Category Archives: Neighbourhood pleasures

November 9, 2016 · 1:25 pm

This week in guerilla gardening

This morning there was a little outing.  Planting at a culvert beside the local train station with cyclists whizzing past and runners raising eyebrows.

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It’s interesting working so close to the train line.  I moved into this neighbourhood because of the public transport, and the lucky find of a place we could afford, discovered when I took a wrong turn on my bike coming home from work.  The place was for private sale with a handmade sign and we had given up on finding anything in this spot.  I appreciate the public transport, and rail freight too, a great deal.  But some days I also reflect on the spectacularly ugly way we do these things here. I live in hope that the future will find better ways and that these trains will be powered more sustainably soon.  I put in more weaving rushes on the banks of the channel, and some saltbush above it.  There was a whole purple towel just inside the fence for the railway, but well past the end of the path.  Curious.  It can join the dyeing towels.

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And then there was weeding.  The best way to keep the poisoners at bay!  Several of these plants have come up.  This one is in bud.  Does anyone more knowledgeable know what they are?  I think my parents have them in their garden, where I think they give off a curry (fenugreek, perhaps) kind of scent in midsummer.  Wandering about on the interwebs, Mum and Dad probably have Curry Plant (Helichrysum italicum) and … this may not be the same plant, but I can’t readily identify it as [locally] native or a weed.  Identification is a work in progress. Maybe the recent flooding rains have borne seeds here, as I have seen it nowhere else nearby. The plant growing in this reveg site I am working on also comes up in the older graves on the West Tce cemetery, where they have recently been poisoned along with the sow thistles.  Poison, even in cemeteries.  Friends, let me push up weeds if needs be, when the time comes.  Weeds may be plants growing where they are unwanted but routine and repeated poisoning is not a great alternative.

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It’s one of the things I love about guerilla gardening, and thinking of it as caring for Kaurna land in some small way, that I understand more and more of the small ways of the place around me.  Both its suffering under trash and poison and the way plants grow and spread and long to live and small creatures find ways to get by or thrive.  The previous round of plantings have survived and begun to grow.

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I weeded out the things I recognise to be weeds (less fumitory, more prickly lettuce and flax-leaf fleabane this time).  I left the unnamed plant.  It may be native and is a handsome, hardy, silver leaved plant in any case.

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On the weekend I weeded on my way home from the train station and there was a broken bucket to pick up and use, into the bargain. Chicken happiness, neighbourhood weeding, and trash turned into recycling, surely the trifecta of the guerilla weeder.

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Then there were weedy poppies alongside the railway line. Beautiful.

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And shirley poppies at home in abundance.

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With bee revelry into the bargain.

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One landed on my thumbnail to inspect me.  I am not allergic but even so it gave me a start, then I blew gently on it, and off it went.  Blessed are the bees and those of us lucky enough to be able to appreciate them.

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November 1, 2016 · 3:02 pm

Dianella planting

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You might remember this street planting.  The dianellas have grown a lot, but the grand plan of the person who envisioned this sweep of strappy leaves was disrupted when plant thieves, and/or people who had exciting alternative plans for dianellas, took 9 or 12 of them over several nights soon after they were planted.  In the end I planted ruby saltbush to fill the gaps and keep the weeds down.  But I felt for the person who pictured in their mind a thriving mass planting.  In autumn I took divisions off the side of some of these thriving clumps, and almost all of them grew.

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Out came the saltbush, looking less than great at the end of winter.  The dianella babies were enough to fill almost every gap (I seem to remember counting!)

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Fingers crossed for them to grow and thrive…

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If they don’t, the seedling saltbush on the edge of the patch stand ready to spring into the space!  Every time I looked at these seedlings as I passed them, this fabulous song celebrating the permaculture principle about making use of edges came to mind. See if you like it too.  Not sure what I am talking about?  Details on the permaculture principle here.

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As you were after that digression… Some boobiallas into the ground nearby for good measure…

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Just in time for the rain!

