Tending, alongside a bunch of other events at Sydney College of the Arts, is going to be featured in this year’s Art Month Sydney.

We’re curious: who will we encounter on Wednesday night?

Here are all the details
(NB: don’t pay any attention to the Art Month map of how to get to SCA, it’s wrong. Follow these instructions instead.)

And here’s a lovely flyer which Nerida the Public Relations and Marketing Manager made for us (pdf).

We like this spiel about the project which Nerida used for the flyer – simple and clear:

An experimental garden project at Sydney College of the Arts. Since July 2010, artists (and keen amateur gardeners) Lucas Ihlein and Diego Bonetto have been tending the garden. Over time, others have become involved in the project which intervenes lightly in the social and biological fabric of the college.

[LUCAS]:

[Betty harvesting some banana leaf]

Yes, it’s certainly fun to have the students back at uni. Although it’s true we’ve enjoyed the quiet of the summer, pottering around on our own with a few trusty gardening buddies, the return of the youthful artists of the college also means the return of a Tending VIP: Betty, our mentor, champion and great providor of cuttings and propagations!

Betty is fresh back from a trip to Laos where she reports having eaten riverweed (“a bit like seaweed but less salty”) and many other herbaceous weeds, and marvelled at the local folks’ ability to cultivate anything, anywhere – “so opportunistic“, she said. (These folks, who have a permaculture garden near Wollongong, seem to have had a similar adventure to Betty this summer. Check out their photo of the “dry season riverbank vegie garden”)…

Anyway, having returned to Rozelle, Betty was keen to rummage around and see what had been growing in her absence. She was very impressed with the rapid expansion of the bananas (and took a few “pups” home for her own garden, as well as harvesting a stack of banana leaves for use as “disposable dinner plates”).

Betty also pointed out that our sweet potatoes seem to be thriving, and why don’t we try to dig some up?

And so we did.

Here’s Diego bandicooting around for some spuds.

And LO ! Our first sweet potato of the season emerged, proudly white on the outside (purple on the inside):

And before long, another one, this time purple on the outside, white on the inside:

Betty decided this was a good sign: the time was right for us to get serious about sweet potato farming. And so this is what she told us to do (we duly followed her instructions):

-make a long thin pile of soil, about 50cm wide, and about 40cm high, with a peaked middle:

-Take cuttings from your sweet potato plants (the leafy bits not the spuds) and tie them in a circle:

-semi-bury these in the elongated soil mound. Repeat all the way along:

Et donc, voila!

That, folks, was the easiest bit of gardening we’d ever done!

The secret here, according to Betty, is to give the sweet potatoes their own bed, so that when you dig around to harvest them you’re not disturbing all their neighbours. She also said the green leaves of the sweet potatoes are good cooked, alongside amaranth (which we also have a lot of).

POSTSCRIPT 1:

Later on, we were having an energetic chat with Carolyn and her friend Corinne. Corinne has just begun her PhD at Sydney College – her research is about people’s relationships to land – so of course we had a lot to talk about. While we were talking, this student emerged from the ceramic workshop, which backs onto the Tending garden. She walked around with her nose to the ground, as if trying to find something she had lost. We paused our conversation, and looked on, curious. Eventually she came upon the table in the middle of the garden where we’d left the just-harvested sweet potatoes. She picked up the smaller, purple one. Holding it up, she called to us, tentatively: “May I take this tuber?”

It turns out that she had forgotten her homework assignment – to bring a small object to make a ceramic slipcast – and that our potato was going to save her educational butt.

We gave her our blessing – with the return request, of course, for some of the clay-potato-replicas, if and when they emerge from the kiln.

Permanent 1:1 scale spud sculptures! Can’t wait to see ’em.

POSTSCRIPT 2:

Diego took home the other sweet potato. I look forward to hearing how it tasted.

[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..

[LUCAS]:

It’s now mid-February. We began this garden back in the middle of last year. Our contract – to gently guide the growth of this wonderful place, and to publically notice it, on this here blog – will run out in June.

With the new year, we began to try and turn our attention away from the soil and the beds, away from the very much here-and-now, away from the changing weather of the changing days. We’re now thinking of the future.

Now that there is ‘something’ established here, concrete, tangible, leafy – now that the space has been well and truly ‘occupied’ by our kindly colonialism, it’s time to think about how to make it last a bit longer. Will it all go to seed? To weed? Should we disassemble everything, smooth over the dirt and let the grass grow back? Or can it survive us? When we’re no longer coming along every week, who will tend to Tending?

So we’ve been chatting with Carolyn, who works with Ross (our ‘benevolent overlord’). Carolyn has offered to help out. Together, in the coming weeks, we’ll be talking with the artists, lecturers, workers and students who form the community here at Sydney College of the Arts, looking to come up with ways to make Tending their own. To make sure it continues to evolve. And to do ourselves out of a job!

[Before we began the planting – August 4th, 2010]

[Lush growth ensues – January 20th, 2011]