Community Garden

Saturday last week I went out to Tung Chung to visit Isabelle's friend May who has a couple of plots in a Community Garden. (Grandad's temple Lo Hon Ji overlooks Tung Chung) Isabelle also has a plot, which May will tend for her when they are established. Now everyone kept talking about the farm... but when i got there i realised that what they are talking about, we would call a community garden.
It was interesting to talk with the manager about what they would like to do in terms of organics as they are restricted by the funding and the presence of the school next door. One of the pictures shows the showcase room, which is netted against insects, concrete floor and everything is grown in boxes. Not exactly a natural system, but the funding body requires it. Then the soil outside is pretty poor and because of the school next door, they can't create their own compost, so they are getting topsoil (of which there is plenty) trucked in from a village nearby!
It was interesting to see that the sign out the front mentioned "social enterprise" and there is even a poster in the Metro that talks about social enterprise. We've got a bit of catching up to do on that front in Australia.
Afterwards we went back to May's house and had a great chat about organics with her friend from Taiwan who has been growing for the last 10 years.
I told them about the four most important things I had learnt from my growing experiences at Imago:
• Healthy plants don't get sick
• Feed the soil not the plant (difference between feeder and tap roots)
• Create a balanced soil (pH, Ca/Mg, biology etc)
• No-effort farming (self-sown)

Then we all went out to dinner at a seafood restaurant nearby, where we picked the seafood out of a dinghy. The restaurant was on an old wharf which had some of the original wooden fisher huts.. all soon to be removed by a potential bridge to china. People are protesting against the bridge because it may disturb the habitat of the rare white dolphin.