At Libertas Gardens, what really keeps us going is our dream to green up the suburbs. We think it is possible to create a nicer, healthier and an ecologically sound urban environment for us to live in and our children to grow up in.
In collaboration with Melbourne City Rooftop Honey and Reclaim The Curb, we are offering our services to anyone wanting to green up public land. At a heavily discounted (and sometimes free) rate!
Inspired by the essence of “guerrilla gardening” and strong of our experience creating urban Permaculture gardens, we pretty much volunteer our resources, knowledge and connections to help create and facilitate such initiatives.
To qualify for this initiative, our criteria are as follows:
- The project has to be on public land, or private land shared in perpetuity with the surrounding community.
- The project has to involve an improvement of the existing land.
- The project has to be “productive”. Food production is given priority, but we also consider biodiversity enhancing plant selection, resilient native gardens and bee friendly gardens to be “productive”.
- The project has to be supported by a significant portion of the surrounding community and mostly, there has to be commitment and involvement by a few core people to make sure the garden is taken care of over time, and grows, matures and blooms for the benefit of many.
- Nature is trying hard to green up all that concrete, lets give her a hand!
We will be more then happy to share our knowledge, tools and vehicles and to let you benefit from the discounted prices we get from nurseries and our different suppliers. In some cases we may want to allow for a minimal payment for labour, especially for potentially sizeable and time consuming projects. Do not hesitate to contact us if finances are short or minimal. This part of our operation is one where we want to give back to the community, where we want to share our gratitude to be able to do such a rewarding job for a living.
Its is our belief that these actions are only a beginning, and that soon there will be nothing radical with citizens taking care of the land they live on and interact with on a daily basis. The city is our environment, it is time for us to farm it and enrich our urban ecosystem.
- A few perspective of a 3 model of a nature strip.
- Notice the veggie boxes, allowing for veggies to be grown off the ground in quality soil while tough, pretty, bee friendly and nature friendly plants are grown in the existing soil.
- Room is allowed for a path to access the vehicles (awesome model eh?) parked in the street.
Now looking for sites around Melbourne
The City of Yarra council has produced a “Guidelines for Neighbourhood Gardening”, available at http://www.yarracity.vic.gov.au/Environment/Community-gardens/ . We can recommend reading it and familiarising yourselves with it. Its is not an expression of our views or a document we feel bound to follow in its entirety, but it definitely is an interesting and innovative tool at our disposal.
We are now looking for interested citizens and potential sites to green up.
In case anyone needs a few arguments to green up and diversify the planting of a nature strip, here are a few of the benefits:
- It is visually more appealing than grass or dirt, it makes for a prettier city.
- It can produce a crop for people, either food, herbs, cut flowers, honey or medicinal plants.
- It attracts and feeds animals, insects (honey bees!), mammals, birds, reptiles…
- It builds soil, which is a very effective way to sink carbon.
- If well designed can help drastically slow down run-off. This is a major issue for the creeks and Port-Phillip Bay.
- It can create a locally managed landscape. So instead of the council needing to pay for maintenance it can be done by locals. We can also create extremely low maintenance gardens that will incur fewer expenses and mostly avoid petrol powered mowing.
- The psychological, emotional and spiritual benefits of being in contact with nature are some of the major beneficial effects we are hoping for with this project.
If you think you have the perfect bit of nature strip in front of your house, and are willing to green it up with us, contact us by email at lucas@libertasgardens.com.au .
Happy guerrilla!
A few links on our site of such projects:
https://libertasgardens.com.au/neighbourhood-produce-share-and-nature-strip-vegetable-garden/
https://libertasgardens.com.au/street-trees-are-the-best/
https://libertasgardens.com.au/reclaim-the-curb-herbert-st-reclaim-working-bee/