Created by Oxfam Australia, ‘Sisters on the Planet’ is a compilation of inspiring short films that tell the stories of five women from across the globe who are leading the way in taking positive action on climate change. In celebration of International Women’s Day, Sustainable Illawarra is holding a free screening of these insightful films on Monday 8^th March in Wollongong. I’ve been working as part of the Sustainable Illawarra team to organise this exciting event, so if you’re in the Illawarra, please do join us!

We’re really lucky to have three special local guest speakers presenting on the night - Doctor Pamela Abuodha from Kenya who is an expert in assessing the susceptibility of coastlines to climate change, Irina Bruckner an artist originating from Kazakhstan and Lindley Berrie who is passionate about sustainable living and an active member of the local BushCare program. The screening will be held in the Level 9 function room of the Wollongong City Council Building from 6:00pm until 7:30pm - see the Sustainable Illawarra calendar of events for more details.

As Oxfam is eager to share these women’s stories and encourage action on climate change, the films are also available free to view on-line at http://www.oxfam.org.au/explore/climate-change/what-oxfam-is-doing/sisters-on-the-planet. If you’re keen to help spread the word and host your own screening at work, in the community, or at home, you can also contact Oxfam for a free copy of the DVD.

February was a month filled with rain, and many of those magical quite moments when the droplets stop falling and the sun shines through...

Inspired by the constant rain, many strange and beautiful fungi rose to show their delicate heads...

The last of the sweet Pink Iona grapes were savoured...

And the first of the acerola cherries enjoyed...

The change of autumn is in the air...

But bottles of summers treasures will remind us of the season past for some time to come (many thanks for the lovely homemade plum jam Cath and Jillian!) ...

We hope wherever you are, that February was magical in your garden...

Food co-ops are a brilliant ways to shop while building community and supporting organic farmers and local food producers. They’re run collectively, with an emphasis on making sustainably, ethically grown, minimally packaged whole foods available at affordable prices. In our travels around Australia we visited many inspiring food co-ops such as Alfalfa House in Sydney and the Friends of the Earth Co-op in Melbourne.

Exciting news for the Illawarra is that a group of wonderful, committed, co-op lovers have been busy setting up the Flame Tree Community Food Co-op – and the co-op shop is opening this Saturday the 27th Feb! The shop is located at 3/374 Lawrence Hargrave Dr in Thirroul - enter via the white metal gate 50 m east of Ryans Hotel. The co-ops sells a range of bulk and mostly organic foods, including nuts, grains, pulses, spices, teas, bread, dairy, honey, oil, flour and pasta, as well as green cleaning products. They prioritise organic, local and unpackaged food and groceries. The Co-op hopes to link with local growers and producers such as organic farmers, market gardeners and community gardeners to boost the local economy and decrease packaging and food miles.

The co-ops opening hours will be Wednesday 2pm-6pm, Thursday 2pm - 6pm, Friday 2pm-6pm and Saturday 10am-4pm. By becoming a member of the food co-op you can receive a 10% discount – we’re signed up already! If you volunteer at the co-op for 8 hours a month you can receive a permanent 25% discount, or you can get a one-off 25% discount for every 2 hours volunteered. To find out more about this wonderful co-op visit http://www.flametreecoop.org.au.  We wish the co-op crew all the best for a brilliant opening day!

We love watching films about people creating vibrant, healthy food systems - whether that be through growing veggies in the city, community gardening, organic farming, soil restoration, running community food redistribution programs, fair trade, food co-ops or even ‘dumpster diving.’ There are such amazing things happening across the globe, and some very clever people catching it on film!

What are your favourite inspiring ‘sustainable food’ films? Ours would have to be:

• Establishing a Food Forest - The Permaculture Way Series
• The Power of Community
• Food Inc
• In Transition – From Oil Dependence to Local Resiliance
• The Future of Food
• Black and Gold – A Film about Coffee and Trade
• King Corn
• Our Seeds: Seeds Blong Yum

Thanks to Dave at Permaculture Power, we also recently discovered the fantastic site Ecoveristy, which has an amazing collection of on-line clips you can watch for free.

