Finally back at the sewing machine!

Here’s the winnings from my efforts this Melbourne Cup Day:

Got up early. Saw my acupunturist before 9am. Went to yoga at 10am. Came back had lunch and got my teeth into this project – a refashioned batik op shop shirt.

Used the trusty Simplicity 3742 pattern that I have used a couple of times. This pattern is SO EASY. It’s in the ‘Easy To Sew’ range for a reason. A good one to do when you haven’t sewn for a while. It’s the first time I’ve used the Elna since I got served and it was so smoothe and quiet and running like a dream! Little workhorse that it is.

I made an obie belt using a very simple pattern out of the June 2009 Burda Modern magazine.

I tidied up the fabric stash this weekend too. I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me before but all it took doing was clearing out the linen closet, which really doesn’t have THAT much stuff in it and there is more than enough room to fit the fabric stash in there! Now the key is to USE UP the stash, not just keep adding to it. No more fabric shopping allowed until I make a sizeable dent in it.

[image from flickr
- imagine if we could establish something like THIS right here in Maidstone! To share with all!]

So many exciting community projects happening in the inner west at the moment!

Last month I attended my first Permaculture Out West meeting – I was so excited to hear it even existed! Like minds in my own neighbourhood, who’d have thunk it? Actually these guys put me to shame, I’ve just scrabbling to find out what’s going on and helping where I can.

One project I am particularly interested in is a proposal they are putting forth to council to start up some market community gardens at a site in Maidstone. Council are wanting to sell the disused land that was once upon a time the old Maidstone Community Centre and later a tennis club. It’s just a short walk from our place.

The POW group are pitching to council to delay the sale for 5 years and to let us try and establish some kind of community market gardens, in the model of CERES. The idea is that the organic produce grown at the gardens would be available for purchase and you could subscribe to get a $20 a week box of seasonal veggies delivered to your door etc..

They are collecting signatures and email to council, but it needs to be in by Oct 30. So if you are a local resident in the Maribyrnong Council area, and think it’s a good idea, please take five minutes to write a short support email to the address below!

—

Maribyrnong City Council is seeking expressions of interest for the purchase of council land by public tender for Maidstone Public Hall site at 16 Thomson Street Maidstone.

Permaculture Out West (POW) is proposing that the land be kept in community hands.

Permaculture Out West (www.pow.org.au) is a group of individuals interested in growing more food in the city.

• Our goals are:
• to reduce our impact on the rural landscape;
• to produce food in a more sustainable way. No petroleum based
• to re-connect people to their community and to the land.

We are a not-for-profit group. Run by community members for the community.

POW’s proposal is to develop a market garden on Maidstone Public Hall site. Vegetables would be grown on site without the use of pesticides and herbicides. Water would be harvested from the site’s building.

• Planned Services
• a weekly box of fresh vegetables
• box of vegetables delivered to your door
• collection of your food waste. This will be composted and used for the garden beds.

We are proposing a commercial operation that will employ 2 people on site to maintain the gardens. Parking and traffic will be kept to a minimum. We respect the right for people to enjoy their neighbourhood and not add additional car traffic and parking problems.

If you support POW’s proposal to keep the land in community hands, please register your support by sending an email to KeepMaidstonePublicHall@pow.org.au. Please include your name, address, phone number and email address. We’ll use your name and address in the Expression of Interest application to show the level of support for a market garden. Your details will NOT be passed onto a third party, and we won’t attempt to contact you unless you indicate you’d like to be actively involved.

If you cannot email or if you want more information, please call Katerina: 0422 261 725.

Our expression of interest must be submitted by Friday 30th of October, so please contact us before then. This is our only chance to keep this land in community hands!

[click to enlarge]

I’ve long heard about the fantastic, colourful community gardens at St Kilda, ‘Veg Out’. They’re having an open day this Sunday so seems the perfect opportunity to check it out!

You can check out more about the gardens here.

[image from flickr]

Hope you all had splendid weekends! I meditated, saw a dance production at Melbourne International Arts Festival, did a permaculture workshop class and cooked Kosheri from the Ottolenghi cookbook. (If you don’t have this cookbook, I am telling you HUNT IT DOWN!)

I’m about to put my Diggers Club order in to claim my free membership seeds. I also am ordering a few books, and coz my order totals over $75 I can claim a free 6 month Diggers Club membership to give as a gift to someone. (I do not ‘gift’ as a verb!)

So I thought I’d share the love with some dear reader. Membership means you will get their quarterly seed catalogues of hundreds of delicious, jaw droppingly exotic heirloom vegies that will inspire you to get out into your yard and food garden to your hearts delight! The catalogues also have some great articles in them. You will get a discount on all the items in their catalogue and you get some free seeds from them as well. Plus membership gives you free entry to their gardens (in Victoria, Australia – Heronswood down in Dromana, near Mornington and St Erth near Daylesford).

