Low-tech tricks for drawing your edible garden ideas into reality

The only reason people let me make gardens on their land is that I show them a picture of how it will look. They get captivated, they find the resources, and it all becomes real. 

I drew this self-watering useful swamp for a Tokyo Rail platform garden.  I imagined irises, purple asparagus, lotus, thyme, taro and some lovely bullrushes, for thatch.

Someone then got inspired to actually have a go at making it. Its not at a train station, and not the plants I chose, but its a really good start.

Learning to draw better is not hard.
Its just like a language nobody has taught you.  Its more fun than meditating, and you have something to show for it afterwards.
You will freak out at how you have never looked at ANYTHING until you have tried drawing it. Even the face of your most loved person - you will see it for the first time.

If you can draw on paper a garden you imagined, you have done most of the work.  The garden already exists, in your mind and you desire. Maybe it starts existing in the desire of the viewer as well.
This newly-conceived garden of yours is just waiting for a day in the diary, a shopping trip, a planting party, and these events are jumping up and down to happen.
Its a bit like those first kisses that are so good, making children is semi-inevitable.

I used to run workshops on drawing up balcony gardens, and I will again. My students improved so quickly, we all got a surprise. There are all these tricks, someone just has to show them to you.

Easy way to draw a garden


1. Take a photo of a place you wish to make lovely.

Asaba Art Square garden, before.

2. Get it up on your computer screen. Or if its a hard-copy picture, tape it under a glass table, and put a lamp underneath.

3. Put paper over the top, turn out the lights, trace over the structural things - trees, walls. Use your brain so you don't hurt your computer screen, or make anything catch fire. If you can't work out how to do this safely, its not a good idea for you to become a designer.

In my fantasy, I opened up the drains as rivers of stepping stones.  I had wall-mounted tanks and sun-catching wall-garden. The heavy bridge, I ignored. Compass on the right shows where sun will shine.

4. Erase what you don't want.

5. Now, do a Google image search of plants you think would suit. Trace them, separately.

6. Practice drawing them freehand, by looking at the simplicity of your  tracings, and the subtlety of the original photo. Do this three times, and watch yourself improve as you 'get intimate' with how this plant is shaped. (added bonus: You will have a deeper love for this plant for the rest of your life. Seeing it will give you a pang of friendship)

7. Freehand draw or trace your plants in. If tracing, copy and shrink them first in a program that gives you control over size, like Word or i-web.

Asaba Permaculture Garden color version with dachshund digging area

8. Your pencil sketch is finished!


Tips to make your tracing and 'pasting' look good

Now make it look good, in pencil or in color.
Pencil is usually enough to get a garden started, if you finish it nicely.
To add color, I put my pencil drawing back on the light box, fresh blank paper on top. I trace its outlines in Copic fine liner pen, then color in with marker pens, blending colors as I go.

Marker pen is not erasable, so I work slowly, deciding easy colors (green) first, commit to important colors last, kind of holding my breath till the end.
Just like my life.

Add contrast
Light things on dark, dark things on light, or else they all blend into shapelessness.

Make it friendly:
Can you see elements that look like they might be family, or at least friends? The orb of the passion fruit echos the sphere of the pink snail. The possum winds up the spring of his curly tail to fit in with the the passionfruit tendril. Emphasize these similarities. This brings connection and love to your picture, and keeps you entertained.

 Cull
Use minimum image to achieve maximum communication. Don't draw ten leaves when three will do the job.

Get Appreciative
Adjust things so that negative space looks good too, so that there is no rejected, leftover, useless thing in your picture. Value the marginal. Its better to use up 'unemployed' space by exaggerating the size of plants and objects, so they can express themselves to the viewer.  You make background space smaller, like a halo. Other space can be made bigger - not unemployed, but a place for the eye to rest.
Again, get decisive.

Design for my business card. Not very business-like, is it? Me neither.

