Courtyard garden for dinner

The Desjardins Family cook up lunch at Cecilia's

Last week I got an impromteau 'Vengance Visit' from the Desjardin's family, who I WWOOFed with in November, and found myself asking the courtyard garden to help with lunch ingredients. Being in the city means you get unexpected guests, and having an edible garden means you can fancy up whatever is in the fridge with something fresh and maybe exotic.

Juju picked some chives, mint and 'cats paw' for the Vietnamese carrot salad, a mix of grated carrots with butter-fried nuts, with a sauce of brown sugar, fish sauce, lime and garlic. For a motherless waif, he is a great stylish cook. The pansies in the rocket salad looked extremely gourmet.

Stephan found my sushi-chef housemates knife, and chopped everything in the Samurai spirit that's part of his package - accurate, careful and with rhythm (he is french as well).

Fabian was generally faboulous, as usual, with the angel-rays peeping though the tiredness.

Which got all of us in the end.

We played with the cats, got out the massage bed (best use of time ever), and Cecilia went wild with the hairdryer and 'curls rock' on Stephan. If he grew that mane long and sold it on his 18th brithday, it would pay his way backpacking Europe, I've calculated.

It was wonderful to meet Angelica, the WWOOFer from heaven (via Italy) who was there to soothe and cook for the family in the days after Yukari passed away, in the warm sunny way that have Italians seem put on this planet to do.
Now she is back in Italy, the Desjardins are back in their Sunshine Coast Paradise, waiting for the next lovely wwoofers to come and for a dose of being amazed, amazing, and cooking up love and family. If you go and stay, expect a tropical supermarket of a garden, lots of puppy-like moments of subduing, tussling and being inspired by these beautiful, resiliant boys, and their marvelous Dad.

WWOOFing at Yukari Desjardins

Yukari's children Stephan and Fabian.
Dashing JuJu has already set off for school

After teaching the course Yukari was scheduled to teach, I was lucky to have the chance to WWOOF for a couple of days with Arnaud and her three children.

I did only my favorite things - streamlining storage in the kitchen, and cooking. The children were enthusiastic, have-a-go cooking companions, and we made new things such as fried rice, things they can cook themselves, enjoy eating, and feel proud of.

What I most enjoyed was sorting and re-labeling the Tea Collection.
One of Yukari's ambitions must have been to have Every kind of tea - there must have been 40 0r 50. Packages were a jumble of luxurious, mysterious, forbidding and inviting, many picked and dried from the DesJardin garden, such as the lemon myrtle. I could read the Japanese labels, and vaguely knew if it was to be steeped or boiled and strained, so Stephan and I re-labled things in English, with instructions. If you don't know how to use it, you don't really own it. Now its even harder to sit down to a cup of tea though - all these new choices!

Nice big chooks in the movable chicken tractor.
The mystery of the dissapearing little bantams was found one morning - as a bump in the tummy of the snake, having an after-dinner nap in the (other) chicken coup.

I awoke to potted blooming water lillies outside my cottage.
My balcony lillies just don't get enough sun to work up to flowering.

The Fabled Banana circle. Arnaud found a nearly-ripe 'hand' of Bananas, which He cut down to yellow up in the cool shed, away from predators. The idea of the circle is that the mulch and leaf litter all collects in the center, enriching the soil rather than blowing away. Surely some other reasons though...
Arnaud freezes the bananas, and then blends them into 'icecream', a 100% fruit thing that the children love.
Hey Arnaud - maybe this is the solution to your eggplant/fussy children problem.



Pools, ponds, dams, galore, and I never reached the edges of this semi-tropical paradise, with only two days. I still havn't seen the artists studios they built for renting out, haven't entered some of the food forests.
A groundcover of sweet potato, to keep out the weeds, keep in the moisture. I saw pictures of these growing in water tanks on the roof of a high-rise in Ginza. The leaves scramble everywhere in just a few months.


Multiple functions. Everything has a few uses, and one of them is usually pleasure.

Snake 'guarding' the raised veggie beds from birds. Chicken enemy in the morning, gardening ally in the afternoon. Life is like that.

I'm very much looking forward to seeing these fun, curious and beautiful children again, hopefully in Melbourne this January.
Thank-you Yukari, your brought so many treasures into this world, in so few years.

