Hello hungry permaculture people,
The club has taken the quantum leap to a new level of permaculture! We have started the new “Learn, Do, Eat” initiative envisioned by Tarla, our club secretary. We are linking our learning and work in the gardens directly for preparing and eating our crops.
Last Saturday at the Bendigo Bank Community Garden the great Tom Kendall provided the “Learning” aspect by helping us understand composting and the energy systems flowing through it. We performed the “Doing” by clearing the space for the new propagation shed and by chopping and dropping a portion of the garden. We then harvested an amazing bounty of crops including three types of sweet potato, arrowroot, tropical spinaches including Sambung, lettuces, sweet potato tips, and herbs. This led to the “Eating” part.
Sourdough Steve had made pizzas the night before for the volunteers and the oven was still hot on Saturday morning. Steve warmed the bread buns which he had cooked the night before in the oven and prepared our veggies as spreads on the buns. We learned several ways to prepare the veggies and the result was very delicious!!! Tom Kendall brought some butter made from the milk from his own cows to add an extra layer of fine taste to the banquet. Young Asher Powell was an enthusiastic helper all morning and he really enjoyed the lunch.
The “Learn, Do, Eat” concept is a very important step to our permaculture journey. It is the path to getting the subtropical crops, which thrive in our Noosa climate, into our diets and into our daily routine. Many of our crops are perennial which basically means that we can pick a little from them throughout the year. For example, it seems that sweet potato and Sambung grows all year round and we can take a few leaves most days. When we mix these crops together in a syntrophic system or with a large diversity of other crops, we get an all year round harvest. The key is to get into the habit of short bursts of gardening and harvesting most days.
Please come on Saturday mornings to join us. This is a revolution.
Learn, Do, Eat,
Tom
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