Check Perspective
You don't have to use perspective, you can draw things flat, like a medieval tapestry, or a kindergarten painting.
But be decisive, don't half-use perspective, it makes the viewer uneasy. In Perspecive, all horizontal lines, like the edges of these square tins eventually converge to a point in the distance. Find that point. Check that ALL the lines converge. Check that as distance increases, objects get smaller in the right proportions.

Vanilla, Rose, and  Blueberry Tea window box garden

I didn't trace this one, so had to work the perspective out myself. Its not too bad, but not good. 

The hand-drawn lines allow me to be forgiven - everything is wonky.

Except the idea. Nothing wrong with that.

Growing your own Vanilla, Rose and Blueberry tea window-box garden: its completely possible.

Somebody please have a go and bring this picture to life for me.  

Cecilia and Kohei working, July 2010

Permaculture workshop July, with concrete wall making

Asabas garden November 2010

Asaba's garden after declutter but before construction June 2010

.

With a vision, the energy to create just appears.

New Year's morning, twice, in Sydney - How to change a mood, all year long

New Year, New City

This is the view from where I sit now. Its my latest front garden, an outdoor 'office' for my laptop and I.
If I stand up and look down the slope, I can see the sparkle of Sydney's harbor.

I had two New Year's Mornings this morning.
I'm going to tell you about them, because they show how my whole year, whole life might turn out. Or not.
They will remind me that putting 'The right thing in the right place' can rescue me.

Image from Google image search

Take One...
I awoke at dawn, knowing I'd had some kind of defeat.
What defeat?  Where? The details hadn't yet clarified in my fuzzy mind.

Ah, the woes of Sydney's New Years Eve Midnight fireworks.
It was being so small in such a big crowd. It was the seemingly endless march to the ever-receeding train station.
One ear hurt.
Oh, and my poor purse, all my treasures, buckled and ruined, sloshing around in soft drink some goon had poured into my handbag.
Me, actually.

Once bad brain chemicals from what happened in the past get a hold, they have a party working on ruining the future too.
"A New Year?   Oh no!
A blank page for me to hesitate in front of, to make a mess of, to squander"!

I made tea,  had First Breakfast, did some more fretting.
Then I noticed something useful - A sleep mask Id put under the pillow.
Then, I recalled my sister's words: 'Thoughts conjured up under the influence of bad brain chemicals are off limits for later use. Straight to the bin".

Alongside the purse.

With darkness, with permission not to fret, I returned to sleep, for another try at a Happy New Year's Day.

Trish's veranda & Bach: Concerto After The A Minor Violin Concerto - 13. Allegro Assai

Take two...
A few hours later I was having  second breakfast, viewing the park, while the breeze softly came in and arranged my hair.  Those sunny brain chemicals kicked in.  Bless them.
But why did they?

Just last night my brother and the gang had turned up with a basket of goodies, and the muscle to haul Trish's dining table to the 'conservatory'.
Having people who want to eat with you is reason to be happy.
Having allies who carry out wishes that seemed beyond your strength, that's reason to be happy.

Being in dappled light, in lively air, surrounded by swishing green and birdsong is a sadness-repellent. Gets pretty much everybody happy, for free, for no good reason.

 

There was perfect leftover potato salad. He cooks it just like I would.
Hey, a potato-salad gene.
There was brushcetta with basil and rocket from the newly-planted doorstep garden, my first harvest.

Two weeks ago these plants were bitter and distressed, confined to their containers.
Just two hours ago so was I.

And the crowning glory - on my little Apple Mac I've got Bach's Trumpet Concerto.
Explosions of glory, fading with exquisite slowness. Fireworks in Audio form.
Anytime I want.


So, very small things saved me.
Without .....

• The sleepmask 

• Remembering the 'permission not to think' rule

• The balcony-table move (just two meters, but another world from its usual spot)

• The 10 minutes for planting (with Trish's BBQ spatula)

• Bach in i-tunes

..... I might have got stuck somewhere awful. People do.

As for my dread with the blank new year - Hey, I draw. If anyone knows it, I do:
Mistakes are the only way to get something creative, something worth doing from a blank page.

