walking for Food at the poetry symposium, The Real Through Line. This chapter constitutes a letter to Maya Ward regarding her book The Comfort of Water: A River Pilgrimage and critiques the place of writing within a culture of ecological intransigence. 

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Excerpts from Dave Jacke's Daylesford talk

Edible forest gardener and permaculturalist, Dave Jacke, came to Daylesford for a brief talk last Wednesday while touring the country giving workshops on temperate climate food forestry.

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Edible forest gardens afoot

Poster by Ian Robertson

Dave Jacke, author of Edible Forest Gardens, is coming to Daylesford to speak on Wednesday March 13. Jacke is a permaculture pioneer who has taken the Forest Garden concept beyond it tropical origins showing it can be adapted to temperate climates. This talk is a unique opportunity for local permaculture practitioners and anyone interested in ecological solutions to hear Dave Jacke speak while he is in Central Victoria. More

And, from this week's The Advocate newspaper, more local food forestry plans afoot...

DAYLESFORD will soon boast a five-acre food forest, thanks to a partnership between Daylesford Community Food Gardeners, Daylesford Neighborhood Centre and Daylesford Secondary College. The food forest will be built on permaculture principles and will boast more than 60 species of food producing plants, a poultry system and bees. Daylesford Community Food Gardeners co-ordinator Patrick Jones said the Daylesford Secondary College Council had already approved plans and the project was now seeking funding. The food forest will be planted at Daylesford Secondary College and will be a fifth community garden for Daylesford. Read on.

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IZAZEZOZ

Melbourne poet ∏.O. reads one of his poems from Rabbit journal #7 the Sound issue at Embiggen Books last Tuesday. 

∏.O. and I had a brief discussion about pros/cons of internet publishing after I asked him permission to publish his performance of IZAZEZOZ. The agreement we made was I would host it for six months and then remove it. This means this video expires on the 26 August 2013.

Others who read at the launch included Ania Walwicz, Autumn Royal, Tim Grey, Anna Fern, Susan Hawthorne and myself, reading Poisoned Gift.

Photograph: Nicholas Walton-Healey

Thanks so much Jess and Nick from Rabbit.

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Wandering through the Universal Archive

A new chapbook of mostly Australian poetry, Wandering through the Universal Archive, has just appeared online curated by poet Fiona Hile. This anthology centres on collaboration and includes poets Michael Farrell, Oscar Schwartz, Amaranth Borsuk, Brad Bouse, Toby Fitch, Kate Middleton, Pam Brown, Maged Zaher, John Kinsella, Justin Clemens, Charles Bernstein, Richard Tuttle, Jessica Wilkinson, Simon Charles, Timothy Yu, Ken Bolton, John Jenkins, Marty Hiatt, Sam Langer, Astrid Lorange, Eddie Hopely, Nick Whittock, Tim Wright and myself.

What follows is an excerpt from Fiona's introduction concerning the work I contributed and my practice more broadly.

Somewhere in the middle of the Australian state of Victoria, the poet and artist, Patrick Jones, is painstakingly gathering and reorganising remnants and cast-offs. Artist as Family is just one permutation of an ethos of ‘permanent making’ that takes place under the rubric of what Jones has termed permapoesis and has included the design and installation of a public food forest for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. Broadly speaking, Jones’ poetic mode is one of epistemological intervention. It rebels against what it thinks of as the ‘neat technocratised rows’ of printed poetry in English just as it seeks to disrupt the agricultural categorisations that insist on the eradication of weeds. For Jones, weeds repair land damaged by farming and industry and prepare the ground for reafforestation. His construction of a comprehensive Daylesford Community Commons Map that pinpoints the location of off-the-grid edible fruits and plants foregrounds issues of inclusion and exclusion. Who gets to decide what or who belongs where and to whom? If a plant or a letter or a word is in the wrong place it is viewed as a ‘mishap’, or a disruption. To overcome this ‘the eye has to get out of the machine and walk … the text becomes something the eye has to forage for or through.’ The map and the two poems gathered here constitute ‘a refiguring or reclaiming of the geopoetical – poems of the earth.’ 

