This is a challenge to Canberra planners: make the next suburb an urban farm.
The concept is slowly taking off around the world, as food gets pricier, supply chains suddenly stop supplying, and teachers bring in food from their own homes and resources for kids who are hungry.
Canberra, Australia, and the world are like people living under a volcano. The rumbles are more frequent, but we assume life will be like yesterday.
Except as we know from the past decade, it won't be. Floods, fires, pandemics, the sudden breakdown of a major aged railway system or badly maintained bridge or highway, three years of poor crops from a massive volcanic eruption that clouds the sunlight vital for farming and stops plane flights, or, even worse, a single solar flare hitting a vital satellite so sat-nav and email fail - it doesn't take much for supply lines to break down.
Suddenly our community resources and sense of community will be vital.
Which is why I love "redundancy gardens". A redundancy garden means that if food trucks no longer can get to Braidwood, or they have little to bring, we will still eat well.
Redundancy gardening includes Araluen's "swap and sell" markets for anyone who has surplus tomatoes or rhubarb, or a crop to sell. It also means that slowly our community learns who has enough grapefruit to feed the valley, or medical or engineering skills.
Back when Canberra was established, new residents and new Australian were given a certain number of native trees and shrubs for their gardens, some of which are still uprooting foundations and invading the drains as I write this.
Here's how we could roll-out an updated and improved version of the scheme:
Step 1: Every resident is given 10 fruit trees, from a choice of about 30 kinds of fruit, including ones that don't need much care: multigrafted semi-dwarf apple or pear varieties , so the two varieties on each tree pollinate each other; lemon trees; naval and Valencia oranges, mulberries, plums, olives, mini red bananas for patios, persimmons, pomegranates, loquats, strawberry feijoas.
Step 2: Add a clause in rental agreements that "The tenant shall be permitted to plant any fruit tree that doesn't pose a danger to drains, foundations or electricity poles." They might also prefer to use large pots - or find used containers to turn into big pots - so they can make their orchard portable.
Step 3: A third of any garden used 12 months of the year to grow edibles qualifies for a 5 per cent rate rebate.
Step 4: Remove the GST from anything that will help feed us locally, plus trees to shade and cool the planet, and flowers too.
Step 5: Streets become orchards, each lined with the same tree, or alternating varieties for pollination: early plums before the fruit fly breed; late apples like hardy Aussie Democrat or Lady Williams or Sturmer Pippin, that ripen after the fruit fly have given up breeding for winter, with every third tree a Eureka lemon, possibly grown from the seedling of a seedling of a seedling of my lemons here, which have self-selected to be warty ugly roundish fruit, but with few seeds, juicy and hardy as a black snake.
There might be white mulberries, chestnuts, walnuts, dwarf red-flowered macadamia and pecans. Bus shelters or anywhere you don't want graffitied could be hedged with prickly finger limes - though areas with more trees, especially fruit trees, are rarely vandalised. At heart we are all hunter-gatherers, especially young humans, who will begin to identify with an area that feeds them.
Step 6: A chain of parks throughout the development, with beds of multi-coloured Swiss chard, curly and Italian parsley, loads of garlic chives to edges the beds and long areas of trellis for climbing peas, the kind that are leafless and produce masses of snow peas, or if left longer, peas for shelling, plus grape vines, kiwi fruit vines, but not strawberry beds as for some reason dogs love to lift their leg there, and kids tend to eat the berries without washing them.
Step 7: Community "potato parks" where once a year potatoes are dug and bags of them given away, with broad beans planted after that to clean the soil till the spring planting of the next lot of spuds.
Step 8: Gardens devoted to the foodstuffs that originally grew in this region: wombat berries and native grasses with edible seeds, warrigal spinach and bunya trees in safe spots where a falling cluster of nuts won't cause a fatal accident or squash someone's car.
Step 9: Car parks, by law, must have a trellis over them, covered with vines that will not drop debris on the cars below.
It would be fun. It would cost very little in terms of infrastructure. You might even find volunteers to do much of the work, and expand the concept, like outdoor pizza ovens as well as barbeques in our parks. And when the pantry is almost bare, kids won't have only a sausage with cheap white bread for dinner, but salads and greens and fruit all year round.
How much of a community's food could be grown in one Canberra community? How much more "community" would be created by picking and snacking on it together, or putting out boxes of surplus marked "Free - please help yourself".
It's time to futurise Canberra, cool our vast areas of concrete, roofs and bitumen; generate community solar power; catch rainwater in household tanks for gardening; recycle all water - and just possibly, grow a third of our food, free, for the hungry and invisible people of Canberra or for when the space junk hits that vital satellite.
This week I am:
- Wishing I could give away 10,000 chokos. The blasted vine is still spreading and producing about 50 fruit a night.
- Picking the last hydrangeas, so they can dry into muted colours in the vase all winter.
- Oversupplied with finger limes.
- Watching the late planted spinach, winter lettuce, fast growing Asian cabbages, parsley and tender celery tops still growing fast outside my study. I don't let celery grow too tall - why have tough stringy celery when you can chop off tender pale leaves and stems. Plant seedlings now, if you haven't already; and add broad beans and peas too for spring.
- Hoping the brown snake in the rock pile and I have come to an agreement: she goes her way, I go mine, and neither bite each other.
- Wondering if there is a 'tallest weed' category in the Guinness Book of Records, because we have contenders.
