Sustainable Gardening Australia - possibilities when communities grow their own food - urban agriculture

Sustainable Gardening Australia 

invites you to join an informal gathering where participants will engage in discussion regarding:

What are the possibilities when modern communities

grow more of their own food?

 The evening will conclude with questions 

addressed by a panel including: 

Natasha Kuperman (Founder of My Home Harvest)

Cam Walker (Friends of the Earth)

Peter Huff (Urban Agriculture Facilitator, City of Yarra)

When:

Monday June 17^th 2013 from 7:00-9:00 pm

Where:

Function Room, The Courthouse Hotel, 615 Sydney Rd, Brunswick

Transport:  

Tram, Train (Anstey Station), 

Car (Sydney Rd meter free after 6pm)

You can purchase meals and drinks at The Courthouse 

and there are lots of great eateries on Sydney Road.

  

To Register for this event go to:http://www.trybooking.com/Booking/BookingEventSummary.aspx?eid=50481

Places for this free event are limited so book early, 

and please let us know if you are then unable to attend 

so we can give someone else your place. 

Alla Wolf Tasker convinces me about the sort of food obsession we really need

Am listening to/watching this:

IQ2 Debate: 

Our Food Obsession Has Gone Too Far

 This is a must and thoughtful watch.

I particularly enjoyed the contribution of Alla Wolf Tasker

who runs The Lake House down the road at Daylesford. 

I try to be an ethical consumer - have done for more than forty years.

I try to support local producers and processors and jobs.

I try to support the smaller business rather than corporatisation.

After listening to Alla, I am going to become even more quality conscious.

I am prepared to spend a little more of my limited income on quality and local.

While I am not an admirer of all things French,

I do admire the relationship there between consumer and producer.

If only Australia would.

~~~~~~~

I am including below a paper which is not connected to the above

but may be of interest to Tucker Lovers:

      

Non-stunning slaughter - Animals are counting on you to be their voice

As you know, a big decision will be made this week when primary industries ministers from around the country meet in Melbourne to decide whether to close the loophole on non-stunned slaughter in Australia.

I'm writing to invite you to an important rallyorganised by Animals Australia on Thursday evening at the MCG, where the ministers are due to discuss their decision on this issue. Already 14,000 Animals Australia supporters have written to these ministers imploring them to show mercy and remove the exemptions that are allowing some abattoirs in Victoria and South Australia to cut the throats of fully conscious sheep. We need your help to send one last and all-important reminder as the ministers arrive for their dinner meeting, that caring Australians are depending on them to make the right decision.

• Where: Gate 2, Melbourne Cricket Ground
• When: 5:45pm, Thursday, 27th October (finishing 7pm)
• What to bring: Just yourself, we will have plenty of posters for people to hold
• More information: Call the Animals Australia office on 1800 888 584

Miss, of all the cruelty I have seen inside abattoirs, non-stunned slaughter of animals represents the single greatest cause of distress, pain and suffering I have born witness to.

Fortunately we understand that several ministers are already of the opinion that non-stunned slaughter is unacceptable, which means there is real hope to end this brutal practice in Australia. This rally may be the tipping point that gets the others over the line.

Please join our experienced campaigners for a peaceful gathering on Thursday evening and help us ensure that all animals in this country are extended this most basic legal protection.

I hope you can join us, Lyn White Campaign Director

P.S. You may be aware that the official meeting of the primary industries ministers will be held on Friday morning. We are rallying at their Thursday evening dinner meeting as it is expected that their position will be determined at this time. I hope you can attend, but even if you can't, you can have your say on our website right now.

Interrogate your purchases : ask where they come from

BUY, BUY AMERICAN PIE

A long, long time ago
we used to get our food home grown
and toothpaste used to make you smile

It used to be you'd shop with ease
never eating antifreeze
You'd plan to keep on living quite awhile

But now our goods are all delivered
from somewhere on the Yangtze River
No none knows the source there
so you might find some horse hair

But if corporations make a buck
they don't give a flying... Peking duck
And with this system we get stuck
today it makes you sigh

Now when you buy, buy an American pie
your grandma didn't bake it
it was made in Shanghai
where they engineered the apples to be juicy not dry

But the crust is made of cardboard and lye
don't feed it to your dog
he might die

Now did you eat a Tasty Cake
and did it make your stomach ache?
I could have said "I told you so"

And the reason you are looking wan
is some guy took bribes in Sichuan
so you just bit into little Debbie's toe

And now the toys you bought from Fisher Price
have toxins deemed unsafe for mice
and Elmo tends to wheeze
cus he's laced with PCBs

But of all my problems seen so far
when I see my cheap new DVR
I'll even brush my teeth with tar

And you will see that I'll
buy, buy from some young guy
I drive a Chevy and it's heavy
but the price is too high

Soon twenty bucks will buy a car from Shanghai
and honey that'll be the day we all die

~ written & performed by the Capitol Steps

From here

~~~~~~~~~

Related reading:

Food Security for the Faint of Heart

Gardening For the Faint of Heart

Further reading:

Permaculture research institute of Austraslia

China considers buying land overseas to secure food supply - report

Melamine in foods from China

Ban Chinese food imports

Chinese food giant to explore NSW

China takes steps to enforce food safety standards

China foods on the rise

 

Coal v Food v Water - on the Liverpool Plains of New South Wales

Fiona Simson

From Pauline Roberts of the Caroona Coal Action Group, via Networker Denis Wilson of The Nature of Robertson:

Dear All

We were delighted to welcome Lee Rhiannon MLC and Tony Windsor MP to our 1 Year Blockade Anniversary Thanksgiving Party today. Yes, we have kept this community-based blockade on the Duddy's property "Rossmar Park" going for one year preventing access for further damaging coal "exploration" on Prime Agricultural Land.

