September snuffles

Ahhh, the last baking hot day in the garden before the September weather came upon us. Here's the state of play. House end:

Wall end. All quite a change since we started, innit:

Here's Miss Hughes, addressing the stereotype that we Green Party types are just a bunch of hippies.

and here's a pair of horticultural philosophers

One piece of very good news. Yesterday Ed and I met and talked to the upstairs neighbour. She was very friendly, though initially more than a little surprised to see what had been happening in the garden while she'd been away on holiday. We're very much hoping that we can work something out with her, so that we can really go for the full permaculture treatment.

I'll mix it a bit here, with a few pics from the Climate Camp Tar Sands demo on Tuesday. A shot of a couple of my in-house placards.

Thanks to Leonie the photographer for this one. Do you geddit?

OK, now to put some order to it all....

We started outside the National Portrait Gallery, which is sponsored by BP. Shame on them.

Then we stopped for a while outside the Canadian embassy, which is just off the other side of Trafalgar Square. Here's Clayton Thomas-Muller (see my previous entry), getting the crowd going. Unfortunately I kept missing out on getting a decent short video clip of him shouting "BP - Criminal!" and "Climate - Justice!" but fortunately someone with a better camera than me got that. The clip is below

Finally we headed up to BP headquarters, on St. James' Square, just off Regent Street, south of Piccadilly Circus.

Here's the clip of Clayton that I was talking about



And here's a clip from the mainstream media.

Tar No Ta.

Watch that first. Tar, and see ya Tuesday morning, if you were there.

And then watch the interview with Clayton Thomas-Muller. This guy is an awesome speaker.



And more detail from this link. Here are Lionel Lepine and George Poitras, representatives of the Athabasca region First Nations, discussing yesterday the film and the actions which must follow.

Photo left: Hackney Green Party sends a delegation over to Climate Camp. General thoughts on the experience. Very chilled out and pretty chilly towards the end of my stay, with that healthy power generator that was blowing across the Heath. There were so many things to learn there, and not much time to make choices about that. The Tar Sands issue stood out front and centre for me at least, but I guess that it may not have been the same for everyone. I would have loved to learn a bit about building a pedal-powered sound system, but I think that I maybe possibly don't really have the time for that hobby right now. Shame.

Lewisham Green Party sent a creditably large contingent to greet the Camp, though I must confess I was a bit jealous that the Camp hadn't chosen Hackney Marshes. Another time, hopefully. All but one, I think, of Lewisham's six Green councillors were there (and apologies if the last one was and I didn't count him - I just don't know). Here are those five, plus Jean Lambert MEP

OK then, back to the allotment today, innit.

Tangential Post

Just to show that there's a bit more to Green politics than allotments. These were taken on Critical Mass, on the way to Blackheath to visit the Climate Camp. The quality is low, granted (though the sound isn't too bad). The other thing is that I can't get my phone to record for more than 30 seconds at the moment.

All of which = v. annoying, so for that reason I've put two snippets. Yes, there is a bloke in the second video riding a penny farthing:

Ah, I keep forgetting to take my camera

It would have very been nice to photo-document today's bit of fun in the car park down at the back of Café Oto in Dalston. Never mind, I'm sure that there will be a few more wombling sessions for me to document with the camera.

We stripped a few large packing crates with a hammer, a crowbar and my Streetfighter-style sideways jumping kick. Dangerous, bruv.

Thanks very much to Sally and Phillipa for bringing the pick-up truck. It's a community fing, innit (though we still do need a bigger van for this kind of thing - help somebody, please!) I'll take some photos of the stuff we brought over next time we're in the garden.

Ah, you might want to know what we're planning to do with that stuff we got today. Many's the thing we can do with it, I suppose. Tool shed, garden furniture, full size snooker table. You've just got to use your imagination.

Contemplation #1

Just a small session yesterday. Periodic rain was spotting on us, and we were few in number. It was just Ed and myself, really, although Anna and Joe turned up at the end.

I forgot my camera, so there's nothing to show, I'm afraid. In any case, we didn't do much more than hack out some ivy and take down the rest of the tree which we had cut on Sunday. There's just the stump of it left now, and we'll have a bit of a back-breaking job digging up the roots. Other than that, Ed and I spent a fair bit of time discussing namby-pamby permaculture stuff, and since I don't have any photos, this is as good a moment as any to introduce this text, which I'll certainly be quoting from time to time.