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October 24, 2016 · 8:17 pm

In guerilla gardening this week

…there has been some bad news.  First the evidence that the poisoner had come through mounted.  Then, concrete pipes were delivered to the neighbourhood (which is a good thing–they are intended to improve drainage and prevent flooding) and placed on top of quite a few plants.  Then the workers who installed the pipes drove their car up onto more plants, killing quite a few.  Then they took out an entire bank of saltbush that were a really good size when they installed the pipes.  And as I assessed the damage I realised that someone had come through and pulled out all of the wallaby grass.  I am sure it was done in error.  They didn’t realise it was wallaby grass and no doubt wondered why the poisoner had left it untouched.  So anyway.  I planted these this morning.

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The neighbour whose place is next to the new pipe and I had a chat about how unnecessary all the damage was, but agreed we could fix it in time.  Otherwise it has been a week of weeding the neighbourhood (I have no idea how the poisoner’s route is determined–but mercifully, it isn’t complete coverage). As I was headed over to tend to my friends’ chickens, I spent an hour nearby grubbing out this awful invasive grass.  I had spent all spring pulling it every time I passed, but it’s called ‘invasive’ for a reason.

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On the way home, I collected rubbish.  May as well.

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I planted this rather lovely specimen only last summer, and now it is looking very much at home. And, now there is less rubbish and less invasive grass in the neighbourhood. I can feel good about that.

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October 12, 2016 · 1:44 pm

Planting the weaving rushes

This is one of my newer planting sites. I’ve weeded it over a couple of times, collected rubbish and planted some things here to see what could make it.  Then this grille appeared and there was a flood.  So there were just a couple of plants left.

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I started out by weeding and collecting more broken glass. I’d just been to a workshop on weeds and their uses, and so I took it to be interesting that this place has pink flowering fumitory rather than the more common (but not so medicinal, evidently) white flowering fumitory.  Noted.  I continue to find it funny that when I was still in school in the early eighties I would read Mrs Grieve’s (English) Herbal and wish all these amazing plants might be growing anywhere I would ever meet the.  Well, dear reader, many of them do, but it took me a long time to realise that they were weeds!

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In the clean up I found more intriguing rusty stuff (on the left–I realise my trowel has seen a lot of use!)

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So out came weeds and in went plants.

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Even more saltbush and sea fig on the upper parts pf the site…

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And into the banks where so much water had so recently passed, I put some of the Ngarrindjeri weaving rushes that have grown up quietly since the weaving workshop. If there is a year they might make it, this year of flooding rains might be the one.

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A portrait of the gardener…

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And time to head home.

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September 27, 2016 · 3:50 pm

More guerilla planting

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One weekend, out I went with pigface, also known as Carpobrotus glaucescens or sea fig.  It has an edible fruit which is quite delicious.  These started life as cuttings in autumn but now a couple have started to flower.  The world is wet around here, time to get them into the ground.

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I walked up to a tram stop where I have planted a lot.  I spoke to the poisoners last time I was there and weeded to try and help them not to poison saltbush of various kinds, boobialla and wattle… One of them told me that ruby saltbush don’t absorb the poison.  How I wish that were true, but it doesn’t appear that way to me  I have had many turn black after the poisoners pass through.  When I went back recently to catch a tram I could see lots of weeds and few plants.  Some of the larger ones, rhagodias in particular, had made it and were doing well.  This time I arrived to find the whole bed deep in mulch.  The mulch was only a few days in place, and all over the plants.  Three cheers for mulch, three boos for burying the living.  I spent time excavating sedges, boobialla, correas, pigface (the large one thriving here drove my decision to plant the bed out with these highly recognisable and quickly spreading plants)… and everything else I could find.  I managed to find a few leaves sticking out and dig some plants out that way.  Others I found by accident, parting the mulch to plant other things!

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In went the sea figs. Then home again, collecting a  lot of rubbish after the Royal Show and the storms of recent weeks.

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I scored some promising rusty stuff, and had a chat with a chap smoking a cigarette by the road who clearly knew what guerilla gardening was, asked me if that was what I was doing, and was generally approving and cheerful toward my project.  I put a few more plants in along the route home, and then it was time for clean up.

