Grab a shovel, go out to the verge in front of your house, and dig it up. That’s right, turn that earth, plant some vegies in there, and watch food grow before your very eyes.

I did exactly that and you wouldn’t believe the results. Vegies are just some of them.

‘After (a month)’

The other, even more brilliant thing, is that I’ve met some great people who live around me who’ve pitched in and helped get it to where it is. We now have over 30 in our little collective. Every time I’m pottering around out there some passer-by comes up and says “I just wanted to tell you you how great it is you’re doing that.”

Here’s the before and during shots:

‘Before’

‘During’

I’ve felt a sense of community, which really is an amazing thing to strike in Sydney. (Not normally one of the city’s strong points.) And of course there are all those other benefits – like the joy of picking your own stuff to eat, getting your hands dirty, showing the local kids where food comes from, saving on food miles, peak oil and all that. In fact those clever Permaculture people were advocating we do this long ago.

Audio:
You can hear my interview with David Holmgren, one of the original proponents of Permaculture, here. He reckons its quite possible for Sydney to grow all its own food here where we live (except for broadacre things – like wheat.)

Articles:
In amazing recent turn of events, Britain’s National Trust have pledged to hand over stately home land for people to grow their own vegies. (Recent story from The Independent.) And here’s an article from the Herald last year: Green solution just outside your door.

Useful links:
Australian City Farms and Community Gardens Network
Sydney City Farm (brilliant new plan for a farm in the city)
Food for the Future Fair (a celebration of urban food growing which inspired us)

Anyway, what are you waiting for?

p.s. Next project on the agenda is to do a tour of community vegie patches round Sydney. Suggestions of where to go are welcome.

Special thanks to Barbara, my neighbour. It wouldn’t have happened without your hard work and ‘yes we can’ attitude.

Lots of people dream of making a ’sea change’ to escape the rat race of the city. Some people even do it.

But how many leave with the intention of living sustainably? To live on the land, grow their own food, generate their own power and water, and even restore their new patch closer to its original, natural state. James Woodford and his family are working on just that.

Audio: Interview with James Woodford about his new book ‘Real Dirt’.

And no James, isn’t a hippy. He loves sushi as much as any inner-city dweller, and for a long time was an ambitious journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald.

Just how he came to be living on a beautiful stretch of the South Coast and slaughtering his own chooks is documented in his new book ‘Real Dirt: how I beat my grid-life crisis’. It’s a very personal account of “what you have to go through to get to where you want to be.”

I read it recently and got decidedly itchey feet myself. I then spoke with James by phone – at the place he now proudly calls home.

Useful links: This and other books by James Woodford are available through Text Publishing. There’s more of his James’s writing on his blog – Real Dirt. And here’s an excerpt from the ‘Real Dirt’ book – recently published in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Photo: James Woodford, environment journalist and “footprint changer”, at his true home on the South Coast of New South Wales.

The proposal draws ideas from successful farms that have ready been established in places like Melbourne and London. And the site is a beautiful location right on the harbour and in the grounds of the now abandoned mental hospital.

It all sounds good, apart from the fact that the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority have not included the farm in their plans for the whole site and a final decision is going to be made on its future use soon.

Audio podcast
In this interview I speak with Rod Simpson and Andrew Jackson from Sydney City Farm. Andrew is the head of this non-profit organisation and Rod is the architect and designer behind the plan. You can listen here to the Sydney City Farm interview. It starts with Rod Simpson.

How to support the Sydney City Farm
If you think the farm is a good idea, there’s a couple of things you can do. Join the mailing list at www.sydneycityfarm.org and write to the New South Wales Planning Minister and to the Vice Chancellor of Sydney Uni to ask them to include the farm in their plans.

More info on Sydney City Farm
More on the farm in this article from the Sydney Morning Herald.

Do your own thing
If you want to join or start a community garden where you live, check out the Australian City Farms and Community Gardens Network.

So is biofuel an important solution to our transport energy needs. Or is it creating problems the world doesn’t need?

To find out more about biofuels and the situation for biofuels in Australia, I spoke with the CSIRO’s biofuels expert Deborah O’Connell. I started by asking where biofuels come from.  Listen to the biofuels interview.

Josh reckons people have seen the light and are now using their backyards to grow food. In this interview, he talks about how to go about grow your own, making your garden sustainable and the role of permaculture in his work. Listen to the Josh Byrne Green Gardener interview.

I caught up with Josh at the Australian Permaculture Convergence.

It combines traditional farming techniques and thinking about nature with modern technology to enable people to live differently to how most of us live. To live in a truly sustainable way.

In this interview, I tracked down David Holmgren, the co-originator of permaculture, at the conference.

Interestingly, having originally developed the idea in response to the oil crisis of the 70’s, David reckons permaculture is the answer to our looming energy crisis. With peak oil, permaculture is more relevant than ever.

More on permaculture on David’s site.

It’s called ‘community supported agriculture’ and it’s rapidly growing in the U.S. Under the scheme, you pay the CSA farmer up front for a season. Not only do you get a regular box of produce, you can also get involved in the farm, help pick the fruit and vegies, and take your kids out there to show them where their food comes from.

Many of these farms also use organic practices and some biodynamics.

John Peterson has a successful organic CSA farm in the Mid-West of the U.S.. He had quite a ride with his family farm, almost losing the lot before he switched to CSA farming some years ago. John has documented his life and struggles in a great film entitled ‘The Real Dirt on Farmer John’.

I interviewed Farmer John about community supported agriculture when he came out to promote his doco. Listen to the Farmer John interview. You can find out more about the farm and find the film at: http://www.angelicorganics.com/ The film is worth tracking down. Margaret Pomeranz gave it 4 stars.