It was Fun: Balcony Garden workshop, veggie village

My favorite way of spending a couple of hours would have to be giving balcony garden workshops. You meet people at their most interesting, hatching up schemes for achieving the improbable: paradise on concrete. And see how happy they get when they hear all the tricks that will allow their fuzzy balcony aspirations to become crisp, leafy reality.

This 3 hour workshop was originally planned for the local permaculture dynamo, the wonderful Yukari Desjardins. We have lost Yukari. No matter how much we wish it to be different, she is gone. But continuing on projects she started, that's something we can actually do. For this day, I just had to hop on the Melbourne to Sunshine coast aeroplane, and do my thing.
I was so happy I could do this small thing.

Participants are always so different from each other, which makes break times the best kind of parties. Who turned up this time? Included in the mix of 40 could be found a soil life expert, heaps of artists, a horticulturist, architect, a few grandmothers, a professional Permaculturist, and another Japan-addict like myself.


Here's Shannon, helping me model the sign that tells me where we are. This one got herself a nice Japanese husband. Maybe my turn is next...

Barry Mcfee, Cecilia, and creative Pizza Oven

The event was impeccably organized by the Veggie Village Maestro, Barry Mcfee. Barry is one of those Engineers that the whole world wants, so it was wonderful staying with him and his dear wife Frances, and hearing all their stories of life lived out in exotic locations.
It took me about half-a-minute after meeting Barry at the airport to guess his profession. Engineers are my favorite people: concise, relaxed, yet accurate. They happily do the groundwork required to make things succeed, while the rest of us skip the little things like confirmation phone calls, etc saying 'She'll be right, mate". But she won't.
Whats the best thing about engineers? Maybe its their flexible attitude to the surprises that life insists upon dishing out. Engineers, like ideal Permaculturists, go with how reality IS, rather than how we think it SHOULD be.

Barry, you were an inspiration.


And I loved your old Citroen.

Permaculture Keyhole garden at Veggie Village

Veggie village is the neatest community garden I have come across, and I've seen them all over the planet. Neatest of the pretty: neat and dull doesn't count.

Reed bed design by artist Glenda Hennig

I especially loved this man-made 'creek' that the volunteers reconstructed from a diverted spring and swamp. Its almost Japanese, the natural placement of rocks, reeds and flow. And how is this for a good story: the reeds get almost too thick by the end of the season, and that's when the lady artist who created all this says 'Harvest time", and turns them into handmade paper.


What did participants think?

"Most enlightening. I loved the possum theory i.e. 'The problem is the solution'".
Linesse

"When you were born, the world made room for a little more fancy - love your approach while providing vital info".
J& D

"I loved your positivity and I will create a garden! I also loved your Japanese-ness. If you have any nice wwoofers who want to stay in Noosa, give them my address. If my garden isn't established yet, they can couch-surf!"
Shannon

Well, I really hope they find a way to invite me back next year.
For now, I'll make do enjoying the 'before' and 'after' balcony garden photos that have started trickling in from the participants. That's the desert.

Remembering Yukari Desjardins

Tonight I'm thinking of Yukari Desjardin, joyful and irrepressible.

photo of Yukari from Shalom Japan website
デジャーデン由香理

"I will be going back to Japan teaching Permaculture and doing the african workshops and concert, my long time wish to demonstrate physically that the permaculture living includes full of art and celebrating"

Today she was to be teaching a workshop in Osaka, Japan "Balcony Garden, creating forest in the Urban situation". Making paradise on concrete. Yukari just had this knack for making something special out of whatever was at hand.

Last time I was with her was a whole ten years ago, when we spent two weeks in Bill's Food Forest, doing that first Japanese-language PDC together, joking and telling stories as we wiped the foam off the dishes we were drying, Aussie style. But her effervescent creative presence was always popping up for me, in e-mails and stories, her excitement telling of her newest babies and endevors, and lovely permaculture projects we could be doing together one day.

Here is a video I watched thinking of you tonight Yukari. It makes me think of how precious us darn humans are, how much fun we could be having together.

Matt, you are on...



Yukari, you brought us together like this. You just wanted to, and decided to, and as one little woman in a big, big world, you did. Now we are so, so sad.