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September 24, 2016 · 3:35 pm

Spring in the dye garden

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I had a query from a lovely reader recently and it caused me to consider what was in my dye garden, which is also the flower and vegie garden, really.  So here is a little taking stock.  Woad is showing its capacity to self sow.  I have gone from struggling to get a seedling out of a hard won pack of seed, to finding I could get it to grow, to this… self sowing in the veggie beds.  Let’s see if these plants manage the summer.

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The one-year-old-woad is pretty big.  Pity I didn’t harvest it at the right time.  I still might have another go… but meanwhile some of it is sending up flower heads and the seeds will dye too! This is the woad-and-potato bed beside the peach tree.

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This is the woad-greens-rhubarb-you name it bed.  Flower heads rising in the middle top of the picture.

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The new raised madder bed, with added pansies, evacuated to this spot when their pot fell apart without warning.  I think the madder already likes this spot. Californian poppies are doing well in the old one.

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Speaking of pansies, I’ve been dead heading these regularly to use India Flint’s ice flower method on them.  They are in a yoghurt pot in the freezer, accumulating. I love my pansy dyed thread and have faced the fact that I don’t need kilogrammes of silk thread at this stage and therefore can happily use quite small quantities of dye stuff.  I have also been known to deadhead pansies in public plantings.  But it goes so much better when I don’t have company, as this kind of weirdness may offend one’s friends. In the top of the picture, the weld. Some of it died months back for no obvious reason–the main stem seemed to rot or be nibbled away.  Mysterious!

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And there are these pansies too. Only some of them make sense for dye but they are all lovely.  I am in favour of loveliness.

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Our E Scoparia has made it through the skeletonising caterpillar season and is now my height!

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Black hollyhocks old–

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–and new.

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Marigold seedlings coming up in a metal tub I salvaged off hard rubbish during winter.

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I do use rhubarb leaves to create acidic dye baths, but mostly rhubarb is for eating and not dyeing in our parts! And the rest of my dye garden is out in the suburb and other people’s gardens… I am a dye gleaner.

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September 21, 2016 · 3:18 pm

The springtime, it brings on the planting

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It’s spring! Well, maybe not where you live.  But it is where I live!  the first poppy came out!

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Bark is peeling…

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My part of the country is better known for droughts than flooding rains, but we had a close call and neighbours on our street were flooded.  This is just round the corner…

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And this is one of my planting sites, with salt bush to the right and water pouring down the bike path to the left!

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So I planted out sheoak seed of two kinds.

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And the last few months’ collection of E Scoparia seed.  I’ve been tucking all the gumnuts I find into this bowl and there is a satisfying drift of tiny seeds at the bottom.

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And there were, needless to say, also saltbush seeds involved.  And now, we wait!

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September 7, 2016 · 3:59 pm

Quandong planting…

I mentioned to my parents that I was trying to grow a quandong (Santalum Acuminatum).  This is a native tree that carries edible fruits. It was, and is, known to Indigenous peoples who ate it, and is one of the better known bushfoods.  Some non-Indigenous people call it native peach but to me it is more like rhubarb, and yet unlike rhubarb, being its own thing. It is sour and tangy but the texture is quite firm, and softens with cooking.  It was one of the special treats of my childhood.  Free food was always exciting in my family but some free food was more exciting. Quandongs were especially good, partly because they often led to quandong pie and pie was a rarity.  Plus, the fun of cracking the pits to eat the nuts. When we lived in the goldfields in Western Australia we would forage for these fruits, finding the trees because emus left telltale signs they had been eating them. We had a tree in our yard in one mining town we lived in. My grandmother had a tree in her back yard.  But these trees turn out to require a symbiotic relationship with another plant/s and they are quite hard to grow in your backyard (depending on where it is). They resist domestication.

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My comment to my father resulted in a surprise gift of saved quandong pits.  My uncle has a grove of trees at his place further north in our state and preserving them is a huge seasonal task, because the fruits are small (perhaps the size of a hazelnut in its shell–smaller than a walnut in its husk) and the edible part is at best the thickness of orange peel and more often the thickness of mandarin peel around the pit, and about the same texture when raw. My uncle had seeds dating back to 2011, saved with the location of the original tree marked on them (most were from the farm where my aunt grew up).  I have no idea if they are viable.  But there were kilograms of them! And then there were about 5 fruits saved in an envelope that Dad had saved from a tree he found at a lookout, that he thought would be extra suitable for a dry site.