One of the two poems Cordite published as part of Fiona's chapbook is called Winter's pharmacopeia, and it goes something like this:

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Symbol-free feeding (on the coast again)

We haven't been able to stay away from the Victorian coast this summer and so we've had to find out a little more about the edibles down there as we camped again and had at least one main meal a day of fish and greens that we foraged and hunted (with hand spear) for. We left home in Jaara country and moved around through Wathaurong and on into Bunurong country, crossing the bay at Queenscliff by ferry.

These are some of the things we found:

Tetragonia implexicoma, Bower Spinach similar to New Zealand Spinach (Tetragonia tetragonioides) by its 4 perianth segments (instead of 5), its yellow flowers and succulent fruit. Used as a leaf vegetable by Indigenous Australians and early Europeans as a source of vitamin C to ward off scurvy. The berries were used as a red dye; they are edible but not highly desirable. 

Tetragonia implexicoma (Bower Spinach)

Rhagodia candolleana, Seaberry salt-bush is a rigorous plant good for stabalising eroded sites. Birds seed this species as they like to feed on the red staining berries. Confined to the Southern coastline of Australia. The cooked leaves of young plants are delicious, the fruit is very bitter but edible, very dark red when ripe, would make a great dye.

Rhagodia candolleana (Seaberry salt-bush)

Carpobrotus glaucescens – all parts of Pigface are edible. The raw purple flowers are delicious, sweet and salty they taste like figs; fresh or dried fruit; triangular leaves cooked; high in protein. 

Carpobrotus glaucescens (Pigface)

Lycium ferocissimum the African boxthorn, according to Tim Low (1988) has orange or red berries, grows on coasts and on the plains in southern Australia, and the bitter berries are edible. We can also attest they are edible, although would be better cooked and added to honey or dried to extract the bitterness and bring out the natural sugars. They look similar to the native boxthorn (L. australe), which have smaller, fleshier leaves and are found inland in southern Australia.

Lycium ferocissimum (African boxthorn)

Meuschenia freycineti, Sixspine Leatherjacket colouration can change with growth. The species is endemic to Australia. The meat is delicious, cook with skin and peel off when ready or skin first.

Meuschenia freycineti (Sixspine Leatherjacket)

There were a number of things we tried but didn't know the names of, such as these two fish. 

Unidentified fish from Port Phillip Bay 

Alyxia buxifolia, Sea box is confined to coastal habitats along the southern coastline of Australia. Often grows in exposed situations where they are pruned by wind. The fruit is eaten by birds. We nibbled a tiny piece of berry and later found out they are supposedly toxic to humans. However, we can attest, they are not poisonous (fatal or otherwise) in a small dose. They are very astringent and not palatable at least eaten raw.

Alyxia buxifolia (Sea box)

Solanum carolinense, Tropical Soda Apple or Horse Nettle. This crazy looking thorny plant is a nightshade that hails from the USA. They start out with a mottle green fruit before turning yellow. Edibility is doubtful, we didn't try this plant and I couldn't find any information on this plant reported in Victoria, so looks like it has just landed and doing its thing. Other states have it on their radar as an introduced pest.

Solanum carolinense (Tropical Soda Apple)

Note: Although inlanders, Jaara people supposedly made routine trips down to the coast to feed on the abundance and variation of food found there. They made corroboree with other Kulin nation clans, traded goods and arranged marriages. It makes sense for us too to load up our backpacks and leave for the coast to look for some symbol-free food.

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An ample leanness

We've just returned from a week's camping at the beach on the Bellarine Peninsula. Bellarine comes from the Bengalit (clan of the Wathaurong tribe of the Kulin nation) word Balla-wein, 'a place where you lean on your elbow beside a campfire after a good meal'.

To hear the poem press play.

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Yeah, go on, jail the hero why don't ya!

The political Right of the Australian media like their heroes to be in neat uniforms; preferably in sports or military ones. When a hero is unshaved, articulate, living in a tent, dressed in any old garb and has no corporate sponsorship, that seems to be a big problem for them.

