An 'inverse' permablitz you are wondering - what in heck is that? Well, as some of you know our edible garden here at Thomas Street is fated to become unproductive, purely cosmetic, energy gobbling lawn once again. May seem a sad thing, but read on to see how you can make it a happy thing.
Usually, a permablitz is about converting lawn into edible garden (as well as learning skills, building community, and having fun). On Sunday July 9, we are inviting our friends to come and help to do the reverse: convert edible garden into lawn. The happy bit is in the bigger picture. For if you come and help yourself to as many plants and as much compost as you can carry home, the very process of losing our edible garden will hopefully contribute to the creation and addition to more area of edible garden elsewhere. In other words, we're aiming for a net gain in the amount of Melbourne that is edible.
We have literally thousands of plants and hundreds of different species, including food plants, herbs, medicinal plants, and otherwise useful permaculture plants. This Sunday, it is all up for grabs. Here is a chance for you to create an instant garden out of nothing or to add to the diversity of your existing garden. The day will start at 12 noon, and for the first hour or so the focus will be on letting people see the garden, have a cup of tea, a chat and maybe a few final tours. Then from 1pm folks are free to start gently massaging the plants they want out of the ground, taking care to disturb as few earth worms and chickens as possible. We'd also appreciate if you could rake over or otherwise make level any ground you dig up. Make our job easier when it comes to sowing, gulp, grass seed.
On the day we will also have plenty of food-related excitement, based around turning typically neglected garden produce into delicious dishes. Saku from Sri Lanka will be cooking up a brocolli-leaf stir-fry and a potato curry. Naron from Cambodia will show us how to turn our taro stems into delicious vegetarian soup. We can't promise anything, but Vilma from El Salvador may well be bringing on the pupusas and filling them up with garden goodness. And of course Dan and fellow bread-freaks will have the oven spitting bread in all directions. A bit of the old permasalsa is also far from out of the question.
So, we invite all our friends to come and join us for an afternoon not only to say goodbye to Thomas Street (and to hear about our exciting plans for for the future), but to take a piece of it home with you such that it may live on and continue to nourish you as it has us.
Date: Sunday July 9th
Time: 12 noon onwards
Address: 16 Thomas St, Clayton
Bring: Pots/bags/containers, maybe a trowel/spade/large spoon, a snack to share.
Best,
Dan, Cat, Adrian, Associated Ponds and Mulch Supply
ps. We also have a few trailer-loads of biomass (pumpkin stems and the like) that would make great ingredients for a slow winter compost pile that anyone is welcome to take off our hands.
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http://www.permaculturesolutions.com.au/
http://www.eatthesuburbs.com/
http://www.codemo.org/
And soon to be launched: http://www.permablitz.net/
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"When the earth beneath our feet is less like a dead concrete slab and more like a dark moist living sponge, then we know we are on the right track" (David Holmgren)
