Sunshine Coast Balcony Gardening Workshop, Sunday 22nd November

Tomorrow I get the suitcase out and go traveling again, to give a Balcony Garden Workshop at Veggie Village, in the Sunshine Coast.
This workshop was going to be lead by Yukari Desjardins. The seminars I just gave in Tokyo and Kyushu still held echos of Yukari's wondeful spirit, so logically this workshop was one I had to do.

We will be learning how to make a Self-Seducing balcony garden: you make it, and you make it so beautiful you can't resist spending time and love on it, and the virtuous cycle begins.

What do we learn? How to choose useful, gorgeous plants and pots, how to create a dappled shady glade for yourself up there, cloak and dagger pest management tricks, urban composting, and samurai-style motivation - who you are being will determine how your balcony garden will look.

More like creating a family than furnishing a room, balcony gardens blossom best when they look like, nurture and delight their owners, who cant resist doing the same back again.
Love, actually.

Time: 10.30 am to 1pm, Veggie Village, Sunshine coast.
Cost: $15
Contact Barry: 0754482749.

Berries, goldfish, and returning from travels - balcony surprises

When you come back from three months of travel, how do you expect your balcony garden to look?
Well, I returned last week, and this is what I found:

Boysenberries. They were probably Blossoming while I explored fairytale Copenhagen, setting fruit as I nestled into my friends apartment in Venice, and ripening as I gave my Permaculture seminars in Japan.

Some aren't sweet enough, the sweet ones aren't tart enough, but mixed into my morning porridge, they give it a wonderful fragrance, and you don't notice the seeds. Most importantly, they make things pink. Cloves, cinnamon, brown sugar and coconut milk make things perfect.


Thank-you Natsumi, thank you Carol, thank you Lon. You are talented Balcony gardeners.

But its my theory that the balcony guard-fish gets much of the credit for keeping things alive.

Of course, he does his thing with admirable ferociousness, blitzing mosquitos, keeping the currents nicely stirred up in the squeezy-bucket pond that is his universe. But most importantly, his presence keeps the humans coming up to the balcony on a daily basis. Its easy to neglect plants, but not so easy to let a pretty fish starve. While they happen to be there, the plants get water dished out to them from the pond, and so long as they top it up before declaring the day's work done, the whole system kind of takes care of itself.

Permaculture systems plus Concientious Japanese. Its a recepie for surprising but inevitable success.

Megapolis radishes - Tokyo city farm

Here I am, trying to spot my house in Tokyo from up rather high. If I do A Google Earth zoom to my home with the Ota family, I might see this:


Oops too far. That's the garden of the old lady around the corner, still farming the family plot, generations on.

The gate carefully clipped Dr. Zeuss pine says 'direct selling place Entrance'

The farm is impeccable, the buildings from before the war, and the technology low and beautiful.

I popped in today, and the nice old lady tells me I can have beets or cabbage. Next week leeks and Persimmons. She chooses the six most plump, and I give her 2oo yen ($2)


About 20 minutes later, they are home, and a couple are sliced thinly and seasoned with salt, pepper and vinegar.
I can't stop eating them. I'm embarrassed by the amount of pleasure their yielding sweet flesh is giving me. Its like eating Snow White.
Their green tops have been sauted with mirin, soy, and strips of Tofu. Im trying to think of a better use of sixty cents, but I'm struggling.

If beets are anything like radishes, they would probably grow in a balcony in less than two months. I can't wait another year to eat this again. So if you are in melbourne, and want to make ceci very happy, put some beet seeds in for me, and we will do a nice trade when I get back in late spring.

Soil and Peace festival, Tokyo

Its been about 30 years since I spent an entire Sunday playing in the park, but the 'Soil and Peace expo' (Tsuchi to Heiwa no Saiten) at Hibiya park just wouldn't let me go home.

Broccoli grown in hand-sewn pots,
with hand-made soil, all for sale
at today's "Soil and Peace' festival.

There were good things to climb, things to put in your mouth, ingenious toys and contraptions to puzzle over, marvel over, and best of all, a constant stream of my favorite kind of people.
Clever Nature-Farmers and musicians and entrepreneurs, all lit-up with excitement for the projects they were pushing and pulling into existence, excited at the small, important work they were doing, changing the world.

Appropirate technology: Now I know how to thresh and hull rice, the human-powered method.

These machines have been going for over half a century, and will be spinning merrily when I'm old and gone. What are they made of? Trees, Grass. You just GROW them.



These Trashy ladies surrounded the park, cheerleaders urging us on to colorful connection-making.

