Growing our own

It will astound most people to realise that a visit to the supermarket to buy food is a greater threat to our environment than all the pollution caused by coal fired power stations. Nearly 30% of the CO2 in our atmosphere is caused by us not growing our own food. Non-renewable energy is used to plough the fields, harvest and process the crop and take it to market. The fertilisers, pesticides and weed killers used to grow the crop are derived from oil. In fact 75% of the energy that is used to grow our food occurs once it has left the farm. The kitchen fridge uses more energy than the farm tractor. In some areas more energy is used to drive to the supermarket than is used on the farm. Up to 25% of the energy is consumed in wasteful packaging. Clive Blazey, Digger's Seeds

This week I planted 8 rhubarb shoots among indigenous grasses along the top of the dry-stone wall. You can't see them, their hiding in the mulch. Rhubarb likes well-drained soil and will grow in full-shade to full-sun conditions. Abundant for breakfasts or desserts for much of the year.

Also planted in aged, thick bush mulch are our broad beans. Frost hardy, their young leaves make a great winter salad. We collected our broad bean seeds from our brilliant crop last year. No money spent, just working within a system of cyclical regeneration, rather than linear death – supermarkets, wage-slavery, et al.

You can never go back to supermarket eggs after caring for your own chooks. They make great family friends. We free-range ours and pen in our vegies. Their shit is as golden as their eggs in a simple system of ecological-economics; circulatory reciprocity. No packaging -much goodness.

Digger's heirloom seeds are sowed tightly in this bed, and will be planted out later when the seedlings are bigger and our new raised beds are built. We typically get about 85-95% success rate with their seeds. A range of seeds including garlic, elephant leek, kale, snap peas, silverbeet, cos lettuce, spinach and broccoli.

The shed of interrelation, SOI (in progress). This will soon become our artist-in-residence shed for budding permies.

Desperate stuff

The Victorian government has recently formed an alliance with US chemical and plastics giant Dow Chemical. Here's what Dow states on its website:

The new $230 million Biosciences Research Centre, a joint venture between the Victorian Government and La Trobe University, will boost Victoria’s ability to make these important scientific discoveries. To be located in Bundoora, Melbourne, the facility will be a world-class centre for agricultural biosciences research and development. Other agencies and organisations with complementary science objectives are invited to partner or link in to the new Centre. (GOSD added the bold)

Government backed commercialised science is based on profits at the expense of natural ecologies. There is no longer an independent CSIRO. Contrary to what it says about averting a potential food supply crisis, CSIRO, like the other hijacked departments, is part of the problem. Science has been bought by chemical companies. University scientists are paid to deliver the science that best reflects the products of large corporations, which of course isn't science at all but at a systems level, a monumental ecological travesty. Chemical agriculture can never enhance the complexities of complex microbial life in the soil, can never mimic the complexities of natural systems, and therefore can never produce sustainable agriculture. Governments who support chemical companies such as Dow and Monsanto, support the abuse of the landbase and the abuse of those that eat their food.

As people, we have to move beyond desperate monological AgriBusiness and start to once again feed ourselves in healthy ecologies. Governments think the future of agriculture is with super farms that rely on broad acre chemicalisation, but the future lies with community food sovereignty. AgriBusiness will never protect diverse life with its single focussed aggregate-growth world view.

The future of food and social relations

Shredding, gleaning, piling and heaping

Currently I glean most of the material for my composts. Neighbours recently saved a trip to the tip because I pulled up with my wheelbarrow and asked to take the loads away. I often take my wheelbarrow for a walk scavenging for material. Peter O has been getting into the habit of dropping off shredded paper from school (if only I could get hold of the White House's pile right now). We collect horse poo from the nearby horse riding ranch and, as I've mentioned before, we weekly collect the food scrap bins from a nearby cafe. As we have now started to harvest food, we have increased our green waste which, in a closed-cycle ecology, is not really waste at all. 

As you can see in the below picture our soil is highly disturbed, largely compacted clay. Intensive mulching, to keep moisture in the soil (which attracts worms who break down the clay), together with intensive composting over the next several years should see a dramatic decrease in water usage.