I'm writing this post after safely returning to our home tonight having spent the day with friends and community keeping away from the Blampied fire path. It has only been a few years since the town was last approached by wild fire.

What will it take to make the Right understand that climate chaos, shareholder aspiration and corporate intransigence to energetic and ecological consumption are synonymous things?

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Merry X (A & B side)

Photograph by Nicholas Walton-Healey

Photograph by Nicholas Walton-Healey

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Reclaiming education as ecological knowledges

A number of us have been working on developing the fifth community food garden, the Daylesford Secondary College Food Forest, since June this year. Yesterday we signed an agreement with the school to begin work on it in 2013.

Drawing: Patrick Jones (click for bigger)

You can read more about the project here. 

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How do we move from citizens, consumers back to ecozens

I thought I was clever coming up with the term 'ecozen' today to describe a participant or player within an ecology, but a quick search shows it is already used as a brand by several global businesses from synthetic pools to chemical companies. It seems today greenwashing and astroturfing occurs even before a thing exists or is named; such is the rapaciousness of progress-capitalism.

The word 'citizen' etymologically refers to a city dweller. But as cities are only responsible for half the world's human population, and account for 75% of global energy consumption and 80% of Greenhouse gas emissions, I think it's time to rethink its use despite already being superseded by the far more violent term 'consumer'. Words form us as much as we form them. To be clear about words and our choice of them is to be clear about who we are, what we are saying and how we are treading.

The word 'ecozen' simply means place dweller, which can be extended to mean inhabitant or being of place.

But all this is a rather slow and musing segue into sharing the main critical premises for my forthcoming book, Walking for Food: regaining permapoesis. I'm three years into writing it, which pretty much spans the life of this blog.

Here they are:

Life is uncertain and human ideologies are consistently flawed, but there are a few things we can be clear about: 

1. Life is made and unmade within ecological communities; ‘man-made mass death’ is an interruption to life. 

2. We are born animal, we require animal protein from birth, we excrete animal wastes, and we die animal. None of this need involve cruelty, markets or pollution. 

3. Real wealth comes from the land; it is generative and relational, and non-extractive. 

4. Poverty is a construction of private property and abstract systems of wealth. The answer to poverty involves free access to land and to local knowledges. 

5. Energy, and its degrees of availability, shapes all life. 

6. Life is not progressive but rather performs in waves of ascent and descent. 

7. Sustainable societies foreground ecological knowledge and background technology and labour. 

8. Sustainable societies produce no waste and do not engineer ecological overshoot. 

9. Complex societies are primarily products of high energy availability, not superior intelligence. 

10. Complex societies are rarely sustaining for long periods because they are inherently wasteful and destructive. 

11. Mainstream thought promotes pollution, greed, narrow self-interest and shortsightedness, but rarely recognises itself as being ideological. 

12. Science is merely an extension of humanism when it is accountable to industry’s imperatives.  

13. Western culture, and those under its influence, operates as a doubling performance looping mastery and amnesia. 

14. Climate change is a product of unsustainable development, driven by energy availability and market capitalism. 

15. Governments control so as corporations can more effectively exploit; this is sophisticated violence. 

16. Non-procreation doesn’t solve overpopulation, rather perpetuates the myth humans are not really animals. 

17. Reckless procreation is a thing of ignoring limits or being under stress. 

18.  Love is a thing that cannot be measured or treated; it is always relational and generative, never extractive and violent.  

19. Perennial food ecologies produce and return nutrients in place. Conventional annual agriculture mines the soil and requires the transportation of other mined inputs for synthetic succession. 

20. A weed is a plant in the wrong place, according to anthropocentrism. 

21. A sensible life involves the senses. In a violent and interrupting society sight dominates the other senses. 

22. Schools perpetuate ideologies of mass control; they explicitly teach children how to veil or normalise mass violence by becoming conformist cosmopolitan consumers.

