[LUCAS]:

Open day was fun. Somebody (it might have been Diego?) said that Peter Cundall‘s idea of gardening is that you should spend 50 percent of your time just sitting and looking. We did our fair share of this on open day, although we threw drinking cups of tea into the mix too.

The day started with collecting a bumper box of cuttings from Betty, the cafe lady (above). Betty sped through her garden at home in Marrickville before coming to the college, pulling out anything that she thought might be good for us.

There’s nasturtiums, some sort of sweet potato, rosemary, cheremoya, sugar cane, dragon fruit, chilli, garlic chives, and a few mystery plants whose names we’ve forgotten. Doesn’t matter, we’ll plant them all! (and she’ll tell us their names again next time).

The sugar cane is one of the most exciting ones for me. Betty’s idea is that we should be growing it and slashing it back to make our own mulch.

And speaking of sugar and its uses – my old gardening crony Lisa showed up with a jar of orange-coloured liquid. It turns out that this is sugar cane juice, from her own garden!

That morning, Lisa had been to the Flemington Markets to have the tough canes squished and transformed into this sweet nectar, which we all shared around with cautious sips. (Perhaps it’s an acquired taste – or perhaps it’d be good with some sort of booze at the end of a hard Tending day?)

Heather, one of Tending’s greatest local supporters, showed up with baked potatoes to sustain us, and coaxed Lisa and I away from the garden for an hour. We strolled with her down to Lilyfield to see the verge garden she and her buddies from Transition Leichhardt had installed in a back street.

Here we are en-route, not being able to resist taking a photo of this hilariously-stating-the-obvious street mirror. (Heather, who is notorious for avoiding the camera lens, lurks in the far background of this panoptic reflection):

Heather said that she and her friends had identified that street as nice and sunny and a good spot for a verge garden. They did a letterbox drop asking if anyone would like to have their nature strip transformed for free. This particular fellow said yes, so away they went. And now, it seems that the next door neighbour is curious to have his lawn dug up, too…

Here’s some of the edible greenery now gracing the verge:

On the way back, we passed a rambling old house bursting at the seams with biological growth. The lady who lives here, a therapist of some sort, had reclaimed the bitumen, wrapped a bunch of mulch and clippings with some chicken wire, and just gone for it!

Heather knocked on her door. The therapist-lady emerged very cautiously, looking like she was going to get in trouble for something. Little did she know she was about to get a hearty congratulations from us, and an exhortation to “keep at it!”

Back at Tending, the boss and I planted the last of our potatoes – these ones (gourmet pink eye, King Edward and Kipfler spuds donated by Jenny from freecycle) we planted directly in the soil. So now we have 3 methods to compare and contrast: “mulch only” in chicken wire; the car tyre method; and direct soil plantings…

And we met Liz Day! For some time we’ve been wondering about her strange grass farm in the corner of the courtyard. It seems she is growing grass for an exhibition at Casula Powerhouse gallery next month. It’s an odd one: she cast plaster in the shape of letters to form particular phrases. Then she grew grass into the plaster. Once the grass is thick, its roots reach into the recessed letter shapes. Liz can then peel back the grass, and let it die off. It forms a dense organic carpet with an embossed sentence!

Here she is posing in front of her grass farm:

…and here’s one of the letters she peeled back:

Towards the end of the day, we were joined by Paul (aka Dr Worm), who set to work creating a new garden bed, not far from that composed by Cecilia.

Paul began by forking the grass to make it more permeable:

He then put down a layer of saturated cardboard to stop the grass from growing back, followed by a ring of sandstone pieces, and filled it in with soil. Here’s how it looks now:

Paul planted a bunch of heavy-feeding spring-summer seeds: pumpkins, zucchinis, beans and corn. Here’s his map of the planting:

We’re hoping this bed is going to spill out everywhere and clamber over the surrounding grassy terrain, triffid-like…

-Til next time, Tenders!

In 2009, when we were researching the best way to get TENDING started, Ross went to the Soil Science people over on Main Campus at The University of Sydney.

‘Does anyone want to do an examination of the soil at Callan Park?’

A group of three students jumped at the project, for their final-year assessment.

We proposed a ‘pretend consultancy’, with Sydney College of the Arts as the ‘client’ and Sophie Gulliver, Adrian Carrillo Garcia and Joshua Godbee as the ‘consultant firm’. The client asked for a viability report and an account of the social and historical context for a ‘community approach to establishing gardens in SCA’s portion of Callan Park’.

