A guerrilla gardening group growing produce during the pandemic | Discovery | Gardening Australia
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- Опубликовано: 8 окт 2024
- Jerry meets up with a guerrilla gardening group taking over empty public spaces to grow food for those that need it, sharing growing skills to increase community resilience. Subscribe 🔔 ab.co/GA-subscribe
Over the pandemic lockdowns, many of us were alarmed by images of empty supermarket shelves and supply shortages. Rather than running out and hoarding toot-roll, a group of young people saw it as an opportunity to provide for the vulnerable in their community and rethink how public space was being used.
Al Wicks says they’d “always had the pipe-dream of doing community gardens…over covid me and my friends started getting worried about food security for vulnerable people in the community”.
One of these friends was Ruby Thorburn, who says “there was an overwhelming sense of fear, seeing these empty supermarkets. We wanted to produce food overnight…to avoid red tape and bureaucracy and use direct action”.
In response, they formed “Growing Forward”, a community organisation dedicated to setting up guerrilla community gardens in underutilised public space. We’re visiting a site they’ve successfully converted from forgotten space to thriving community gardens with a purpose.
What started out with a bit of rule bending, has now garnered support of the whole community - including the council.
“We looked around and found a plot of land that was owned by the state government, but had been abandoned for over 90 years. Our neighbour works in council and looked into contamination reports that had been done on the soil and found it was good” says Ruby.
Leaning on Ruby’s permaculture background, they conducted a site assessment and identified a tap for water supply and a promising full-sun aspect. “The goal was community food resilience, and to get people thinking differently about food”.
After speaking with local indigenous elders to gain their permission to use the land, the group studied successful guerrilla community gardens to try to replicate what factors had made them work.
The first was wide community consultation. Every house in the surrounding area to the proposed garden was repeatedly doorknocked, to canvas any issues or concerns with establishing the garden- and identify anyone who was willing to help. Flyers were also distributed.
The next was rapid implementation. “Our goal was to set it up in 2 days, to skip the uncertain period where people are not sure what’s going on” says Ruby. “We just went ahead and did it” says Al.
“We brought in about 20 m2 of soil, and spent our personal money on it” says Al. “It took about a day to get it all in, there was a lot of community support”. While a lot of elbow grease went into the set-up, there’s no permanent infrastructure, which helps avoid the ire of bureaucrats
The first garden is at West End, in inner-south Brisbane, and it’s been a total success. Occupying around ¼ acre, it’s ringed by edible native plants with mounded beds of vegetables inside.
Everything grown goes back into the community to feed those who need it most. “The founding principles were doing free work for the community, and the produce is free”. “We have signs saying this food is going to vulnerable people, and it seems to work”.
At West End the produce goes to refugees living in the community, so Al and Ruby asked the refugee community organisation what they would like to eat. Accordingly, the fare is a little more diverse than what’s on offer at the shops, with sweet potato, okra, cassava, elephant foot yams and papaya thriving. It’s also become a place for meetings and picnics.
The approach has been a big success, regularly supplying food to community organisations and those most vulnerable, as well as building local connections. The program has expanded.
Featured Plants:
PAW PAW - Carica papaya cv.
SWEET POTATO - Ipomoea batatas cv.
CHILLI - Capsicum cv.
PUMPKIN ‘JAP’ - Cucurbita maxima cv.
OKRA - Abelmoschus esculentus cv.
Filmed on Turrbal & Yuggera Country | Brisbane, Qld
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Развлечения
Councils should be on board with this, they should be converting unused blocks to vege gardens, im sure if they put the call out people will hepl make it happen, their should not be anything that the council's should put in the way of this being done, we need vege gardens everywhere t t needs to become the norm
Ive heard from older Australians there is an old English law (allotments) that is also part of Australian law that stipulates each council must set aside land for its people to farm from so they don't starve. If this is true than it explain why councils are willing to share unutilised land with gardening groups.
Our tiny indoor vertical farm here in South Carolina was founded in 2020 and is now open source. We are dumping all our methodologies to the public for all to use, get inspiration from, etc. ✌️💚🌱
Time 2 get back 2 growing your own veg and fruit people great show people 🌱🌱🌱💯💯💯👍👍👍👀👀👀 Les from Perth
Wonderful initiative.
Wonderful ideas and action. Congratulations to all involved!
My dream garden. But I am very busy with kids, cooking and working. I wish have enought time to build my dream garden.
You only live once, if you want to do some thing bad enough you will find a way to make it happen
Just do it and be happy 🌱🌱🌱💯💯💯👍👍👍👀👀👀
I'm a stay at home mom with 3 little ones. I have 8 raised beds and plan to expand 4 more 4x20 beds. I built all 8 leveled and filled them by myself in a weekend all while having to be on a budget. Best advice I can give is just do it and involve your little ones with you. Yes it takes time I'm 5 years in and finally got the hang of it. The more you hold off on it, the more you won't do it. And doing something like they've done is pretty simple. Go thru where you want your beds to be, lay down cardboard, and build the soil up into mounds. Fill in the paths with more cardboard and fill with wood chips or you could always grow a cover crop. Either would be fine.
What a wonderful idea! More lower to them they’re doing such a wonderful job. I just love that they’re helping the more vulnerable members of our multicultural community too.
Great job guys. Xx
Great work!
Love it.. let the okra grow tho
I love this! Is there a guide on how to try start a similar thing in everyone's local council? I don't have a horticulture degree but I'd definitely volunteer to be admin and a worker!
Not that we know of Sam, you can contact your local community garden to see if there are any similar gardening groups in your area.
Beautiful 😻 thanks 🙏
Great idea, but I'm curious about who is paying for the water? They said they identified a water source, where did that come from? Was it the apartment building, or was there already an outlet on the government owned land? If its on the government owned land, then its the tax payers paying for the water, which is why some government areas can get twitchy (unapproved use of tax payer funds).
J.A.P. aka Kent Pumpkins are Moschata not Maxima as show in the clip
why don't councils grow fruit trees in public spaces for people to pick for free? it should be their responsibility...
Great concept love the idea. But guerilla gardens would be better in the poorer suburbs of Brisbane where they are more needed than
the richer ones.
Wawnice
Is this recent?
I like the gesture of asking the traditional owners but at the end of the day you can't just build a garden without approval from the local council at least!
If its a state government owned block, then local council doesn't care and has no opinion on the matter. And generally, state governments don't care about disused blocks being utilised like this as long as no permanent infrastructure is built on the land.
@@sightseeinginstyle8119 Where I live in WA the community gardens are run by the local council
Will this be allowed in the future with the 2030 agenda?
Nope.
While I like the idea, the fact the people who run the project are extreme far left leaves a lot of people from the centre and right out of it. Why would you want to get involved. Some of us have extensive permaculture experience.
Hopefully they become more neutral as time goes on. I like the concept of turning people owned spaces (council land) into more edible spaces.
They ask refugees what they wanted grown but didnt seem to involve them in the growing process. Seemed very privileged upbringing white saviour motivated.
gardening with masks 🙄
yes, because of the possibility of legionella in the soil. But who cares what the reason was? If she wants to wear a mask then yay to her
You're using gorillas in your garden to do the work?
!
Woke alert WOKE ALERT!
Gardening Australia has gone FULL WOKE!
@@howdyd9181 not really. The presenters are all white.
I'll say!
Love ya work, its the only thing we need to do as humans , the perfect cure for depression an basically every disease known to man .... to grow an eat all fresh produce will change ur life forever... I'm living proof of this fact 💙