23. Being born is regarded a medical emergency. Infants are rushed into life in an ambience of hysteria.  

24. Dying today is prolonged, passive and drugged. Bodies are either burnt as carbon or buried and released as methane. In either case death becomes pollution.

The following people helped form such views: Derrick Jensen, Peter Minter, Deborah Bird Rose, Bernard Stiegler, David Holmgren, Masanobu Fukuoka, John Zerzan, David Graeber, David Fleming, John Michael Greer and Vandana Shiva.

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Dja Dja Wurrung web resources now online

A new site for Jaara people (Dja Dja Wurrung) is now online and the traditional owners are presenting some great information and short videos, such as this one:

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Reading with Australia's favourite redneck (and scone fresser)

A reading with Les Murray in Melbourne yesterday took me back to an afternoon in my youth where I came home from school to find a large poet sitting at our kitchen table eating his way through a bowl of scones mum had just cooked. My mother was the president of the local literary society and had invited Les to come share his words with the community. Although I did go to the CWA tea rooms that night in 1984 (or was it 83?), my hungry teenage mind wouldn't leave the lost scones for the poems. Yesterday, all these years later I actually got to hear his words in relative peace.

Les bookended his reading with Quadrant fitting subjects – big machines and type 2 diabetes. I guess they go hand in hand. Les is the literary editor of Quadrant, the pro-industry rag which boasts Keith Windschuttle as its deregulatory helmsman. As a segue into his read yesterday Les grumbled about big machines not being fashionable today... Perhaps Quadrant could give out free Tonka mining trucks and hamburgers with fries and coke to encourage younger readers.

Les Murray at the Butterfly Club for the 4W launch Melbourne Dec 2012

The main reason the little group of writers and listeners assembled in Melbourne yesterday was to celebrate the launch of this year's 4W New Writing anthology (#23), which includes nearly seventy writers from around Australia and overseas who together constitute the long-list for the 2012 Booranga Prize. I met David Gilbey, the 4W editor, and quite a few poets I hadn't heard read before.

This guy for example, Pony, who has the sort of short bio you can really do something with:

Pony lives somewhere in Melbourne. He spends his time writing poetry, growing vegetables, reading, resting, hanging out and partying. And making online dating profiles and deleting them.

Pony 

Another gardener, Stu Hatton, read a nifty little poem called 'a book of buddhist monks', which ends with a thud. You'll have to seek it out to see why; no spoilers here.

Stu Hatton

I read one of my weed loving poems, Noxious, which was shortlisted for the 2012 Booranga Poetry Prize alongside Stu Hatton, Brett Dionysius and Vlanes poems. Michael Farrell won the prize with The Structuralist Cowboy – good one Mickey Faz! 

Noxious

A weed is by common definition a plant in the wrong place, in my poems a number of letters follow such arrangement.

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Walking for Food – geopoetics

Over the last month, while ima Meg recuperates from long nights of breast feeding, Woody, Zero, (sometimes Zeph) and I, dada, have gone out walking every morning noting all the free public food in our local commons.

We and our thrown together clipboard have seen cold, windy, dry, warm and joyous mornings this spring and today, adding a few last finds, we finally got rain. Ah, the joys of being car free!

Patrick Jones – Creative Commons: Foraging Commons

Yes, the map is not the territory but it has been a useful project to see just how much food is available that is autonomous and not reliant on agriculture's heavy-footed resources and processes.

Over the past several years we have kept a mental note of certain trees and plants, but carrying out this exercise has made us even more aware of the autonomous floras – indigenous and newly naturalised – that are building mutual relations. It is common, for example, to see elderberries parking themselves under blackwood wattles on the fringes of town.

Blackwoods are themselves companion plants to eucalypts. Hawthorns, which are now habitat for ring-tail possums and their berries are a preferred food for gang gangs, proliferate in these new ecologies alongside blackberries and oaks and a host of other plants, longtime or newly naturalised.

I wonder if we, newly arrived creatures, are making or looking for such mutualistic relationships. It seems while we are still dependent on conventional farming practices we are still aliens of place, extractors and miners, not those that engage in the generative and relational.

