Growing
Community
photos: AD Wright
News: Kensington Gardens has
it's birthday on November 17. This seems like a good time to have a
public event celebrating the garden and condemning Transit New
Zealand's intention to park bulldozers on it. Contact the Te Aro
Conservation Office or come to an ABA meeting if you want to help
co-ordinate this.
Hystory: Growing
Community began as a
network of 'gorilla gardeners' opposed to the building of the
'Inner-City Bypass' motorway through Te Aro. Over the past few years they have co-ordinated the creation of
a number of community gardens throughout Te Aro, following a series of community
meetings and a leaflet drop informing residents of the area and
inviting
their participation.
So far GC have two public gardens to their name, a flower and herb garden in Tonks
Avenue and the Kensington
Garden in Kensington St (pictured below), which was nominated
for a civic award for beautifying the city. GC gardeners also helped to
start a vege garden behind the Catacombs
drop-in centre in Willis St. The Catacomb garden was now maintained by
drop-in volunteers and provided them with valuable experience in
planning and carrying out organic cultivation work. This garden is now
in need of volunteers to plant it out for this season.
Anyone is welcome to add
their efforts to the gardens at any time.
There is plenty of work to be done including watering, planting,
weeding, removing rubbish, pruning trees, building and maintaining
compost heaps, building outdoor furniture, painting murals, making
foot/
cycle paths and so on. It would be great if anyone can build nursery
and
tool sheds or donate tools and plants to put in them.
Attempts have been made to start another garden in Buller St. So far a
number of trees have been planted but vandalism
by people who are determined to keep the vacant lots dedicated car
space
have slowed this project down. All of these gardens are on land owned
by
the government road-building department TransitNZ and have been planted
as a positive protest against the proposed Bypass project. At times
Transit officials have become quite aggressive towards the gardening
projects as reported in this article on Aotearoa
Indymedia, when veiled threats of arrest were made by Project
Manager Jamie MacDuff.
For more information about Growing Community contact:
Kerryn (04) 387 1146 kerryn.pollock(NO SPAM)_at_paradise.net.nz
or 128 (04) 9727 260 communitybuilding128(NO SPAM_at_egroups.com
photos: AD Wright
An ever-increasing area of the Earth's
surface is dominated by modern
agriculture in which huge areas are planted with only one species
resulting in a constant reduction of the Earth's total biomass and its
ability to support life. Since
we don't want to mimic this monocrop approach it would be great to see
urban communities working together on permaculture eco-village plans for their
neighbourhood. Imagine if
all the unutilized green spaces
in and around the cities of the world could be fulf of food, herbs,
flower and trees, beautifying and to some degree cleaning the
enviroment
(trees filter poisons like carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide out of
the air and produce oxygen for us to breathe). Community gardening is taking off all
over the country with various projects in Auckland,Christchurch, Hamilton, Dunedin,
in the Nelson
region, in fact all around the Pacific! These
projects are proving that it is possible for people living in urban
areas to produce some if not all of their own food in a co-operative
way.
Another potential source of free food in the community is fruit trees,
many of which are not utilized by the people on whose property they are
located. One group in North America has started a Fruit Tree Mapping Project
to forge links between tree owners, community gardening groups and
fruit-deprived members of the community.
Page Design: Danyl Strype
strypey@indymedia.org
