* I’m finding serenity in my Sydney mornings, thanks to gardening at Pocket City Farm
(Image from Pocket City Farm website.)
Hadley’s story . . .
Since I arrived in Sydney from the US about three weeks ago, I have spent my days outdoors engaging with nature and with the people that care for it. Here are my observations so far and some early thoughts.
• Here I am on a previous design of a coolseat on the footpath outside Michael’s house, Sydney’s Sustainable House. (Michael got me to sit for a microsecond on a VERY wet coolseat in pelting rain. He was dry inside the house.)
Every Thursday morning, Michael and I have walked or bused to the Sydney suburb of Camperdown, where a tiny farm sits on ¼ of an acre and spent our mornings volunteering at Pocket City Farm. It’s about an hours walk from the Sydney Opera House.
We start at 8 am when the winter sun is not yet high enough to warm the gardens (or me). Bundled up, we often begin by clearing beds from overgrown crops and weeds or harvesting salad greens. Connecting with food in the making, I find myself reflecting on the labour and time needed to bring me the foods I enjoy daily but often don’t know or understand where they’ve come from.
• This former bowling green site is now an urban farm and I’m gardening there once a week
Working at this farm has brought a lot of serenity to the start of my Sydney days.
Alongside planting seeds in the ground, we also plant new relationships with fellow volunteers and workers at Pocket City Farms.
While planting leeks this past Thursday, I had a long discussion with two other volunteers about our lives and our commitments to sustainability. The conversation was wide-ranging and often filled with interjections about how much we enjoyed volunteering at the farm and wished more places existed like this.
We concluded that everyone should have the opportunity to engage with nature – especially to garden growing food. When we garden we can grow more care in ourselves for our Earth and learn to recognise the problems we give it by wasting food or selling stuff that’s too filled with unnecessary, harmful components as ‘food’ .
Coolseats are another way to grow our care for Earth. Coolseats are a new composting option: a seat that is simultaneously a compost and a garden bed. Some are on the footpath garden outside Michael’s house and he puts his food waste into it. I have also taken up the habit of collecting food scraps, placing them weekly into coolseats, and tracking my food waste using the coolseats calculator.
I am spending my internship developing the coolseats project broadly, in Chippendale, and in locations like Pocket City Farm.
Coolseats have a similar mission to the urban farm. By making composting and food waste available and accessible to any citizen, we are increasing the conversation about food, food waste and getting people to care about what they eat. Passion can have a snowball effect, and like Pocket City Farms made me more engaged with food and urban agriculture, coolseats can work similarly.
This week, in further collaboration with the farm, the first coolseat will be set up on the property. We want to help the farm end food waste for the restaurant they are co located with on site. While Pocket City Farms compost all their own waste (and all the coffee grounds from the cafe on site) there's currently too much food waste generated in the restaurant for the existing farm compost system to handle. We hope this cool seat will be the first of many.
• The free Winter Solstice Festival at Pocket City Farm - I’ll be there with a coolseat you can check out and discuss with me
On Saturday, June 22nd, the farm will host a free winter solstice event showcasing local stalls, including coolseats, where Michael and I will be able to share the mission and goals of coolseats with visitors - I hope to see you there.
Hadley Flanagan, Intern with Sustainable House