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How to make

A recipe-poem in action (with a mini manifesto).

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A Victorian country town says no to abusers

Much respect to this incredible community.

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What's wrong with industry-funded science?

Here's the latest:

In California right now, due to twenty years of GMO ill health in the US, people are demanding their food is labelled so as they can avoid GMOs in their diet. If the vote is YES, this will set a precedent in the US and send a strong message to the biotech industry that the public don't want their Frankenscience technology. 

However, pesticide giants and junk food playmates Coke and Pepsi are throwing millions at a campaign to persuade people otherwise.

MapLight analysis of California Secretary of State data

In Australia we must continue to apply the pressure on governments to disengage with these criminal companies that are knowingly promulgating illness and harm. Biotech agribusiness will never feed the world, only make it less well.

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Introducing Blackwood to the locasphere (Zephyr's cubby)

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Sign, signifier, signified...

A Hardee's and a Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) fast food outlet burns after protesters set the building on fire in Tripoli, northern Lebanon September 14, 2012. (REUTERS/Omar Ibrahim)

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Permapoesis (on Radio National)

From Radio National's Off Track programme:

So far, the Permeate series has focused on artists who are inspired by the environment.

But today, Miyuki Jokiranta introduces Patrick Jones…

Listen here.

And for the astute listener, yes I mispronounce 'deliciosus'.

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An essay that includes excerpts from my interview with David Holmgren

How permaculture and non-monetary economies are part of the solution to the problem of capitalism. Feature article by Patrick Jones in Arena: The Australian Magazine of Left Political, Social and Cultural Commentary, No. 119. August 2012

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Zephyr & Blackwood

On my forty-second birthday my second son Blackwood came into our world. One of the many pleasures this week has been watching Zeph and Woody get to know each other.

Zephyr is a geographical/gardening term for a gentle warm breeze or fructifying wind. In Greek mythology Zephyrus is the god of the west wind.

Blackwood is a wattle (Acacia melanoxylon) local to cool mountainous climates in Victoria and Tasmania, and thus a tree local to where we live. Blackwoods are soil builders and companion plants to eucalypts and native cherry (Exocarpos cupressiformis), named because of their intensely dark wood.

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Eating wild fungi: fun or foolhardy?

In April 2012, in conjunction with Fungimap, the inaugural Australian Fungi Festival was held in Hobart. Here is the audio of the debate, Eating Wild Fungi: Fun or Foolhardy from my perspective, the second speaker for the affirmative.

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A blue wheelbarrow (lessons in household economics)

so much depends
upon 

a red wheel
barrow 

glazed with rain
water 

beside the white
chickens 

William Carlos Williams Spring and All 1923

With spring coming and a home-birth approaching – Meg now has regular visits by Sally our midwife –

we've been working through a list of jobs. This morning Zeph and I loaded our blue wheelbarrow with over forty kilos of Jerusalem artichokes to sell and a bag of goodies for the community op shop and headed into town.

We took many stops for breath and encountered neighbourhood friends along the way.

We took it in turns to push our heavy load, Zero conducting affairs from the top of the pile, passing the pine forest where we hunt mushrooms from May to July.

We arrived at Tonna's and we sold our artichokes for five dollars a kilo, 

which we took as credit and filled the barrow with produce our garden hasn't started producing yet, and toilet paper – we really need to get around to building a composting toilet and using old phonebook pages for paper.

We wheeled on up the hill with our goodies to the community op shop and left a bag among a sea of other donations. It really is an awesome op shop that raises money for various community groups.

Then we pushed on home, clocking up about four kilometres of joyous car-free, physical, educative and alternative economic exchange. 

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Winter Garden

8.50am

5:25pm

A day of pleasure harvesting potatoes, carrots, beetroots, leeks, cauliflower, broccoli, spinach, Jerusalem artichokes, dandelion, chickweed and Brussels sprouts in the first warm day all winter. The chooks munched down wheelbarrow load after load of leaf matter and sunned themselves at siesta time. Clever chooks.

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