Whatever gardening validates active undisturbing: deliberately letting it be. Over the past five years, I have been developing my style of Whatever Gardening, not in a curated style of gardening but relinquishing overall control for a blend of allowing and purposeful intervention, making way for the regeneration of a place into a rich habitat. Step by step, my backyard habitat changes and develops. I can track my steps over and around all this growth, sometimes intervening but always considering when I should be stepping aside.
Whatever webs: all small actions count
My interest in home gardening and multispecies interactions aligns with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 15: Life on Earth, particularly protecting, restoring and promoting sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, halting and reversing land degradation and biodiversity loss. Rattan Lal from Ohio State University promotes practicing home gardening and urban agriculture (HGUA) as important strategies towards the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (2020). The roles of home gardening and urban agriculture have been underrated: in food security and providing ecosystem services such as microclimate, plant biodiversity, water quality and reduction of run-off as well as human health. HGUA can reduce […]
Whatever Gardening in my Scratch Patch
I am not really a gardener. I’m a sort of gardener, a ‘whatever’ gardener. I simply don’t have the time and energy to do much. Nevertheless, when I had a house built on a small block of grassed clay soil, I decided to try. After decades of shrivelling any plant I was supposed to care for, I was starting from scratch in more ways than one. My aims in developing my scratch patch were to improve the soil and sequester carbon on a small scale, creating a habitat to feed myself and others, including other species. These intentions completely ignored […]
B-mused alliterative gardening #1
B-mused alliterative gardening #1. Building bolted bright blue Birdies bubble beds by bluetooth beatbox boxes.
B-mused alliterative gardening #2
B-mused alliterative gardening #2. Built both bright blue bolted Birdies bubble beds by bluetooth beatbox, beer and BOA BPA-free blue bottle boxes, a bale and a barrow.
From scratch, never from scratch
Bubble bed tales: A layer of cardboard, shredded exams, well-moulded sticks, coconut shell, palm fronds, baway husks. Dried long grass. A mix of crumbled builder’s concrete, scraps of plastic, sand, clay, red ochre, white quartz, worms, beetles, grubs and grass roots. Vegetable scraps from Latin fiestas. Larvae. Straw.
Planting in patches
Starting from scratch, whatever planting in patches: trees and pumpkins from scraped-out seeds, tangles of weeds. Endemic, endangered, cultivated and cropping: feeding the multispecies collective.
Start with a spider patch
New backyard plantings on a bare block of grass start with the mower skirting a spider patch. A micro-wilderness of whatever chooses to grow fosters spiderlings and others.
Woodford Folk Festival 2014
High excitment here as the 2014 Woodford Folk Festival program has been launched. What a line up! It’s going to be hard (once again) to decide where to go and when. One things for sure, you’ll see me at the Raw Poets’ Breakfast every morning. I’ll be co-hosting on Monday 29th December at The Duck from 8 am. Don’t miss the NYE Poets’ Dinner, either. I’ll be featuring as a character connected to the theme which is the Scottish Referendum. Not telling who. Come along and find out! Looking forward to seeing ya there. Wednesday 31st December at The Duck […]
Paper on Country, Performed Poetry and Andreas Weber’s Enlivenment
My paper published in JASAL, the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, Vol 14, No 3 (2014): A Continuity of Country: Enlivenment in a Live Evocation of Place http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/view/3239