In about 20 city blocks, about 45 minutes walk from Sydney’s Opera House, there are about a thousand fruit trees, herbs, medicinal plants in our Chippendale road gardens.
Since 2008 our community has been planting, harvesting and enjoying the food and community which growing food and gardening inevitably produces.
Fancy some rosemary for your gin? it’s here.
• Four Pillars Shiraz gin + Chippendale rosemary
Or some green paw paw salad? The green paw paws for it are here, too.
• Green paw paws ready for harvesting from a paw paw tree in one of our Chippendale road gardens
There are about 6 or so paw paw trees in our Chippendale road gardens.
Green paw paws make a delicious healthy, cheap salad. They’re very different to a yellow, soft, ripe paw paw.
To harvest them, if they're up high poke them off the tree with a long stick. They're hard and the fall doesn't damage them. Wash them then make a salad with them.
• Two green paw paws on the ground after harvesting them with a stick
They're there for anyone - help yourself.
• Green paw paw salad recipe from Sustainable House
The recipe is from my book, Sustainable Food (there are copies in most Council libraries, and it’s also an ebook).
The book has the history of these and other gardens, planning, politics, how to compost guide, how to prune guide, how to grow community and stories of food growing, soil growing and community growing success around Earth.
We negotiated and assisted with the drafting of a policy which allows anyone in the City of Sydney Council area to garden without approval. The Footpath Gardening Policy has contributed to our gardens being used as a precedent for other gardens in road verges across Australia.
As the gardens depend on healthy soil and good quantities of water we also have public composting options for turning waste food into soil, and various options for keeping rainwater where it falls to make the gardens partly self-watering.
But . . . is there enough water?
Footpaths are water rich
When we harvest rainwater from footpaths we can cool our street, cut our air con bills and grow food, plants and trees.
There are two sources of water from footpaths.
Run on – rain that falls on the path and runs off it.
Run off – rain that falls on adjoining roofs, goes into a downpipe and under the footpath either to be absorbed there or to be wasted to run into the gutter and then to pollute the ocean or river with the gunk the water picks up along the way there.
Let’s count how much free water is on a typical footpath.
Take a Chippendale footpath outside a terrace and do the sums:
Run on: footpath is 1.5 wide and the distance beside the terrace is 5 metres = harvesting area of 7.5 metres
Run off; roof draining to the footpath is 50 square metres
Total rainwater harvesting area = 57.5 square metres
Average rainfall is 1270 mm a year ie 1270 litres per square metre
Total water available per year is 1270 x 57.5 = 73,025 litres
If there are 10 terraces in a block, that’s 730,250 litres.
That’s enough water to ‘feed’ a dozen trees, hundreds of plants both edible and decorative.
Yum!