O'hashi-san's project is creating and bringing this fine vine-nut oil out of the Amazon, to the rest of the world.
Its delicious, it will keep you fresh and beautiful (as demonstrated by Mr Ohashi), and its cultivation can completly green ravished Amazon land in a year. I'm happy that the native people can now have stables lives, working and living in their forest. But I kind of want to see this green nut doing its thing, twining over, shading all the hot balcony gardens of the world. See Inca Inci Green Nut Virgin oil.

Toziba

This gang called me over to enjoy their tatami-party, with sake to drink from freshly-cut 'cups' of bamboo. Their bamboo farm might be one that I see from the Narita Express. Hillsides covered in feathery bamboo are the first truly beautiful things you see when entering Tokyo from the airport, reminding you that you have come to a land where shinto gods dwell. These guys are responsible for the beautiful bamboo stalls at the festival (look up, and down. Attractive.)

Bamboo exhibition stalls. Note the shoes.

Here they are again, the $4 pots you can fold up an put in your pocket. They are sewn from recycled plastic fiber, last about 3 years. and look so much better than a rag-tag collection of whatever pot the nursery doled out to you. They would allow evaporation to keep the roots cool, drain well, be light and easy to manuver on your balconies, and I'm a fan. Except they are not quite my color, so I might just have to make my own.

Here is the fellow from Hafuu looking proud of the bags he has made. He also 'makes' and sells soil, around $10 for a small pot-plant worth. If that seems weird to you because dirt is lying around everywhere, free for the digging, that's because you havn't grown edibles in pots, or havn't got a wormfarm. Delicious soil makes delightful flowers and fruit, and there is no other way.

The good guys at Wehab want you in their ricefield. The more life forms, the merrier.
This detail is from their carfully-researched chart, and shows you just how many life forms your bowl of chemical-free rice 'sponsors'. Write them, and they will invite you for a splash in a richly organic, heavily populated rice paddy (April and May), to do a bit of creature counting.

Tsuji-san, MC for the festival's live music area, popular writer, and Chief Sloth at the Namakemono (sloth) Club. So good to see this positive, immensly productive and fun-loving man again.

Liberace: Straw, not Gold!

Hiromi Matsubara. Photo: Greenz website

Strolling along, a voice called out 'Is that... Cecilia?'. The voice belonged to Hiromi Matsubara, who runs the online cultural-creative organization Greenz, and reads Balcony Gardening Blogs. Nice find, Hiromi.
She moves, shakes and organizes so well, that within a few minutes of meeting her, we've got a Tokyo Permaculture balcony party happening (mail me if you want to come, late October)

A Ball of children

Children went crazy playing with stits, with slingshots, with string-powered flying whirigigs. I know why they were happy, I remeber. I remember playing hard with six little brothers and sisters, and whatever was lying around in the garden. It was play you had to be dragged away from, cold, tired and happy at sunset.

Now I'm thinking about 'Soil and Peace', but sometimes I get tired of my own opinions. Sometimes just tired. I'd love to hear your comment and insights on how what these guys are doing with soil is connected to Peace.
Inspire me!
x

mini dwellings, boats & edge gardens at Dragor, Copenhagen

The fishing village of Dragor is 10 minutes from Copenhagen's modern Airport, yet 2 or 300 years away from life as we know it.

The people who built it where traders and captians of tall ships, who almost certainly took the image of Dragor with them to sustain them over the rough and salty months at sea. Like cold Hobbits longing for The Parish, their night fantasies would probably zoom in on the domestic: the sweet wife awaiting them by the fireside, larder stocked with the berry jams she picked and preserved from the summer garden, baby on the way.


Due to photographic incompetence, the loveliest of Dragor is not shown here: Amythyst colored fish layed out for sale by the burly man who caught them, 'fast food' fish, just whisked from their shoal and ready to be eaten before the chimney in which they were smoked. The scent of birchsmoke was familiar, the scent of 'lapsang-souchong'.

I do believe there are tuna about the size of this fishing boat. Don't get too ambitious, mate.

Wooden boats rock

Perfect decoration for a jewel-like window

Every home had a tiny 'edge garden', tall self-seeded hollyhocks now in their hundreth or so generation. Useful perinnial Rosemary, or berry bushes, which where just finishing for the summer when I arrived.

I remember reading about oilcloth curtains in Robinson-Crusoe style tales. I wonder what these are? Little cubby houses cluster in the lanes where men dry their nets, lanes stacked with piles of old racks for drying fish, cages where plump bunnies were once kept, because fish pie every night gets dull.

Aspirational living

Heres a nice house for my mum. The internet reception would be great.

Well, these days Dragor has a few thousand residents, with a supermarket, library, community noticboards and choir. Most of the gardens are edible, thats just the way its always been here, as they had to wait quite a while for hubbie's ship, and even longer for the supermarket.

As a destination for starting a new life, writing your novel, or learning the art of medicinal herb gardening, this town could be just the spot.