The report that the students produced is to be read as an exercise in education and professional training, of course. We emphasise that it has no legal status. But it is thoughtful and thought-provoking and full of good information. Which is why we present it here.

Thanks and congratulations go to Sophie, Adrian and Josh for all their excellent work. Of course, they received splendid marks for this part of their final assessment. We hope they come and visit us at TENDING sometime soon…

You can download the full report here, it’s a 3mb PDF file.

A summary from their research is here:

Executive summary
The SOIL3010 unit from the University of Sydney undertook an investigation into the agronomic suitability of sites with the Sydney College of the Arts leasehold for the purpose of creating a community garden.
In order to establish the suitability of the soil for growing a range of plants as would be required in a community garden, physical soil samples were required. However, political and social pressures from the community meant that we were denied access to extract soil samples from any areas within Callan Park outside of the SCA lease.

In light of this, three additional sites were included in the soil survey to gain a comprehensive understanding of the soil health status within the confines of the SCA grounds. Of the six sites surveyed, site 1 was the only site deemed agronomically acceptable for the establishment of a community garden using the existing soil. The five other sites displayed varying soil depths, nutrient deficiencies and other physical attributes that are
inhibitive to plant growth and development. Considering this, two recommendations have been proposed; the first involves a community garden at site 1 using the existing soil in conjunction with a soil remediation strategy to improve soil fertility and ensure plant productivity. The second recommendation involves the erection of raised garden beds at any of the sites which would negate the unsuitability of the existing soil.

Raised garden beds would incur a greater cost of establishment however, it is a more culturally and socially sensitive alternative and would provide superior soil conditions for a sustainable and productive community garden.

In the report, among the many detailed fascinating observations and recommendations by Sophie, Adrian and Joshua, is this one, which I believe will very much appeal to Diego:

An additional low-cost and very effective method to improve plant growth and development is through compost teas. We recommend setting aside a garden bed and planting stinging nettles a month prior to planting the rest of the plants in the community garden. Stinging nettles growing vigorously in a range of soils and are very high in N, K and many other micronutrients. Once they grow to a reasonable height they can be harvested and placed in a bucket of water for approximately 10 days. This creates a compost tea which can then be strained, diluted and poured across the garden providing water and essential nutrients for plant growth (Woodrow 1997). This foliar fertiliser strategy can be continuously applied throughout the year to the entire garden and can be done at no cost.

[LUCAS]:

[Cecilia, our guest-boss on Thursday posing at her TENDING makeover, just before mulching…]

Following from Diego’s post about Thursday just passed… Yes, Tending is really hotting up now, in its own kinda slow, many-cups-of-tea-along-the-way, way.

Thursday was an epic day. It began with the collection of more sandstone blocks from “the quarry”, which is a courtyard two down from our own.

The quarry is like a purgatory for broken sandstone pieces from the SCA buildings.

Grant the property services fellow showed us this space a few weeks back, and pointed out which blocks we could take, and which were off-bounds.

It’s really satisfying to take the wheelbarrow over there and load it up with heavy chunks of this fantastic, site-specific building material.

Here’s The Boss unloading another barrow-load:

Besides the satisfaction which comes from the physical labour, and from the re-use of an onsite material, the stone blocks have another wonderful property. Unlike timber beams, they are able to be shaped in ways beyond the rectilinear.
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[Diego]

So, both me and Lucas are pretty busy at the moment, getting ready the last details for the opening of the group show In The Balance: Art for a changing world, at the Musuem of Contemporary Art, Sydney.
We both have work in it, Lucas doing an environmental audit of the exhibition, blogging the findings and discussions on this blog and printing a number of posters as well.
While myself is presenting 5 Terrariums, 5 Tours and world of facebook friends (that’s the title).
The terrariums have been constructed by Ian and Matt at the MCA, and they look fantastic, the tours will be in September and October, see here for details, while the facebook part is an attempt at elevating botanical species social status, by inserting them in the social network by excellence.

So, that means that the tending project is not going to be attended this Thursday, sorry, bear with us, we will be back the week after with plenty of energy, to get ready the garden for the SCA open day on the 28th.

Regardless, as a good gardener, I went to check out the plants this morning, water a bit the straw planters and assess the general well being of the site, and i discovered a generous donation from Betty, the cafe’ manager, of cardboard boxes and food scraps for the compost bin, so thankyou thankyou!
..we will be on site Thursday 26!