Films we have heard about that we would love to see include:

• Dirt! 
• HomeGrown - the 21st Century Family Farm
• Homegrown Revolution
• Rare Chicken Rescue

Homegrown corn is such a treat – it’s so sweet, juicy and flavoursome. We’ve been planting patches of about 20 corn plants every month here since about October, which means we’ve been having a steady stream of corn to enjoy.

Corn loves warm weather, good rich soil and a fair bit of water. We’ve found corn is easy to grow from seed, and takes well to being transplanted from the seedling tray to the garden when they’re about 10cm tall. The weather has been quite wet and humid here lately, and it’s been amazing to see how the corn we planted out only 4 weeks ago has shot up into giant stalks of corn  over 2 metres tall!

Not all our corn has grown this amazingly tall – most plants averaged about 1.5 metres in height. To ensure the cobs fill out with kernels properly we’ve planted the corn in patches of at least 15 plants, spaced only about 20cm apart. Each kernel on a cob of corn needs to be fertilised by pollen from other corn plants to form. If pollination doesn’t occur properly, you end up with bare patches without any kernels on your corn cob! The little silvereyes below are flitting about on the corn flowers.

We harvest the corn when the kernels have just turned yellow. Just peel away a bit of the husk to check.  Our favourite way to enjoy corn is lightly steamed with a little butter and freshly cracked pepper. But we also love to eat them fresh and raw off the plant. This surprises a lot of people – but if you’ve never had fresh raw corn before, next time you have the opportunity give it a go!

In the heat of summer, our harvest baskets this last month have been full of pawpaw, potato, pepino, zucchini, chilli, cucumber, eggplant and grapes...

In anticipation we’ve been watching many bunches of bananas become plumper by the day...

In excitement for getting backyard bees next spring, we’ve built a top bar bee hive...

In relief on hot humid days we’ve cherished the sound of falling rain, 

And listened to the sounds of gentle workers creating healthy soil... 

A delicious, moist chocolate pie that’s eagerly devoured by all, has no refined sugar, eggs or dairy and doesn’t even need cooking??? We didn’t think it was possible either until we discovered this yummy recipe on our travels to northern NSW, which is a heartland for scrumptious, real food. We take this yummy pie to parties often and are always asked for the recipe – so we thought you might like it too!

Equipment: Food Processor, 9 inch pie dish

Ingredients:

Crust

-2 ½ cups desiccated coconut

-350g pitted dried dates – soaked for 15 mins in hot water

Filling

-2 large or 3 small bananas (the riper the better)

-250g pitted dried dates – soaked for 15 mins in hot water

-5 heaped tablespoons fair trade cocoa powder

-2 tablespoons raw honey (optional)

-1/2 ripe avocado (optional)

*Use organic ingredients where possible

1. First make the crust. Take 350g of soaked dates and add them to a food processor with the desiccated coconut. Make sure there are no date pips hiding in the dates, and save the soak water. Process until combined. Add a little soak water if it seems too dry.
2. Place mixture into pie dish and press down firmly to form the crust, attempting to get an even thickness
3. To make the filling, process the filling ingredients in the food processor until thoroughly mixed into a smooth, creamy moose. Then simply spread onto the pie crust.
4. Sprinkle coconut, nuts or berries on top for a finishing touch.
5. Set in the fridge for a least a couple of hours before serving. This pie is also divine frozen. As with many pies, cutting the first piece out can be a challenge! But once the first piece is out, getting out the following pieces is much easier. 

We’d love to hear of any yummy sugar free dessert recipes you know of...