If you’d like the 6 month membership, please leave me a comment, tell me where you’re from, what you like reading on my blog, anything really. I love hearing from my readers! I’ll randomly pick a winner this week.

[from my flickr set]

I’m Permablitzin’ faster than I can post em!

Here’s one we did at Mel’s place in Seddon, organised by the Permaculture Out West group. It’s a quite new group, I attended my first meeting this week and have signed up! Check out the swanky new site here.

I’m going to let the photos do most of the talking for this one.

Here’s the front of Mel’s place. She had planted a native and perennial edible verge.

She also planted some green manure that needed turning in. That’s what you can see here:

My wonderful weeding! There were some native grasses, warrigal greens and other natives and herbs amongst here for passersby to enjoy:

And yes it did give me a big kick up the butt to go home and finally tackle my OWN weeding! Here is Mel’s great little courtyard area out the front which she plans to eventually turn into a food forest. Perhaps at a future Permablitz?

An essential part of any great Permablitz – a scrumptious, energising feed for the volunteers!

Woah check out that line of rainwater tanks! Jealous. Surely they’ll just about be self sufficient in water with this much storage!

Putting together the chook house from scratch. Think we could put chook house on a wedding gift list?

Chook house was clad in reused weatherboard – so cute! Very nice touch.

Justa about done and ready to set up the chook run

Mel’s also got a rabbit(s?) Soft, furry, cute and their manure is great for the yard.

There is usually a workshop or two run at a Permablitz. Here is Kate running one on propagating soft wood cuttings

Kate also runs a business called ‘Rapunzel’s Wild Garden’ growing advanced edible seedlings to order, ready to put in your garden beds at home! Quite a brilliant idea. It means you need to plan ahead BUT gives you some wonderful choice of unusual heirloom varieties like those offered by Diggers Club, which are quite often not available at your regular nursery. Contact Kate at rapunzelswildgarden [at] bigpond [dot] com

She provided some WONDERFUL ideas about growing your own advance seedlings though. You can use strawberry punnets as mini glass houses to propagate from seed. And then you can pick them out and plant into the bottoms of 2L plastic milk cartons! Cut the tops and bottoms of them, fill with soil, plant your seedling. When they reach the size they are above, you can pop it directly into your garden bed and just slide the plastic off the top! You can reuse these a few times too. Brilliant idea and reuse of materials.

Now here is the area of the yard that believe it or not, was once all concrete! A wet concrete cutter was used to cut up the concrete to be reused to create raised garden bed (again – fantastic reuse of material!). Best thing about this method is that you can cut the concrete to the exact size you want it to be to create height of garden beds as well as a path to access them.

Here they are using builders sand to held level out the concrete pieces and compact it down to create the paths and walls for the garden bed

The beds were filled with soil and compost

A cover was made to protect the piping from the kitchen

Beautiful!

Ready to plant out with all these goodies

Mel and her fabulous new garden even made it into the local paper! Check out the story HERE.

UPCOMING WEST-SIDE PERMABLITZES:

Both in West Footscray!
Sat 10 Oct – Permablitz #77 Michelle’s at West Footscray.
More info here.

Sat 31 Oct – Nyree’s place in West Footscray.
More info here. Viva la spring. Please come and join Nyree and Willie in the West to help transform their small, barren, concrete yard into a scene from “The good life”. We will be building and planting a chicken house and run, raised garden beds and a vertical garden using the wire frames from old bed bases that require stripping. We also need help pulling up the front fence and garden to prepare the soil for a future food forest.

I’m sad I won’t be able to make the one this Saturday. I’m already booked into a CAE class to learn how to string my own pearl necklace! But hope to see you at Nyree’s at the end of the month.

In the meantime be sure to check out the fabulous newlook Permaculture Out West blog!

[image from flickr]

NEWSFLASH!

Remember the wonderful Monica whose blitz I blogged about a few weeks ago? See here to read the original post.

Well Monica is having an OPEN GARDEN DAY at her house in Moonee Ponds tomorrow Saturday 3rd October from 10am.

The address is 297 Ascot Vale Road, Moonee Ponds [Melway Ref 28 J8]

We will be popping along for sure and I really encourage anyone in the area to drop by and seeing her tremendously inspiring and productive garden.

They have also put together a CD that will be available on the day, that documents how the garden has come together over the years. I can’t wait to see it.

Monica’s house is a Sustainable home and Eco home, is also a heritage listed too.

She also has plenty of living creatures integrated in her design quail, ducklings, laying egg hens, rabbits etc.

Go check it out!

[image from my flickr set]

I turned down a Permablitz at our house today! It’s a bit too soon. We were offered a ‘blitz in November but we’re in the midst of wedding planning because we’re trying to get on top of it all early.

But it was nice to be offered already! I’ve been to four Permablitzes now and am just enjoying attending them, meeting other like minded people and learning valuable skills.

I think we will try and schedule one at our place after the wedding – a ‘newly weds Permablitz’ because really – it would be the best wedding present EVER!

