plans

This community development project – looking at creating food security within the Harbour Basin by means of a co-operative model continues to buzz me big time!

What abundance is cascading in as the creative minds pool their imaginings for the project. I am engrossed with the vision aspect of the whole project, but I am also mindful of the finer detail.

Let me explain more…
It is great wisdom I believe to look to nature to see how she does things – she has multiple solutions on many levels for particular situations. So to achieve food security, food production needs to be on both a larger scale and on the micro scale and everywhere in between!

I am thinking, “How will I, personally – my household, at the micro level, contribute to food security?” I hesitate to call myself a gardener, just as I would hesitate to call myself an artist or a musician because entrenched beliefs held deep in my body say you can only be called these things when you are an expert. I am in the process of debunking these limiting beliefs! And besides I digress. I am a gardener!

My garden is getting more and more productive. I am playing with possibilities as to how I can add to local food production. Maybe I can link to OOOOBY or create something similar and co-ordinate the sharing/distribution of my produce – even small amounts.

Winter is an ideal time to get lots tidied up in the garden to increase this production I dream of. I like to use what I have to hand. The earthquakes, devastating as they are, do have some up sides! A small retaining concrete block wall on my property failed. It is now propped up, but the people who did the propping up took off all the capping blocks that were on the wall and stacked them up along the path. Well, I have found a great use for them. One garden bed now has edges. Another little step in making my garden more productive.

The baths that were perched up by the retaining wall have been brought down to the house level and I am now dreaming this year of a huge crop of strawberries at my door.

I am told that my house (concrete block) will be re-clad. I have already started to talk about using those blocks – strengthened with rebar and concrete (something the previous one didn’t have) to terrace the top part of my property so I can access fruit trees and other potentials on small parcels of flat land. I am planning on getting a cutting from the community garden’s thornless blackberry to cover part of the new wall. Maybe too I can give the hens a holiday every now and again in a hillside terrace version of a chicken tractor.


written by Margaret Jefferies, chair of Project Lyttelton