A key insight of permaculture thinking is that there is no such thing as “side effects”. Everything has multiple effects. Everything exists in a networked ecology of interdependencies, ripples, cascades and risk insurance redundancies. So verge gardening has to be looked at as a sector analysis that takes account of all the “wild energies” of “the public”, and some of them are quite wild.
We just split the first of our native bee hives. Late spring is the time, when they are warmed up and living their best life, and when there is still plenty of time for them to regroup before winter. There are over 1700 species of bees in Australia but only 11 of them build hives and only a few are stingless. We have two species, both stingless hive building, honey…
Much of the retrosuburbia writing about energy use and energy conservation that I see is about heating, but heating isn’t the issue here. Here, it is cooling, not heating that is the main challenge, even now let alone in the future.
Someone asked me in a comment about my seed raising mix, so it’s a good opportunity to do a whole post about it. My recipe has changed with the availability of ingredients. But the concepts remain the same. Permaculture is like that – not a recipe but a system to be applied differently to every site.
It is year three of this retrosuburbia challenge, and most days now we are eating substantially what can be produced from this little, 500m2 suburban block. No food miles, no packaging, no energy loss through processing or storage. With important gaps – cooking oil, dairy products, flour – but also with some surplus shared with neighbours, and at least in spring of a la Niña year and not taking our…
We asked the neighbours how they would feel about a short stay rooster, just for long enough to get some fertilized eggs. They were all…
Hanging baskets, pots, edges, all the little unused spaces. It is a little bit ironic that the beds I harvest most often are the smallest…