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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| 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
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.Read more...
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.
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| Drawing: Patrick Jones (click for bigger) |
I was in Sydney earlier this month, so I checked in on the Food Forest and did a little work there with some local residents. When I got back, a family friend, Rory, who works for ABC radio, sent me the audio file of the interview I had with Deborah Cameron on 702 in September last year. This little archive vid brings all these things together.
With our recent project in Sydney I think we have achieved what we set out to do in showing how art can itself be a biophysical resource. In this new work, Natural Bitterness, I attempt a similar thing – the poem doubles as video field guide for edible weeds and wild foods abundant in our area this spring.
This poem is dedicated to Alexis Pitsopoulos, our local wild foods expert and cook.
Cheap oil has made us forget the proper relationship we once had to the first six inches of the Earth’s crust. Yet we now know that microbial forests—networks of microfauna and microfungi—operate invisibly beneath us, generating the conditions for plant life to flourish and thus produce food. Soil not oil is a clear enough message, but increasingly difficult to translate to an expanding urban population evermore estranged from the interdependent processes of healthy soil ecology and permanent food supply.
The ABC, by virtue of so-called rationalist accountancy, is yet another public institution being systematically degraded of standards. The latest degradation is the outsourcing of news resources which apparently happened on the eve of Julia's ascension to the crown (see previous post here).
I don't watch TV much. We don't have one. So you can imagine the occluded laughter when on Saturday night we tuned in with friends to watch the ABC news and saw that I was labelled "Patrick White" and "Garden Artist"?
It was very kind of the ABC to report on our Food Forest plant-in and help further the idea of free, local-community organic food, I just feel for those in the ABC who have to work within such a culture of sub-standards, or rather sub-less standards, because it's sub-editors who seem to be our absent friends across the media.
Here's an idea: slash accountancy departments in half and put the resources back into content and editorial services. But of course this won't happen so we have to remain evermore cynical that what content the mainstream media simulates into our living rooms should always be taken with a grain of salt.
Come to think of it, if any of you are budding sub-editors and find fault on this blogsite, we'd be happy to hear from you. We have neither an accounts department or a salaried editorial team, but we do have standards we'd like to maintain.
Shelling acorns (click for bigger).
If the above is difficult to read (click for bigger), you can also read it at Trouble by clicking here.For a few years now I’ve been interested in how permaculture, and its siblings – biodynamic and natural farming – can inform an arts practice. In other words, how an arts practice can follow suit in the way in which it produces things, biomimicking natural systems and therefore having something to return to the land it has taken from. More recently I’ve been thinking about foraging as another such activity that can inform art and help move it on from an industry embedded in capitalist structures. An ethic of foraging attends directly to the reclamation of public food lands and to the reclamation of a ‘collective wealth’. Read on here.
We have been asked to participate in an ecologies show at the MCA in Sydney which will open later in the year, and have been steadily working towards our proposed food forest since last December. We are getting closer to finalising a site. You can read a first post for the project here.
detail: Jones, P. ‘A Free-dragging Manifesto’, pp. 41-43, ecopoetics, no. 6/7 2006-2009, Australian Ecopoetics Feature, eds. Michael Farrell and Jonathan Skinner, Periplum Editions, USA
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