The community garden experience < our gardens

COMMUNITY GARDEN FENCED AND GATED

The UNSW Permaculture Community Garden has been closed by the university and given to the university's childcare centres. No further gardener or community access to the garden in Arthur Street is to be permitted, according to a letter from the university received by the gardeners.

Gardeners are continuing their campaign against the university's action in excluding them and handing over the results of their years of hard work.

UNSW Community Permaculture Garden

unsw community garden photo essay > early days > the garden matures
> garden of many uses > garden of winding paths

Story + photos... Russ Grayson

UNSW gardeners check out a pawpaw tree. The space below the pawpaws was planted to the low-growing fruiting shrub, pepino.

December 1994 was hot and dry in Sydney. It was not the best of weather for starting a community garden. That’s why we were surprised when something like 35 University of NSW students turned up for a week-long permaculture course run by Pacific Edge's Fiona campbell and Russ Grayson.

The course had been organised by Leith Sharp, from the UNSW Student Guild. Leith was then a student. Later, she would lead the university’s environment program.

Another reason why we were surprised that so many students turned up was that the university summer break is in December and that's when students go on holidays and take part time jobs. Their enthusiasm was encouraging.

The idea

The idea was that the students would use what they learned during the course to develop a block of sandy, university-owned land into a community garden.

As we moved through the week the students learned to reality check their initial, somewhat grandiose, notion of what could be fitted into the relatively small area available. Bush foods, an orchard, native plants, herbs and vegetables were all on the wish list. While all of these can now be found in the enlarged UNSW Community Permaculture Garden, one of the first learnings was that, like fruit trees, over-ambitious wish lists have to be pruned.

Our approach

We knew that to simply run a course then abandon the students to their own devices would be to court failure. We had learned that successful projects require a clear and achievable commitment of time, energy and resources if they are to become sustainable.

So we made an agreement... we would stay with the project for the two years following the course and offer a series of weekend day workshops. The gardeners would commit themselves to attending the workshops and seek other opportunities for learning so that, at the end of the period, they would be ready to assume full responsibility for the garden’s development.

This proved a successful strategy. In addition to the workshops, some students did EarthWorks waste minimisation training to learn about composting, worm farming and other useful things and a few completed our permaculture design course. After that, they assumed control of the garden, saw to the training of new members and to the expansion of the garden’s area.

Learnings

One of the first things the students learned came in January 1995. That month was the high-point of a hot summer – the sun beat down day after day from a clear, blue, cloudless sky as Australia suffered another El Nino drought.

The gardeners who had not left for the summer break soon discovered what a hot sun and lack of water meant for young plants. Before long, a watering and maintenance schedule was in place to save the heat-withered plants.

They also learned that it takes several months for vegetables to grow from seed to edible stage.

We learned that a group of people who have never planted a seed in their life and who left ripe vegetables in the garden because they weren’t sure when they were ready for picking could quickly acquire the knowledge to take responsibility for a block of land.

Over the years that followed it was encouraging to see successive generations of students, staff and people from the local community come into the garden, learn how things worked and take responsibility.

We continued to maintain an association with the garden and the EcoLiving Centre of which it now forms a part. The garden – which started as a flat field of lawn - has now grown into a small food forest and is populated by a growing flock of chickens and, at times, by laughing children and adults who come to garden, to wander and sometimes to do things entirely unassociated with gardening.

Bill Mollison, who with David Holmgren developed the permaculture design system, once said that university gardens had short lives. While that may be generally true, I am happy that he was wrong in the case of the UNSW Community Permaculture Garden.

< top

PAGE UPDATED... Tuesday, 5 December 2006