Flavoursome, with a soft, juicy flesh, our home-grown grapes are quite different to any other grape we’ve tried. Fresh from the vine, they’re tantalisingly sweet like a lolly. We’ve even likened the very ripe grapes to tasting like the bright coloured lollies called ‘nerds’ we used to eat as kids!

Grapes are such an incredibly rewarding plant to grow – we planted our two grape vines only 16 months ago, and we’re already enjoying the fruits! We also love how they provide shade over our front deck this summer, but let the sun through in the winter as they’re deciduous and die back in the cooler months.

For more information about growing grapes see our fruit tree profile on growing grapes.

Just like with building a house, we’ve found putting the time into creating a design for a productive food garden is invaluable. Though it’s always tempting to run with a burst of enthusiasm and pop a fruit tree in here and a seedling there, having a good design can save so much work, time and possible heart ache in the long run.

We spent three months working on our garden design, while we were focusing on green renovations to our home. In creating a garden design, there are many things to consider about the place you’re working with, but we found the most important ones to be: 

• Sun and shade – being aware of where the sun rises and sets in the summer and winter,  where the shadows of trees and houses fall, how you can use deciduous trees near the house to provide cooling in summer and warmth in winter
• Winds – which direction the winds come from (we get fierce westeries in late winter), where there is protection from wind (like on the eastern side of our house), and where you can create protection from the winds (like we did on our western and southern borders)
• Water – how water falls on the property, what areas retain water well, what areas are always dry, how the garden slopes, where is it best to create swales and place water tanks, where greywater leaves the house, how can you best place irrigation...
• Complimentary uses – what things in the garden work well near each other? For example, having the plant nursery, tool storage area, and a sink for washing the veggies next to the veggie garden. It’s also important to think of how the garden and the house can work well together, such as having greywater from the washing machine and showers going to fruit trees. Similarly, what things won’t work well together – like a huge tree right next to the veggie garden that will always be taking the water and nutrients from the veggies.  
• Frequency of use – How often do areas/trees need to be checked or harvested? High use areas such as the veggie bed are best right at the back door.
• Keeping good relations – Neighbours may not be too fond of a chicken house or frog pond right near their back door!
• Council regulations – Particularly in urban areas, there may be restrictions on things such as the number of chickens you can keep, what you can plant on the verge - it’s worth finding out to avoid having to change things down the track. 

Some of the most helpful gardening books we found in designing our garden were: 

• The Permaculture Home Garden, Linda Woodrow, 1996
• Smart Permaculture Design, Jenny Allen, 2002
• Introduction to Permaculture: A Designers Manual, Bill Mollison, 2000 

Just as important as knowing your site, is knowing what plants do well in your local climate, and how to choose a spot in your garden that they’ll just love. We’ve found fellow local gardeners, community gardens, and on-line places such as Daleys fruit tree forum are the best way to find out what plants grow well in the area. Once you know what trees grow well, when selecting a spot for them in the garden, it’s helpful to think about the plant’s water, sun and soil requirements, tolerance for wind, size, and how often they need harvesting.

For a more detailed overview of the landscape design for our property, click the image below and/or refer to the various topics on the sidebar under ‘The Food Garden’.  It’s been really exciting over the last two years watching our design come to life on our 920 square metre suburban block.  Our trees and veggie garden are providing us with such abundant harvests already! 

Happy Earth Landscape Design
(Click to enlarge) 

Happy New Year! With the doors of 2009 having come to a close, we just wanted to say thank you so much for your support and enthusiasm for our little ‘adventure in urban sustainability’ over the past year. It means so much to us that so many people enjoy visiting our site, and it’s been wonderful ‘meeting’ many of you through your comments and emails, hearing your stories and visiting your blogs. Thank you for inspiring us, and sharing your ideas and passion for simple green living! Best wishes to you for a wonderful 2010 on your own ‘adventure in sustainability.’ May it be a year abundant in much happiness, good health and homegrown food!

