- I’m the Linda Woodrow who wrote 470 (Melliodora Publishing, 2020). (You can find out about it, including where to find it, at lindawoodrow.com)
- And The Permaculture Home Garden (Penguin, 1996).
- I’m not the Linda Woodrow who was briefly married or engaged or something, to Elton John.
- I started this blog over a decade ago now. It spans some changes.
- My passion and interest these days is climate change, and how we get it together as a community to respond to it.
- 470 came out of wondering and speculating, then researching and imagining how it might play out.
- I live in Australia, for 36 years in rural Northern NSW, and for the last few years in suburban Coffs Harbour.
- We moved to Coffs partly to grandparent, but also inspired by David Holmgren’s Retrosuburbia, to take on a new challenge. To play with permaculture in suburbia.
- I have had a kitchen garden or a market garden for about 45 years now.
- Which meant that the first few months here, not eating out of a garden, were very strange.
- My climate is sub tropical – warm dry windy spring, hot summers with unreliable thunderstorms, warm wet autumn, cool but not cold winter. This makes me a very lucky gardener.
- I live with my partner of over 40 years, Lewie, who is the smartest, funniest, most creative, honest, and sexiest man I know, and also the laziest.
- He likes fishing.
- I have two grown up kids, a son and a daughter, who are both people anyone would choose in their “survive the zombocalypse” crew.
- I also have a ten year old grandson and six year old granddaughter – having them “help” pick peas out of the garden is the best fun thing I know. And a baby grandson, too little yet for picking peas but soon.
- I am a Virgo, but I don’t believe in astrology.
- But co-incidentally, I’m a pretty good Virgo.
- I do believe in science. I love the scientific method for observing and understanding reality. 470 is based in my Masters research.
- And thus I find it hard to believe that anyone doesn’t believe that climate change requires us all to seriously change our addictive consumerism, now, yesterday.
- When they believe in electricity and aeroplanes?
- In fact the only way I can make any sense of it is that they mustn’t like life – their own life, other peoples’ lives, human species life, biodiversity, life in general – and this is shocking.
- Because I believe what is sacred is the miracle that this blue green planet circling a small outlying star put together the right conditions for the marvel of evolution to happen. How unlikely is that?
- I feel very lucky to be the beneficiary of this miracle because life is good.
- And to honour its goodness, I plan to live long and enjoy it, in solidarity with all the other lives – human and other- doing the same thing.
- Which makes me a witch. Or at least a pagan.
- And brings me back to the theme of food gardening, and cooking and enjoying fresh healthy food.
- Because food is one of the great pleasures of life. (Just one of them, but a good one.)
- And maybe now is a good spot to add that I’m not a vegetarian – I have been in the past, and sometimes we go for a long time without eating meat, but philosophically I think predation is a natural part of the cycle of life.
- So long as the animals have a good life, preferably wild and free.
- It worries me that we feed fish to cats when there aren’t enough fish to feed people in much of the world.
- I like cooking. It is a way to relax and be creative and show nurturing care for people.
- Possibly a little too much. I work pretty well full time lately, often on a computer. So I have to watch I don’t put on weight,
- But the whole idea of “diets” just doesn’t fit in my world.
- And fake food made industrially sets me off on a rant.
- I like mending and making things and making things last.
- I like the challenge and elegance in being frugal.
- And I hate waste.
- Left to myself, I would have very little stuff, but I live with a bloke who likes old things and the stories they hold.
- Until the move to Coffs, we lived in a home-built house, and I hammered in a good percentage – in fact probably most – of the nails in it. I have a rebellious streak that has to challenge gender roles.
- I have lived for nearly 40 years with solar power which makes energy frugality come easy.
- Nowadays we have town water to back up our house tank, but the habits of water frugality stick too.
- I am a very bad housekeeper.
- I think perfect is the enemy of good and being purist is dangerous, which is just as well because otherwise I’d have to totally disown myself.
- I love the internet – information and ideas – such treasure.
- Though not the conspiracy theories that proliferate on it.
- I think if we forget and lose the skills of living as a community, including trusting and relying on each other, we are going to be in big trouble as we negotiate the challenges ahead.
- I’m not at all sure that mobile phones are a necessary invention though.
- Or any music system since vinyl.
- I am basically very shy and don’t like talking about myself, so this is hard.
- I started this blog because I had an epiphany that it wasn’t ok to let shyness stop me when we need all hands on deck to create a cultural shift.
50 things about me
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LOVED learning more about you Linda!
Hi Linda , i have just recently read your book The Permaculture home Garden, it is a revelation and i wonder !. my grand parents used to garden like this, how did society get so detached from food??? i have allot of food intolerances that i have struggled with for years and am looking forward to discovering gardening this natural way Thanks Glenn.
Hi Linda, I’m a slow learner, usually needing to make my own mistakes rather than learn from those of others. Sometimes twice. I used The Permaculture Home Garden as my chief resource when designing my garden. I really took to the connectedness of all the elements and it answered so many of my questions about how to approach self-reliance. The lady who delivered my PDC did warn me about using a model from a different climate, but I mentioned I tend to make mistakes. So now I’m discovering ways to adapt a chook-powered mandala system in a mostly dry-temperate, usually frosty, sometimes baking, occasionally soaked but fast-draining and otherwise thirsty environment. And thoroughly enjoying it. It may end up in a companion book, or just in feeding my family and neighbours. I appreciate the significant part your writing played in inspiring the journey I’m now taking. Thanks.
Thank you Dean. If you write a companion book, I’d love to read it!
Hi Linda. Just discovered you while learning about tromboncino, which has gone ballistic in my southern Tassie garden. I think, like you, it may replace zucchini for me.
So loved learning about you as well as trombs. Thanks for your blog!
Hi Linda, just reading your permaculture book now – I have a question: We are buying a small plot of bare land to build house on in a tropical region and can only fit one std size mandala so wondering if we have maybe 6 chickens in std chook dome can we leave them in each spot for longer than 2 weeks to get same result of mulching etc? (only needs to feed two of us)