10 ideas for a more edible Bendigo in 2015
Using my 2014 Template for Food System Change here are 10 Ideas for a more Edible Bendigo in 2015:
1. Vision
Contribute to a City of Greater Bendigo Community Food Coalition, supporting a local food policy and urban agriculture policy to ensure your favourite food system ideas and expertise are included
2. Champion
Start a local community food market that champions very local produce – separate from a larger Farmers Market, involving small scale and niche producers and people from the Bendigo community with something edible and homegrown to sell or swap plus bargain boxes of seasonal fruit and veg, maybe with recipes for their use
3. Participate
Work with a community group to start a weekly community lunch using rescued, donated, homegrown and gleaned fresh produce . Check out the Castlemaine Community Lunch
4. Advocate
Find out who else shares an idea you have around food production in Bendigo and advocate for change Eg. Why can’t our street trees be citrus trees? Wouldn’t it be great to have community orchards around the city? Have you heard of The Lemon Tree Project? or local ideas for a community food forest garden?
5. Value
Map our assets – infrastructure like kitchens in public buildings and trees producing fruit going to waste and get ideas going of what we could do with them. Check out this Harvest Group‘s activities
6. Establish
Think about what sort of new ventures could be established that will enhance the food system in our local community? A food hub or a community food centre? Check out the Trentham Food Hub, the cooperative buying and distribution of the Open Food Network and the brilliant Canadian Community Food Centres. How about investing in commercial greenhouses, or even better, a large community greenhouse? When it comes to the most popular and healthy produce greenhouse produce seems to be the way forward. Plus, greenhouse equipment, including heat shrink plastic wrap can be found online at a great price nowadays. Just take a look at this visqueen plastic for instance. By investing in the necessary equipment now, a community greenhouse could be up and running in no time at all.
7. Celebrate
Celebrate the diversity of food cultures in Bendigo with an annual event where we can learn food preparation ideas from our diverse citizens such as our Karen Community
8. Teach
Volunteer at the local primary or secondary school to grow fresh produce and share your experience with the students, such as the local Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation program at Eaglehawk Primary School
9. Invest
Invest funds in local community food initiatives and social enterprise startups, large and small, and where possible provide advice, mentoring and support. A new local social enterprise Growing Change is supporting is Go and Grow Gardens
10. Reduce
Find out about composting to reduce waste going to landfill and creating greenhouse gas emissions, so many things can be composted, there are even loads of benefits of composting dog poop, so even something so obsolete could be used for good – 2015 is the International Year of Soils. Let’s have a Composters’ Composium later in the year – an event similar to one in Melbourne a couple of years back that was a smash hit. Think about reducing waste in general
Working with the environment
There have been homegrown tomatoes for Xmas in The Backyard Pharmacy at Maison Bleue for the first time. Construction of mini hot houses over my big metal tubs beat the last of the frosts and saw the Roma tomatoes flourish, extending our tomato season as the heritage varieties planted have now also kicked in. Tomatoes’ high antioxidant content make them a strong contender for prime position in our garden of preventative medicines.
Disappointingly the three garden beds left unshaded this year are just not coping with our severe summer heat, so its a matter of making the most of what we have. The delicate seedlings waiting for planting out remain in the potting shed for now. It’s just our luck that we’ve recently upgraded our old retired shed to one of those fancy modern sheds, as it makes the perfect place to let the seeds germinate and grow a little in. Although I must admit, it’s thanks to our friends in Tennessee who recently purchased some sheds in TN for both storage and for potting, because if we hadn’t of seen their new sheds and been so jealous we probably wouldn’t have got one. Who would have thought I would be waiting for the small zucchini crop to prosper?
There are cabbages, potatoes, onions, rocket, and a large amount of parsley (the consequence of planting seed plus seedlings and ending up with 24 plants – tabouli salad here we come). If we’re going to be thinking about growing this many using a shed then I think sometime in the future we’re going to have to upgrade our storage and potting facilities as I’m calling them now. We might even start to look at custom sheds so we can customize and then maximize the space of the shed relating to the layout and size of our garden!
The little cherry and apricot trees have pumped out volumes of lucious fruit, despite the dry. It has been a good year for cherries. They were great in a cinnamon syrup to adorn the mango and macadamia ice cream Xmas pudding.
The apricots made great eating when fresh, then stewed and now bottled, and the chickens liked the off cuts as well.
Flexibility is the key word for gardening in our environment. Now we are gearing up for several days of rain. I hope it works wonders for the eggplants and extends our tomato season.