Make drafts. Refine them. Fix mistakes, do second drafts. Be surprised and proud.

 A dwelling to choose

I can do that.
That's what I do.
I can have yet another worthwhile and interesting year, worth the work, and different to all that have come before.

Carefully Fermented Strawberries to fizz up your life

I woke up early on my first Monday(late April) at RuuRuu and Q's legendary Den of Creativity in Shibuya.
In walks Mrs Natural Bakery, Amy-san, with the Jar of fizzy strawberries in her hand.
Yesterday at my Permaculture after-party she tried to explain how she used strawberry and other fruit cultures instead of yeast, but I just couldn't get it.
Now I see.


Amy and Ruu Ruu prepare welcome party food, with city-delivered veggies grown by their organic farming mates.
Declutterers heaven (my sideline. I'm just lying in wait).


It works like this. You sterilize the jar with boiling water, preventing mould and not-good microbes from spoiling the batch.
You then fill the jar with fruit, and some cooled, once boiled water, to the rim. The good microbes go to work, and in a few days, you get this fizzy, CO2 filled 'vitamin water'.

You can drink it, and become as bright sparky as Asaba-san and her mate, my host Ruu Ruu


Or you can use it to make your bread rise, as Mrs Baker does.
The bread was lovely and light, but with no trace of strawberry taste.


Listen...Fizzy!

I once grew hanging basket strawberries on my balcony, their fragrance was intense, and kind of drove me crazy. They were safe from marauding snails up there, but the birds had a great party, till I decided to wrap them all in misty bridal tulle. They succeeded because I planted them in 100% home grown compost, made with lots of woody material - forest fruits are in their element in a fungi-rich forest-floor style compost.
And I am back in my element, surrounded by the dreamiest, go-getter Japanese.

how to make compost compost

Compost activators, photo by Cecilia Macaulay

My two oldest of my compost heaps (6months +) seemed to have hit the glass ceiling of the compost world. Nicely composted in some spots, but cold, slow and chunky in others. After a harvest for the potplants, here is what we gave them to get things going again.

Comfrey - famous for adding nitrogen and contributing minerals 'mined' from deep down in the soil. I grow some of these hairy leaves just for the compost, but beware - one you plant these persistent perennials, you need a bulldozer to get them out by the roots. Choose their location carefully. They do have pretty mauve flowers, which the useful garden insects are also pleased to have.

Golden syrup - Composting texts recommend unsulphured Molasses, its calories and minerals encouraging fungi and other microbes into a population explosion, getting things hot again. Sulphur is usually added as a preservative to stop things fermenting - exactly what composters WANT to happen. I accidentally purchased this sugary golden syrup, and thought 'better in the compost than in my body'.

Seaweed - Usually you MAKE compost to get its free liquid fertilizer, so it seems strange to put bought stuff in. But my story to myself was: its just to get things activated again, maybe the microbes are lacking an essential mineral. It all ends up in my pot plants anyway.

Water - compost should be the consistency of a squeezed-out sponge. Too dry, and microbes will hibernate. Too wet, and there won't be enough air for the aerobic microbes, and the smelly, anaerobic ones will take over. Most inner urban compost veers to too wet, if it is pure kitchen scraps. As mine has the dry, high carbon contributions from my dove cage: newspaper and straw, it needed additional moisture. Last weekend Adison the day WWOOFer harvested the good stuff from the center of the heap, and the bottom of the oldest bin, to go in my boysenberry recycling tub. He chopped the big garden scraps up smaller, and buried them in deeper. Laying small branches on the bottom, where they allow air to circulate, is another trick.

Creative Compost illustration by Cecilia Macaulay

When St. Peter meets us at the pearly gates, I'm pretty sure he will ask "Did you make soil?". Even if you live in an apartment, composting skills are worth having, as compost is about life, decline, transformation, more life. Establish compost heaps at the homes of your favorite friends and dullest relatives, and watch things hot up.

transforming a recycling crate into an edible container garden

A bright and ambitious WWOOFer couple, 'Sawadsion', blessed my garden with their presence last weekend.
The result was a hessian-covered, compost-filled boysenberry garden for my balcony.