And seeing we shamefully STILL haven’t gotten around to getting our rainwater tank we’re thinking perhaps we could ask people to put money towards us getting a rainwater tank for our wedding present. Rainwater tank and a chook run, ah I’d be so happy! Though, for the record we’re not just thinking of ourselves. We’re figuring out a way we can ask our guests to not just spend money on us, but to split it and to make a donation towards a charity as well, perhaps we could find a project we feel particularly connected to and raise money for it.

So perhaps an Autumn blitz in May, otherwise we could wait til August because that seems to be a good time – you can still get those bare rooted fruit trees in the ground then!

Tomorrow I am attending my first ‘Permaculture Out West‘ meeting to see what they are all about. There seems to be a real burst of permaculture, social and community type activity in the west at the moment. It’s tremendously inspiring!

[image from flickr]

{from my flickr set of Monica’s mini blitz]

I took AA along with me to his first ‘blitz a couple of weeks ago. It was at the amazing Monica’s house in Moonee Ponds. It was a small turnout and operated more like a working bee on the day but that’s not to say I didn’t learn just as much!

Monica’s house and property is just BEAUTIFUL. Originally from Romania, Monica has lived in her beautiful period home for 20 years. Monica is a civil engineer by trade. But at age 58 she decided to study horticulture. She had studied botany in her first year of university and later decided to further her knowledge, simply because she loves plants and working with nature! Her garden is quite inspiring.

She keeps chickens, ducks and quails which she feeds food scraps to and they in return give her eggs and valuable manure for the garden. She also has some gorgeous fluffy rabbits that she keeps and uses their manure throughout the garden as well. The garden is planted throughout with beautiful edible delights. She has a grey water irrigation system, a German designed passive heating and cooling system and she is working towards an Open Day in October. She wants to use her house to show people how to live a more sustainable lifestyle and put in to practise permaculture principles.

Upon arriving it was very evident that Monica is indeed a very special 70 year old lady! She was in her kitchen making homemade mayonnaise to feed us with a selection of vegetables from her garden later. In the backyard were trays of homemade soap that she had made earlier in the week. At lunch we were fed a delicious Romanian meal prepared by Monica and her friend, of mixed pork and beef rolls wrapped in fermented cabbage leaves (ie home made sauerkraut). The intricate dish had taken one week to prepare. Yummmmmm. That’s right – WILL WORK FREE IN YOUR YARD FOR DELICIOUS HOMECOOKED MEAL!

AA and I were set to work, giving the fence a ‘lime wash‘. It’s an ancient technique and a very cheap, non toxic paint. The lime wash or whitewash had been pre-prepared. There are lots of recipes to make your own on the internet. It’s incredibly inexpensive to make and you can even tint it whatever colour you like. And best of all, it’s environmentally friendly. Basically lime powder, that you can get from the hardware/ gardening store, had been mixed with water to make a thick paste, and watered down a little. It was then left to sit for 3-4 days and then by the time we used it, it was watered down to the consistency of milk. We used dustbin brushes and then paint brushes to paint the fence.

The main purpose of painting the fence white was to reflect more light onto the shady side of the garden. As we put the paint on AA and I were wondering what on earth it would look like once it dried. Because to be honest, it looked pretty average as we put it on. The wash was very watery so we really had to slop it on to get into all the crevices of the wooden fence. But thank goodness once it dried it looked really good! And my, was it BRIGHT!

I really love the raised garden bed Monica has, seen above on the left. No bending! And for folk like us, especially handy for keeping your dog out of the patch. I’d really like to get some of these at our place.

We also helped put up some star pickets against the newly painted fence, and thread wires through them to espallier some old varieties of pears and apples onto. I showed our fellow volunteers the ‘slurry technique‘ that I learnt watching Cameron the week before and we used that to plant the bare rooted trees.

We also helped dig up some cumquat trees. I can not tell you HOW AMAZING Monica’s soil is. I wish I took some photos of it – it was just a pure joy to dig up. It was beautifully moist, and easy to dig, with the FATTEST, JUICIEST, HEALTHIEST LOOKING WORMS I have ever seen in my life! My God! Monica said “that’s from 20 years of kitchen scraps!” I had a good giggle later, wondering what Monica must think of this recent resurgent interest in returning to the ‘old ways’ of doing things, taking a more holistic approach with permaculture principles which in so many instances are just plain old common sense when you think about it. Monica said “I have been doing this my whole life, this is not something I just recently picked up!” and that was very evident by the health of the soil of her garden. I wonder what the soil was like at her property when she first moved there. Seeing it’s on the same side of town as our place, it was quite possibly very heavy clay like we have. I guess if we feed our whole yard with veggie scraps, and animal manure from ducks, chickens and rabbits we too much dream of one day having soil like Monica’s. It certainly has inspired me!

Looking very forward to Monica’s Open Day and will be sure to take lots of photos to sure with you all.

See more photos from Monica’s HERE.