This year amongst the many things we’re looking forward to are more of our fruit trees starting to bear fruit (our garden still so young being just over 2 years old), making a bee hive, getting a couple ducks – and having our green wedding right here in the veggie patch!

Some of our favourite memories of the last month of summer 2009 in our garden were...

Creating meals from our abundant harvests of corn, cucumber, zucchini, chilli, onion, carrot, tomatoes and more - we haven’t bought any fresh vegetables in about four months!

Watching dragonflies magically emerging from their shells on the stems of water chestnuts in our garden pond...

Seeing our garden and silkie chooks featured in a copy of the Wellbeing Organic Garden magazine...

Tasting our first grapes that dangle tantalisingly from the front deck...

Cheering on the pumpkin vine climbing over the chicken house...

With ridiculous amounts of zucchini coming out of our garden, it’s time to get creative with this abundant veggie! We have zucchini with almost every meal at the moment – sliced thinly on pizza, grated into pasta, shredded onto wraps, made into sticks to dip into homemade hommus... what would summer be without zucchini? We’re also really enjoying zucchini fritters at the moment. Our favourite recipe for fritters is:

• 1 large zucchini  - shredded
• 2 medium potatoes – shredded
• 1 medium onion or leek – diced
• 2 cloves garlic – finely chopped
• Handful of mixed herbs – chopped (basil works well)
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 cup plain wholemeal flour (maybe a little more – you want enough to make the mix form easily into patties)
• salt and pepper to taste

The process is really easy – just mix all the ingredients together and form into patties the size of the palm of your hand. Unlike with some other pattie recipes we’ve tried, we found these patties stick together really well – if they’re not sticking well, you can always add a bit more flour. Shallow fry the patties in a fry pan with oil for a couple minutes on each side until they brown up a bit – then they’re ready to enjoy! What’s your favourite thing to make with zucchini? 

185 onions and 50 cloves of garlic from an area about 6 square metres in the veggie bed was a very exciting harvest for us last week! We were especially pleased with the onions – 95% of them had really big healthy bulbs, and some were just ridiculously huge! If you haven’t guessed, we love onion and garlic. There’s hardly a meal we cook without the two essential flavour enhancers.

We grew three kinds of onions – White Sweet Spanish, Cream Gold and some other type we picked up from the local nursery. We grew them from seed at different times throughout May, June and July, and later transplanted the seedlings into an area in the garden that had just moderately rich soil. If onions are planted in really rich soil, they can put all their energy into leaf growth, and not much into the bulb growth. About 5% of our onion harvest was like that – all leaf and not much bulb.

We were a bit early with growing them in May and June actually. Onions are meant to be biennial, meaning they flower in the second year of growth. So you can imagine our surprise when our onions started going to seed in late November! Next time we’ll grow them after the winter solstice in June. Apparently if you plant them before this change in daylight, it can confuse them and they can start to go to seed in the first year.

We snapped all the flower shoots off, and harvested the onions after they started dying back. To ensure the onions will store well, it’s best to wait until the onions have fully died back before harvesting. But as ours were going to flowers, and rain was looking eminent, we harvested them early. We’re drying them on our airy drying racks on the back veranda at the moment, and will move them to a darker place to help them keep for longer soon. Hopefully this harvest will last us many months! 

From Wollongong to Iceland to Tokyo, it’s so inspiring to see the way communities across the globe are coming together to show their concern about climate change and support for strong leadership in creating sustainable futures.

This Saturday is Walk Against Warming – where we can walk the walk as world leaders talk the talk at the 15th United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. In Wollongong, we’ll be joining in the walk at 12 noon, meeting at the steps of the Westley Uniting Church in Crown St Mall, and heading down to Wollongong Harbour. If you’re wondering where the nearest walk to you is, check out http://www.walkagainstwarming.org.

