Honey graft

Grafting the commons (cont.)...

The antibacterial property of honey makes it a perfect skin cure for a graft. In this image a hawthorn rootstock has a quince scion grafted on to it.

Forest transformers

Grafting pear and apple scions onto wild hawthorn.

(More) grafting the commons

Last year I wrote an article about grafting various fruits onto wild hawthorns and apples. I was keen to trial various fruits without doing any research, as this attitude can sometimes lead to the quite unexpected. However, not surprising to me now, all these grafts failed. So today, armed with a little more knowledge and an awesome grafting tool, I took a small jar of honey, some pear cuttings, a roll of grafting tape and walked into the bush.

I decided to use two cultivars of pears (Winter Nelis and Beurre Bosc) that cross pollinate with eachother. Apparently, hawthorn makes a good rootstock for any of the rose family – apples, medlars, pears, quince, etc. On a 'wild urban spaces' workshop taken by David Holmgren earlier this year we were shown a 10 year old medlar graft David had done onto wild hawthorn. It was doing really well with abundant fruit (though hard to see in this photo).

Brett Adamson and David Holmgren stand on either sides of the graft.

The grafts I did today were dipped in honey to mitigate disease before being wrapped in grafting tape. Each was then given a splint for strength and protection. I'd like to keep making rose family grafts onto hawthorn over the next two months, so hopefully I can report some significant success, even unexpected, next year.

If you have any grafting tips or anecdotes I'd love to hear them.

Simulated poetics – beaming in from home

I'm participating in a poetry event in NSW today from the low carbon comforts of my central Victorian home, courtesy of Skype.

Of course digital culture is fully supported by industrial technics, so I'm not pretending this participation isn't without its pollutions and abuses. And I'm only guessing that my decline to be flown/driven up to participate in person constitutes a lower footprint, in comparison to using all this technology (including a plasma screen at the event end) to beam me up.

Here's the poster that was produced for this gig, in which the Bundanon Trust designer has taken an excerpt from a statement I wrote in 2004 and laid it over a photograph taken by Heidrun Lohr.

My Fellow panel participants are Yvette Holt, Chris Mansell and James Stuart.

Two forms of death: ecological and anthropocene made

Deborah Bird Rose (2011):

There are two big contexts of death. The first is the fact that death resides in life... Death, as a corollary to life, happens to all of us complex creatures. It may happen through old age, or illness; it may happen through hunting or killing; it may happen on larger scales through events such as cyclones, earthquakes, or volcanoes. In this context, living things are bound into ecological communities of life and death, and within these communities life is always making and unmaking itself in time and place.

The second context differs from the first in being a uniquely human invention: man-made mass death. This form of death arises out of a will-to-destruction that seems to be confined to humans... The will-to-destruction can most vividly be thought of as death work. It involves imagining a future emptiness, and then working systematically to accomplish that emptiness... In ordinary life, death is the necessary completion of life. Man-made death is not necessary and does not complete life. Instead it is a massive interruption, a negation of the relationships between life and death.

A complete failure of government to protect us from corporate intransigence

Take this survey to estimate the level of toxicity in your home.

Click for survey.

If only every Australian business was scrutinised like this

Take action!

Poetics and Future Scenarios: poems and poets in an age of energy descent and climate chaos

I have put together a panel for a forthcoming poetry symposium to be held at Trades Hall in Melbourne. Here are the details, followed by a film trailer that features David Holmgren called Anima Mundi, due for release shortly.

The opening panel for the forthcoming national poetics symposium, “Poetry and the Contemporary” (Trades Hall July 7-9), is a panel of three poets joined by sustainability leader, David Holmgren, the co-originator of the permaculture movement.

The panel is titled:

“Poetics and Future Scenarios: poems and poets in an age of energy descent and climate chaos”, July 7, 2.30pm Meeting Room 1(downstairs), following the Welcome to Country, 2.20pm. (Entry by donation).

David Holmgren will open the panel outlining the four main scenarios he believes we face as a result of human engineered climate change and energy depletion. He will draw on his bestselling book “Future Scenarios”, and over thirty years of research that has made him one of the key ecological thinkers of our time and a national treasure.

Three poets, Sue Fitchett, Patrick Jones and Peter O’Mara will respond with critical papers, prose and poems. Each are ecological activists in their respective regions.

Greenwash #24 in Trouble - Suck and Truck

Click on image to read, then click again for better focus.