We held a multi-denominational service of thanksgiving today in the glorious sunshine, thankful for our productive land, our critical above-ground and aquifer supplies and our strong and resilient community. 130 people attended this great day with an open fire, enjoying mulled wine, hearty stew and damper and sticky date pudding laid on by the SOS Liverpool Plains girls. We were very pleased to find Graham Brown and Lance Batey in our midst and are grateful for the pledges of support from other similarly affected communities on the Darling Downs, like Felton.

Whilst we wait for a proper Water Study to begin, we are as committed as ever to preventing coal and gas mining on Australia's scarce Prime Agricultural Land, so this Blockade continues.

This Monday 20th July at 8.30pm, Four Corners will be running a story about our area: "The Good Earth" [www.abc.net.au/4corners] on ABC1. (It is repeated 11.35pm on Tuesday 21st) We hope you will be able to watch and that it has a positive result for those of us who believe food and water security is important.

Our thanks to Coal Communities for your continued support and good wishes.

Kind regards

Pauline Roberts

www.ccag.org.au

CCAG & SOS Liverpool Plains

~~~~~~~~

There is an excerpt of the transcript on the ABC website here.

~~~~~~~~

If you watched The Good Earth on Four Corners last night, you will have confronted one of the major issues facing us in Australia. What is happening on the Liverpool Plains, as Mrs Duddy so emotively pointed out, goes to the heart of our identity as Australians.

The Liverpool Plains is rich agricultural country - with its own underground aquifers. George Clift pointed out that in his seventy years of farming, he had suffered only one crop failure. On the dryest inhabited continent on earth, that is a boast that can seldom be made.

Under the ground is not only water, but coal which two separate companies, BHP Billiton and Shenua, have exploration rights for which they have spent stratospheric amounts of money to the cash-strapped New South Wales (NSW) government.

The Liverpool Plains is not the only place in Australia or the world in which this is occurring. I recently posted on the situation on that other place of great fertility, the Darling Downs in Queensland.

The essence is that one resource is being played off against another and against another: coal -v- food -v- water. What seems to have been forgotten by both miners and government is that we, in Australia, can survive without coal. We cannot survive without clean water and quality food.

Socially and politically, the protests and blockade on the Liverpool Plains is interesting.

The situation has the landed gentry whose huge agricultural holdings date back several generations and whose traditional political allegiance is to the conservative National Party resourcing the blockade and treating with The Greens as well as the local independent of National Party origins, Tony Windsor.

The Nationals are angry as can well be seen in the persons of Queensland Nationals, Barnaby Joyce (Senate Leader) and Ron Boswell. In fact, the anger, the action and re-action of The Nationals brought back memories of a similar response to the in-roads made into The Nationals vote by Pauline Hanson. It brings a smile, because decades - and a couple of generations of politicians - ago, Jack McEwan, Minister for Trade, did his best to provide an insurance policy for The Nationals who are reliant on a declining agricultural electoral base still by orienting his party to the mining industry.

Now, on Four Corners, is displayed Barnaby & Co on the horns of a dilemma for The Nationals: miners -v- agriculture; Australians -v- Chinese; Australians -v- international conglomerate pretending to be Australian.

So that gives one an idea of the politics and the economics involved. Then there is the personal, the social. Farmers on the blockade are promising not to succumb to financial blandishments from the miners. George Clift says that it won't happen with him. He will go out in a box first, he says. The much younger Chris Howarth has sold to Shenhua.

Chris is not the only one - but he, commendablyl, came to the camera and explained. And who can blame him. This is a man in his middle years with a wife and a young family. Shenhua are offering farmers more than the value of their property. Chris says that if he stayed, the situation of his property in relation to the geography of Shenhua's rights is such that his family would be living next door to an open-cut mine. How could one live with that? Lifestyle gone; livelihood jeopardised; property declining in value and the opportunity to underwrite the family's future. Surely, a no-brainer?

What is needed here is a clear-thinking response from government. Government must break the nexus of the clash of rights and resources. Government must stop behaving like an addict with its hand in the till and prostituting itself for every dollar it can get while selling the birthright of Australians - to food security - for the Biblical mess of pottage.

It is also high time that the electorate became able to see politicians withstanding the "winning ways" of international corporates and high-flying lobbyists, many of whom have long-standing personal and political connections to the government which happens to be in power at the time which means corporations frequently have a choice of political attractive lobbyists depending upon who is in power.

So we wait to hear what happens next?

• Will the agricultural interests of the Liverpool Plains be successful in the latest round of Court proceedings?
• Will the farmers of the Liverpool Plains remain entrenched within the National Party (my own prediction given the disciplined nature of the National Party vote) or defect to The Greens?
• Will the major and far-reaching environmental issues facing Australia transcend political, factional and social boundaries to establish cross-party support for intelligent and sensible policies on resource management?
• Will the miners be checked now that their behaviour has been aired on television?
• Will governments begin to look and act as if they represent the interests of Australians?
• Will governments take a tack away from the cynical and self-serving glad-handing of corporates and lobbyists and desist from forelock-tugging?

Permaculture in Castlemaine

BubbleShare: Share photos - Easy Photo Sharing

On 28 November, I was in Castlemaine. I was there for a meeting on water organised by Carol McDonough who provided me with the Cook's Tour prior to the meeting.

Part of the tour was to the headquarters of the Mount Alexander Sustainability Group (MASG).  Mount Alexander is the name of the shire of which Castlemaine is part.  The album above is of the marvellous permaculture garden that is part of MASG's historic premises.  Thank you Carol for a marvellous day.