Ken Done of the Vikings: Bo Bendixen's edible garden, creatures & artwork

Bo Bendixen treats Cecilia to a harvest of tiny,

sugary-red tomatoes from his rotunda greenhouse

Bo Bendixen's Art
Bo Bendixen is one powerful Dane, who can't resist making slight adjustments to the world.
There is a road that winds between his homestead and his shop. It used to run straight through what is now his sprawling gardens - Bo took care of that. When he realized his front lawn lacked a menhir, he hunted one down and carried it in. Deciding he needed a better view of the sea, he got an earth mover and built a personal Mt. Fuji for short, steep hikes, with a meditation spot at the summit.

postcard no. 578 © Bo Bendixen

His pet cows, however, choose to graze somewhere less dramatic.

His artwork has power of a different kind: With a few deft brushstrokes, his animal designs bring a narcotic kind of happiness that induces people to buy and buy. His cards, mugs, t-shirts are found in Bo Bendixen shops that pop up all over the place in Denmark, and reach all the way to Japan and beyond.

Cecilia and Bo Bendixen, with Japan on our minds

"I'm not an artist, I realized early on that was too much trouble, depending on galleries. Why am I successful? I like working hard. And I'm lucky - I just draw what I like, what makes me happy. And it happens to be what the public like too".

Bo Bendixen merchandise

Cecilia after being tossed atop Bo's useful front lawn menhir.
In the background are the diverted public road and a Bo Bendixen shop.

postcard 603 ©Bo Bendixen

Big Bo has a dogmatic little dog following him everywhere. When I asked "Where are your cats?" he tells it like this: cats are for drawing, dogs are for living with.
Cat pictures, it turns out, outsell dog pictures in legions. The reason for this is that cats come in one model only: cat-shaped. Dogs however come in every which way, from great danes to scotties, and dog people (being the faithful kind) only love the kind of dog they love. They don't go buying cards with the 'wrong' dog.
In Art and in Business, Bo does an unusual amount of observing 'what actually is', then letting the essence of those observations shape his designs, his garden, his manufacturing.

View from atop the Menhir, decorated with an extremely functional Bendixen column

Bo Bendixen's Garden

Chickmatrix - every good Viking needs something sweet and fluffy to care for


A plum tree grows into his chicken coop, giving his fluffy friends sweet treats throughout summer, while the tree enjoys home-delivered fertilizing. Eggs and plums are collected simultaniously.

Above: Bo the batchelor's declared favorite chicken. You can almost measure the delight he takes in his creatures from how impeccably tended they are - clean coop, weed-free - and how attentively they are drawn in his designs. Gardens this impressive can be created and tended alone, but not without the energy-source of being utterly infatuated, besotted, and rewarded by the results of your labor. There is no doubt about it: a garden is beautiful when it is loved.

The frog prince and the golden ball

Bo's goldfish bowl

One of many meditation & inspiration spots, watching his 'models', the fish, waiting for a visual 'story' to tell.

Sometimes it happens
postcard ©Bo Bendixen

But sometimes Bo exaggerates
postcard©Bo Bendixen

Bo's glass bower is quaint in shape, high in tech. He got inventive and thought up gadgets to vent and create mildew-expelling breezes in summer, and to create season-extending, human-friendly warmth in winter. As anyone who draws knows, success is a matter of staring at things long and hard enough to see whats missing, and to start to care about putting it in. Its pest-free, carefully pruned, watered, and arranged. Like a well-mannered, creative child, this tiny balcony-style garden has a parent that listens to it, goes out of his way for it, and does quite a bit of appreciative, critical gazing.

Seed for saving for next years crop of flowers

Grape vines and tomatoes festoon the green house, with his frog-flag waving bravely in the stiff nordic sea breeze

postcard © Bo Bendixen

Creative Copenhagen: be elevated

"I wish I could photograph these balcony gardens from up higher" I said to the man loitering outside the fruit shop. So he arranged it.


Bo Bendixen just threw me up onto the menhir he happens to have in his front garden


And at Tage Andersons, the fairytale florist, the potplants are irrepressable. Just because its dark half the year doesn't mean you can't make the best of whatever hole you find yourself in.

Over the bubbles at Copenhagen design week, I met a real life Billy Elliot: a Welsh labourour's son who took his teenage dancing lessons in secret, here to do some seriously elevating choreography.

Cecilia at Jurgen's wild west birthday party

Its a fairytale city, a city of spires and dreams and Leggolands and Queens. You are only meant to have your feet on the ground just long enough to get by. So it seems, so far.

City of Copenhagen's emblem

Click on the links (tomorrow), once I've tossed all those stories of urban gardens & sustainably aspiring creativity onto this blog.

Time for slumber. Tomorrow many things need to be thought up, making up my life as I go along.

Flower arragement by Tage Anderson