We’re extra inspired for action on climate change at the moment after watching the DVD ‘The Age of Stupid.’ Told through the eyes of a lone elderly man in the year 2055, this documentary/drama explores what lead to a devastated future world. It shares insights into the real life stories of people from seven countries, including a British windfarmer, Nigerian medical student, Iraqi refugees kids and a 82 year old French mountain guide, and leaves an empowering legacy for creating a more sustainable and humane world – check out http://www.ageofstupid.net for the details.

With long sunny hot days, and the festive season of December just on our doorstep, November’s been a busy month here filled with:

Much excitement about our luscious dwarf peaches ripening in time to beat the summer fruit fly...

Three weekends of meeting lovely fellow gardeners on tours around our suburban food forest...

An abundance of ladybeetles loving the fennel and parsley going to flower...

Much surprise and honour at being announced the winner of the Top Gong Environmental Sustainability Award for contributing to building environmental capital in the Wollongong community...

A spectacular display of blissful balls of fruit on the japoticaba...

This beetroot dip recipe from Stephanie Alexander's book ‘the cooks companion’ is so simple and just divine! Beetroot grows pretty much all year round in our climate, and at the moment we’ve got quite a few beetroot ready for harvesting, so last weekend we whipped up this gorgeous beetroot dip by: 

1. Harvesting about 6 medium sized beetroot
2. Giving them a good scrub, and removing the tails and stalks (you can use the leaves in cooking the same way you use silverbeet leaves. And if you’re worried about getting pink fingers you may want to wear gloves!)
3. Chopping the beetroot up into cubes about 1 or 2 centimetres in diameter (you can roast beetroot whole, but it reduces the cooking time drastically if you cube them)
4. Spreading the beetroot cubes on a baking tray, covering them in olive oil and baking them for about 20 to 25 minutes at 180 degrees, until they’re nice and soft
5. Letting the roasted beetroot cool a little, and then giving it a whizz in the food processor along with a clove of grated garlic, a teaspoon of both ground cumin and coriander, a pinch of salt, and a splash of olive oil (you can adjust these flavouring depending on your preferences).
6. Enjoying the dip with small pieces of Lebanese bread and zucchini dipping sticks (we’ve overloaded with zucchini around here already!) 

This was the first time we made this dip, and it’s definitely now one of our favourite ways to use our fresh garden beetroot. We’d love to hear about your favourite way to use beetroot!

We often get compliments from visitors on our bark framed wildlife photos, so we thought we’d share with you just how easy they are to make. Though they are quite delicate, we’ve had ones on the walls for years, so they’re certainly durable. These frames use no glue, and being made from bark they’re very eco friendly indeed.

All you need to create a natural bark frame is your photo, a piece of cardboard the same size as the photo, four pieces of pieces of bark, and about 1 and a 1/2 metres of natural string – like jute or hemp. To avoid using glue, the two pieces of bark used at the top and bottom of the frame need to be cylindrical with a small gap where you can slot the photo in. So when searching for bark, you need to look for those tight, rounded ribbon-like strips, that you can use to support the photo and the cardboard. Be sure to check there are no critters inside these pieces of rounded bark! It makes it easier to tie the frame together if the side pieces are also not flat, but have a slight curve to them as well.

So armed with your pieces of bark, firstly work out which ones look best on which sides. Then slot the photo and the cardboard into the bottom rounded piece.

Cut a piece of string about 30cm long, then take one of the side pieces of bark, position it in place, and wrap the string around where it joins the bottom pieces of bark. Tie with two simple knots at the back of the frame – you want the knots to be tight enough that they’ll stay in place, but not so tight that they start to break the bark.

Take the top piece of bark, slot it into place, and tie the side piece to the top piece. Then put the other side piece of bark in place, do the same, and see the frame come to life! It can help to have someone give you a hand when tying the pieces together.

Now all you need to do is attach a piece of string to hand the frame. You can simply use the string as it is, or create a plaited hanging string like I’ve done below. Simply tie the hanging string around the top two joins of the frame, and it’s done! Once you’ve gotten the hang of it, you can make a frame in less than ten minutes – it’s finding the right pieces of bark that’s the key, and that often takes a lot longer than actually making the frame!