Sawa and Adisson trimming, repotting and pest-spotting on Cecilia's balcony garden

Sawa and Addison turned up for DayWWOOFing (gardening work experiance) with fantasic smiles, and a Jar of Urban Honey from their last urban WWOOF hosts, Adam and Kat. After lunch we set to work.

Adison worked harvesting, turning and activating my three compost heaps, getting enough for my Autumn balcony garden re-potting.

Divide and conquer: when a task is too hard, dividing it into two tasks often works. Wiring the hessian neatly onto the black plastic required either ten hands, or some straightening up using elastic and bulldog clips.

We assembled the finished result on my balcony: if a pot holds enough rich soil to grow boysenberries, its will be too big to lift. Now that the days of high summer sun are over, my covered North facing balcony has enough low-winter sunshine to 'feed' my plants, so if all goes according to plan, there will be berries in November.

Sawa in Cecilia's garden

Thank-you Sawa and Addison, I look forward to visiting your Permaculture farm in Japan one day, where I expect I will run into half the Aussie permies I know - you have lots of fans in this country, all expecting great things :)

How to dry persimmons, traditional Japanese farmhouse style

This week I'm shopping for a persimmon tree for the Edible Japanese Garden that's replacing the fern garden out front at my place. Of course I will be planting a sweet, rather than an astringent (shibui) persimmon. The sweet ones, such as Fuyu, are squat-shaped, and can be eaten either crunchy or yielding. The long-shaped Hachiya variety, the ones Aussies first planted before we knew better (sorry Hachiya), are awfully 'shibui'. You have to wait until they become syrupy-ripe before eating, otherwise, biting into one will give you that 'cotton-wool-in-the-mouth' reaction, awful. I don't enjoy slushy and stringy much more than shibui, and neither, it seems, do the Japanese. They harvest them in Autumn, hang them under the eaves, and let the dry winter air transform them to something like enchanted dried apricots: intense, chewy, and frosted in sugar. 'Hoshi Gaki' is the Japanese name.

Last year while visiting the old pottery town of Machiko, in the Japanese mountains, I came across a lady at the traditional dye-works, performing the annual Autumn task of harvesting and preparing the 'shibui' persimmons from the tree outside, to be hung to dry.

Here is how you do it.

1. Cut the fruit from the trees, leaving a little 'handle' to hang it from
2. Peel the fruit, but leave a tiny square of skin at the bottom. This stops the sugars from dripping out the bottom

3. Hang them, evenly spaced, in a shady place with plenty of dry air circulating so they don't become moldy. If you have ancient thatched roof eaves on hand, perfect. Note what a beautiful, asymmetric patterns the Japanese lady has hung her baubles of drying fruit. The sight of drying persimmons is one that must be lived with for weeks, recalling autumns past as you gaze on them. In the Japanese aesthetic, almost everything you touch can be honoured as art.

Hoshigaki dried persimmon photo from digicamworks.
No bloom yet, but looking festive.

4. After a few weeks of regular massage, a white frostiness appears as the sugars seep to the surface and crystallise. Home-reared dried persimmons have a rich flavor and smooth texture. The cheap, mass-produced dried persimmons who missed out on this loving step are stringy and shallow. My friends explained to me that the massaging of sugar crystals up through the flesh breaks down the fibers.

My friend Endo-san's persimmons, drying in the
grand Tokyo garden that her parents left to her and her sister.

Hear the how-to story from somebody who has actually done it. The Slow Food USA drying persimmon story is both beautiful and useful.

Apartment balcony Hoshi gaki persimmons from Nekobiyouri blog

The great thing about dried persimmons is, you see them gone splat on footpaths by November, so I figure most owners would be happy to give them away if you ask prettily. Go for an inner-Melbourne walk in mid-May, see what you find, and start the sensuous pioneering work of massaging astringent persimmons to sweetness. Don't forget to send me the photos.