As soon as Ed came out with the phrase "one straw" I jumped on it. The term was coined by Masanobu Fukuoka, a crazy Japanese guy (at least, everybody thought he was crazy) who dropped his promising academic career and went to live in the country, with the idea of developing a new, and yet ages-old technique of farming. A couple of decades later agricultualists were coming to visit him from far and wide to see how his super-organic farming method managed to produce amazing crop yields. His fundamental premise, as illustrated by the following quote in one of the early chapters of the book, is that the more we humans try to tinker with nature, the more complicated we make things for ourselves in the long run. Core Green values:

So, here's what Ed's thinking to do with Dave's garden. We can treat it as an experiement - do a completely hands-off Fukuoka-style patch in one area of the garden, and do a traditional "Dig For Victory" allotment-style patch elsewhere. The latter is what, for instance, Ray (see the previous entry, and this link) does every year, digging up all the ground to start all over again. The central notion in permaculture is that the closer you live to nature, the less you should need to make that kind of effort.

Let the battle of ideas commence.

Clear-up #4 - Sunday

Aha, Manisha made it over, finally. We'd almost given up.

Interesting discussions today with Guru Ed and Joe's dad Ray, who came over all the way from Richmond to see how we're getting on, and to offer his advice. Ray's an old hand in the allotment movement (is there an allotment "movement" as such?), and you'll see a few of his thoughts on allotments and many other social issues in his blog, which you can check here. Ray's a bit sceptical about what permaculture actually means, and seems to think it's just a namby-pamby intellectual gloss on what is a fairly obvious thing that any of us can observe if we engage our brain for a few minutes, that as the world's population increases beyond six or seven billion humans, we are all going to have to think a lot harder about where the food we eat comes from, and start making a bit for ourselves. Ray's been putting that into practice for forty years, so fair play to him.  

Ed's more "on it" as far as the permaculture side of things goes. His scepticism, by contrast, is about whether the immediate environment which we're working on in this project will allow us to put permaculture principles fully into practice. Three factors which we need to think about are:

1. How long is Dave going to be in the place? A proper permaculture project takes time to implement.
2. Dave is in the garden flat, which gives access to the whole of the garden. That's fine, but one of the things you need to be able to do in a permaculture garden is to collect rainwater from the roof. To do this, we'll need to talk to the people in the upstairs flat, or possibly to their landlord/landlady. Like that, it starts to look complicated.
3. And, ah, yes, we really do need to clean up Dave's kitchen :~}
   

Ed's wondering, then, if we ought to scale down our ambition for the time being, and just focus on growing a few veggies. It's not as if we won't learn a lot by doing that, in any case. There'll still be plenty to write on this blog. No doubt about that.  

And so, what did we do today then? Joe enjoyed himself up a tree (aah, can someone please remind me what the name of this tree was). What, Green Party members cutting down trees? Well, it depends on the tree, doesn't it? If the tree can produce food for us to eat, that's fine, and nut trees can be a very sustainable and effective alternative to (GM) cereal crops; but the only really "useful" tree which Dave has in the garden is the pear tree near to the back door, and the other trees have only been serving to block out the sunlight which we're going to need if we're going to plant proper fruit and vegetable patches. So, down it went, and we spent pretty much the rest of the day lopping the branches, and separating what we had. The straightest of the branches will get used as stakes when we start planting, the leaves will get composted (although the leaves from this tree will take an awfully long time to decompose), and what we're thinking to do with the smaller branches and twigs is to get hold of a wood chipper which will break the wood down to the point where it can go into the composter. So, if you've got a wood chipper which you can loan us for free or just for a small fee, please get in touch.

It was a beautiful day for it. Here are two of the main carnage culprits enjoying the afternoon sun on a bed of leaves, and contemplating permaculture principles. In its own way, that's a pretty important part of the process, you know.

Clear-up #3 - Saturday

This is how the garden looks after three sessions. There's already a radical change.

In attendance: 6 plus Dave, who did actually pick up a shovel for about 20 seconds, though we unfortunately don't have the photographic evidence :~}

Without Guru Ed (aka Mr Miyagi) we were a little bit rudderless for today's session. We started off doing a bit more clear-up, and then we got a bit bored and wanted to do something more radical, so we got stuck into some more of the nettles and took down a couple of bushes. We also got permission from Dave to take down a couple of trees which are blocking the light coming into the garden. So we've got a bit more carnage to look forward to over the next few sessions, before we settle down to applying the more gentle and harmonious principles of permaculture (or something close to that, anyway).

And here's the woodpile that we're going to have next to the pond. This is to encourage beetles to hang around the garden and do all the good work they can with breaking down nutrients. A very interesting picture, I realise.