Whenever you feel like a picture change, you can just carefully untie the knots, and pop in a new photo. 

As the changes we can all make to create more sustainable and comfortable homes vary so much from place to place, it’s fantastic to be able to have a trained home sustainability assessor offer ideas and information tailored for your own home – and that’s exactly what’s on offer to Australian residents through the a new federal government initiative.  

The free home sustainability assessments involve a trained assessor going to people’s places for about an hour and a half and undertaking an assessment to look at energy and water usage, and other aspects of household sustainability. They then send you a report with all the suggestions, and there is an option to take out an interest free loan up to $10,000 to buy any sustainable investments recommended in the report – like a solar hot water system.

Local assessors and teams of assessors are popping up all over the place, including in the Illawarra. The web address for more info is http://www.environment.gov.au/greenloans/, or you can call the national hotline to find your nearest assessor on 1800 895 076.

Goodness November is already here and it’s time to say goodbye to a wonderful rainy October in the garden that brought:

Very funky chicken hairdos! In just a couple of weeks we received a much needed 90mm of rain that brought the garden to life and filled our thirsty water tanks...

Rain inspired days of craft, making mosaics to brighten our garden paths...

Harvests of beautiful broccoli, broad beans in abundance, carrots that have such a strong carroty aroma, and as always, bunches and bunches of rainbow silverbeet...

Plantings of coriander, beetroot, onion, lettuce and alyssum...

And visits from a gorgeous garden fairy...

What were the highlights of October in your garden?

With a whisper of magic in the air, the forests of Booderee National Park this weekend reminded us that:  

We all need a nap in the sunshine now and then, to refresh the spirit and rejuvenate the soul...

All the solutions to the challenges we face in creating a sustainable future already exist – we just need to embrace them...

With passion and belief a little idea can turn into an amazing thing - like thousands of people all over the world showing their support for the 350 day of climate action.

A wild bird landing on your head will always make you laugh...

We walk alongside a myriad of amazing creatures in this world, and the decisions we make each day impact upon their lives in countless ways...

The world has gifts for us everywhere when we open our eyes – even heart shaped roo poo!

Sweet, flavoursome and juicy paw paw fresh from the garden taste sooo much better than those you find in the supermarket – the difference is just as distinctive as between home grown and commercial tomatoes. We had high hopes for our home grown paw paw (we planted like nine paw paw trees!) and we weren’t disappointed when our garden gifted us with ripe paw paws for the first time this week.

Paw paws are such incredibly fast growing trees – the fruits we’re enjoying now are from trees we planted less than two years ago. Being such fast growers, paw paws have a relatively short life span of about 5-10 years, but they’re easy to propagate from seed. Paw paws thrive in sunny but sheltered spots away from the winds – we’ve planted a number of them along the north eastern side of our house, we’re they’re nicely protected from the westerly winds.  Being such tall and narrow trees, they’re great to tuck away in places that are too small for large branching fruit trees.

Paw paws (called papaya throughout the rest of the world) come in a range of different varieties. Generally varieties are classed as either Mexican or Hawaiian. The Mexican ones are HUGE, but not as sweet as the smaller Hawaiian types. The Mexican paw paw shown in the photo below that we harvested from our garden this week was so ridiculously huge it’s hilarious!   We ‘re not sure how much this one weighed, as our scales only measure up to 3kg!!!

Paw paw will further ripen and soften off the tree, as long as it has been picked when it’s started to colour up a fair bit, and wasn’t too green.

Paw paws can be used unripe too, like a vegetable, and grated into salads or used in stir-fries. We’ve made a few Thai green paw paw salads over the winter, and they were really nice and refreshing.  

We’ve put a few more details about our experiences with paw paws in our paw paw fruit tree profile article – we’d love to hear your ideas about paw paw and how you use them too!