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Well, I took my uncle’s advice–he thinks these are easy to grow but my experience is different–scuffed up the mulch in the front yard where it has taken only 3 years to get our quandong tree to knee height (but the fact it is alive and growing is a triumph), and put them in.  I planted lots in the front yard, and then headed out into the neighbourhood planting them in mulched areas all over the place where I presume the chances are slim but success would be awesome! I hope the winter rain and now the spring weather persuades these little pits to seek out the light and a companion plant and all the other necessities of life.

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August 26, 2016 · 3:40 pm

Tending the sedges

The sun is out some days now, and I am well after quite a lot of winter snuffling, so I have been out in the neighbourhood.

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I set out with 16 ruby saltbush seedlings.  Some went in at the end of a street.  First my friend stopped on his way to work and we had a chat about the risks to this patch when the Royal Show opens and pressure for car parking creates all manner of hazards for plants large and small. Their prospects have been much improved since we first put out plant protective bunting. Then I was hailed by a man who lives right at that end of the street.  He has concerns about bad treatment of the plants and also about crime and drug taking, and shared them with me. Clearly his interventions have led to some of the recent changes in our area to close off access points to public land where it is clear some people are using after dark.  He has been putting stakes beside some of my plantings and they are mostly thriving. So I tried to accentuate the positive and emphasise the long term nature of the project and how much better this part of the neighbourhood looks now than it did in the years before he moved in.

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Then I moved around to a nearby reserve and planted the remainder of my seedlings in gaps left as other plants have died. I found a huge grub, something I see seldom these days.  I remember as a child how exciting it was when Dad would dig one up, and he would put it on his spade and set it a little way off so that birds could come and eat it.  I am glad some beetle will get to live here. I carefully put it back under some mulch out of the sight of passing birds. It looked succulent, even to my unwilling eyes.

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But my main task was to tend to the sedges growing in this area.

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There are lots of them growing beside a pedestrian and cycle path, but some of them have been faring badly in recent years after having been extremely healthy earlier in life.

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Now that I have learned about these plants from the Ngarrindjeri Aunties, I understand that the way the council has treated these plants (a rough haircut 10 cm above ground every year) is probably killing them.

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In some sad cases, only the root mass and a lot of dead sedge is left, but in others there is still a little foliage coming on. So I cleared away the dead to make way for the living.

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Having had their lesson in how the plants spread I could see that some of the plants that are there now are new plants that have been sent out by some of those that are dead or perhaps dormant.  In other cases, I hope that using the Aunties’ wisdom might let the old plant recover.  Meantime my little sprouts are coming along and perhaps this is a place they can be planted eventually.  Then, some rubbish collection and home again.

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July 21, 2016 · 4:56 pm

Train station plantings

I finally decided to plant out the Eucalyptus Scoparia I manged to grow from seed.  I have been planting out an area near the railway line for some time now and it has gone from bare and weedy to bushy and well covered. There is plenty of protection for a tiny tree now!

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I planted some more ground covers and was surprised to find that the seafoam statice that had been doing so well there had vanished, with some holes left behind.  I hope it has been dug out and replanted somewhere where it was wanted.

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The E Scoparia went in behind a bench where I’m hoping it will be safe to grow.

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Later in the day I headed over to a new place I have been thinking over.  It is a barren space adjoining the railway station in my neighbourhood, with an open drainage route running through it.  I have been wondering whether the rushes might grow in the drainage channel, which is quite mossy in places at this time of year. I thought I’d start with the sides of the space though.

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I took over some native pigface (Carprobutus glaucescens) which has grown readily from cuttings, some saltbush, a hop bush and a eucalypt (unknown species).

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In they went.  There was some soil here and a lot of sandy unpromising material as well.

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And, there was so much broken glass.  It looks to me as though someone/s must have had fun smashing bottles against the bridge walls here at some point.  So I collected all I could.

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I took my haul of rubbish home and tucked the rusty wire into my iron water jar for later use in dyeing.

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