ALS members Blogs

Last Updated on Thursday, 02 May 2013 08:58 Written by Administrator Saturday, 06 April 2013 21:11   What is a blitz, I hear you ask? A blitz, or to use its full title “permablitz” is where a group of Permaculture people (“permies”) get together at someone’s place and hack, chop, dig, construct, shred and generally do stuff to your garden to help you live more sustainably. We hosted one recently with Permaculture Sydney West (PSW) and they are a great thing. Stuff that would take you a couple of weeks to do by yourself (or you couldn’t do by yourself) is accomplished in a couple of hours. We got trees trimmed, shredded and mulched, firewood (next years’) cut, the old cob pizza oven deconstructed and the herb spiral redeveloped, all in a matter of hours.It is wonderful to have all these people get together to help you out and hopefully...

Last Updated on Thursday, 06 December 2012 16:37 Written by Administrator Tuesday, 27 November 2012 19:40 An idea that was put forward by one of our members at Permaculture Sydney West (PSW) was for members to share the skills that they have developed over their lives. PSW is just a group of ordinary people but it became obvious that the membership had lots of skills that they could pass on to interested people, usually other members and the passion to do it. The person who suggested the idea is now the coordinator and she sets the sessions up as required. There are a lot of things out there that our parents and grandparents knew how to do as a matter of course, but we of the modern world have not been interested enough to acquire the skills ourselves. It is great to see a resurgence of interest in things like...

Last Updated on Saturday, 09 June 2012 10:55 Written by Administrator Friday, 08 June 2012 17:31 Before we could hold the big day, I had to have one more meeting with the vice Principle (Gwen) who was driving the project to identify exactly what we expected to achieve on the day and the resources we would need to accomplish those expectations. We decided to split the people there on the day into three teams, assuming we had enough, one for the fruit trees and fish scale swales, one for the mandala garden and one for the wicking beds and if time permitted the flower towers. The herb spiral and chook tractor would have to wait for another time. Gwen and I had both developed various contacts over the years and we both used them to get as much of the materials that we would need for the day on the...

Last Updated on Monday, 12 March 2012 19:38 Written by Administrator Monday, 12 March 2012 19:10 One of the things I have wanted to get involved in for years was to set up productive gardens in our local schools. For me there could be no higher purpose than to be involved in teaching the next generation how to grow their own food and live more sustainably. I had considered approaching the schools where our daughters went, but since they had left school more than ten years ago, any connection would be pretty tenuous at best, so I had not worked out how to crack that one. Due to the work with the veggie groups that I do locally my name has been bandied around (even, if you can believe it, without any associated curse words!) and the local primary school Vice Principal gave me a ring a few weeks ago....

Last Updated on Monday, 01 August 2011 07:58 Written by Administrator Sunday, 31 July 2011 20:25 Starting a community vegetable gardening group in the Western Suburbs by Greg Harriden If you have read my article on conducting community workshops, you should read this one as well. It is written by Greg Harriden, my partner in crime in the community workshop business. Greg is a community worker who was respinsible for conceiving the idea and then funding the idea, which I was able to help make a reality, at least in part. Anyway, here is the process from an alternative viewpoint.Nev Sweeney?Developing? communities: frustrating, ambiguous, exciting When I was employed as a community development worker in a small organisation in Western Sydney, I was given a relatively clean slate to work with. The community that I was to ?develop? was a small suburb with only 1000 dwellings, housing around 3,500 inhabitants. At the...

Last Updated on Wednesday, 02 November 2011 19:04 Written by Administrator Sunday, 05 June 2011 13:50 Are you a sustainable living guru? Or, like me, are you just someone who has experience of living a more sustainable life that you wish to share with others? Either way (or anywhere in between) one way of letting others tap into your experience and learn from what you have done is to conduct some workshops in your community. This is a very rewarding thing to do, sharing your hard won knowledge and experience with those who are just staring out so if you are in a position to do it, it is worth considering. I have found it to be a huge amount of fun! Setting the Boundary Living more sustainably is a wide field covering many diverse subjects so to stop yourself from getting caught up in trying to cover too much...

Written by Administrator Thursday, 05 May 2011 21:03 Some years ago we realised that while we were trying to live more sustainable lives and encouraging others to do so, the impact we were having outside our own family group was negligible. The neighbours were tolerant of our foibles but not really interested and apart from that the only record of our efforts was the odd article in Grass Roots magazine. We were at an eco-show and I talked with a gentleman from the alternative Technology Association who suggested we open for Sustainable House Day and since then we have opened on sustainable house day for 5 of the last 6 years and we now open every year for National Permaculture Day as well. While it would be quite within the realms of possibility to hold an open day yourself, just for your local area to showcase what you have been...

Last Updated on Wednesday, 23 February 2011 15:06 Written by Administrator Wednesday, 23 February 2011 14:50 The group has been formed and the first couple of meetings have been conducted and we are still getting new members and over a dozen people at our last meeting. This first meeting was all about setting up the group and the second was about planning what to grow so it was time to move into the more ?technical? side of gardening. So by mutual consent the third meeting was about how to grow vegetables from seed. I don?t have access to a projector at the moment so I had to transfer the information I wanted to present onto butchers paper with brief notes (but no diagrams, my drawing skills suck!) that covered off the following ? Why bother? ? satisfying and fun; save money; give them a head start; plant only growing plants;...

Written by Administrator Monday, 07 February 2011 11:07 Over the past year or so my daughters and son-in-law have become interested in the art and science of sustainable living so we agreed that we would get together to do something towards producing things for ourselves and help them learn how to do it, so we decided on a preserving day. Like a lot of people these days we have become somewhat insular and as a family we all get together mainly for special occasions like Christmas and birthdays etc, so the opportunity to get together as a family and have some fun as well as being productive was too good to refuse.  I have more than a few books on food preserving (check out the library tab for a list) so we had a bit of a wander through those to decide what we wanted to make on the day....

Last Updated on Friday, 04 February 2011 14:06 Written by Administrator Thursday, 18 November 2010 09:50 The Story Continues....... It took a while but the St Clair backyard veggie gardener?s group is now up and running. In the end while we only got one expression of interest from the Saturday morning stall at the shops, a number came from other areas. Notably two different very enthusiastic families contacted the website after seeing flyers in the local library and one lady became interested after visiting us on Permaculture Day. Now with a committed core of people we are able to start regular meetings and we can work on getting more members as we go. Venue The obvious venue is one of your group?s houses if anyone has the room; because it is comfortable, safe, amenities are in place and it is free. In our case, because I was setting it up...

Last Updated on Friday, 04 February 2011 14:04 Written by Administrator Sunday, 18 April 2010 21:02 A few years ago I decided to start up a group based around people in our area living more sustainably. A fine idea but my thinking was rather fuzzy so I never really moved too far with it. Eventually I decided that it would be good to build it around the fairly non-threatening idea of home grown veggies ? save money, provide food for the family and have fun ? that sort of thing. If I could attract both new and veteran veggie gardeners we could get cross fertilisation (if you will pardon the pun) of ideas and share seeds, seedlings, produce and growing techniques and information; everybody wins! Getting too heavy with global warming and peak oil can put people off, so starting off with something a bit more positive increases the likelihood of reaching interested...