[DIEGO]
Here’s the video from Peter, AKA Pedro TV, when two weeks ago came to visit the garden.
Me and Peter have been also making wine together, infront of a camera, you can see the process here and the tasting here.
In the video below I briefly introduce Tending, what it is, what it does, and laugh about silly morning jokes that one gets.. uhmm
here it is:
[DIEGO]
This was found on the blackboard this morning, and here is the answer I wrote.
Fortunately Liam is a clever individual, and popped in today, so to have a chat.
It’s all fine, he wanted to know what would be the procedure and where are the boundaries of involvement, for which I replied ‘none’ and ‘none’..
I mean, do consider all other’s efforts, but if you would like to do something at Tending, well, just do it. Leave traces behind, write on the board who you are, what you doing and what is your aim, and that would be pretty much it for requirements.
Just let everyone know out of courtesy what you’re doing, and then go for it.
Call out for involvements are all over, in most cases the only pre-requisite is energy and willingness, like the upcoming Agar Dish night, organised by Gemma, of SCASS, one of the Student Association groups active in the campus.
The night will be hosted in the garden, on the 18th May, applications are open now, contact g.mckenzie.booth@gmail.com as from flier below :
In the meantime, pedroTV came to visit, and did some recording, we will find out soon enough if we make it past the editing room:
The garden is growing! thanks rain 🙂
[DIEGO]
We started the morning at Michele yesterday, helping out with a pile of soil which we spread around her garden.
Michele is the lovely lady who famously donated the banana pups for Tending.
Michele is also the producer of the Permaculture Diary and her garden is one of the most awarded and respected backyard in Sydney.
As we were chatting and shoveling we admired the enormous bananas that she just pulled down from the tree, and learned about a number of plants we never heard before.
Thinking back what to write about the experience two words kept coming back, embodiment of knowledge.
At some point, somewhere, I remember talking with someone about the aspect of embodied knowledge, I think was something about the french philosopher Michael Serres.
The fact that Michele knows so much about plants, growing, permaculture, food security and sustainable systems, is only part of the story. There is so much more knowledge that could be gathered from her only by looking at the way she spread the soil on a garden bed, the way she pull out a plant that finished its cycle, the way her body moves amongst the chickens.
Knowledge does not comes in written words alone, far from it.
As we then moved onto Tending, we welcomed Aanya again, who with little Rufus, is one of the great gardeners on the site.
We set-up a new patch, and sown beans, broccoli and garlic.
Again, her hands knew the dirt.
it is a pleasure to be reminded of how simple movements signify so much history and cultural relationships.
We were talking about the symbiotic relationship between human and weeds to keep it on the subject. The way some botanical species have adapted to us to the level of being an osmotic extension: weeds ooze out of our cultural and societal architectures.
Interestingly Bryden is keen on weeds too, and embodied knowledge.. OK this is a bit of a long shot of mine, regardless, here’s Bryden talking about his project, which comprise of a set of willows which he collected from the mountains, and which will be ‘wired-up’ with a solar-powered sound system, and here is me talking about bonsai possibilities with such plants
🙂
Tending on..
[DIEGO]
The new calendar year started for the university, and we busied ourselves talking to the new students at the Orientation Day, Student Union’s gathering and proposing garden possibilities to the various departments.
Next week there will be also a presentation of Tending at the Graduate School Forum for 2011, held on Wednesday 9 March
at 4pm in the SCA Auditorium, coinciding with Art Month, a city-wide celebration of galleries, artists, and the arty spirit out there, see the link here
In the mean time the garden is inspiration for keen draughtspeople..
[DIEGO]
when Tending started it kind of felt like stepping into a blank canvas, all it was in the courtyard was a frangipani, 3 tall palm trees and a lot of lawn.
Since spending time there me, Lucas, Betty, Cecilia, Heather, and all the rest of the people involved, increased exponentially the number of species on site.
Yet, as we engaged with Tending we also found out that there was much more there to begin with.
So this post is for the palm trees, tall, old, proud, 3:
The Left, the Right and Back Right.
Recently Left got decapitated.
For some unknown reason it kind-of dropped its living core to the ground. Yes, I am implying that the tree itself, in a desperate attempt at coping with the heat-wave of the past month, cut its own head off!
So there it stand, a bare post, amusing and extreme.
Left is also the tree that sported a scarf, I took a video of it a while back.
While Right, never had a head, it has been a bare post since we stepped in the courtyard, is it dead? is it alive?
Right is the mysterious one.
And then there is Back Right, which is pretty much the only one that I could (with some sort of confidence) name.
It’s alive, is happy, seen worse times, and is native, might even be endemic, as this area might just have been the right environment for it to grow.
It’s a Livistona australis, a Cabbage-tree Palm.
This plant use to be quite popular in early 19th century, as food (you eat the heart of the palm, killing the young tree in the process), and as the fiber source for the Cabbage Tree Hats, a straw-kind hat which became popular at the turn of the century..
So there you have it, the Left, the Right and the Cabbage Tree Hat one..
