Australia: While city farm plots and beehives spring up across Canberra
“Gardening and nurturing the soil are serious business.”
By Susan McDonald
ABC Net
Oct 11, 2020
Excerpt:
Lil Costello isn’t letting her city-dwelling life stop her from achieving her dream of being a farmer.
Instead, she helps turn residential backyards into urban farm vegetable plots.
“It’s small-scale farming right in your very neighbourhood,” Ms Costello said of her network of market gardens in Canberra’s inner north.
Ms Costello said that, after this year’s devastating bushfires and amid the global COVID-19 pandemic, people’s hunger for sustainable food projects and community creativity grew — and interest in her Inner North Urban Farm project surged.
So, last month, as Canberra’s major political parties launched their election campaigns, Ms Costello and co-founder Karina Vennonen took matters into their own hands.
Rather than waiting on environmental policy announcements that may not come to fruition, they launched a crowdfunding campaign to create more urban vegetable plots, attracting strong local support — including from rugby union player and Canberra local David Pocock.
Within two weeks their $11,000 target was reached, paying for enough seeds, compost, mulch, shade cloth and irrigation for five plots — one at Ms Costello and Ms Vennonen’s place, the others in the backyards of enthusiastic supporters who volunteered their patch of grass rent-free.
