Australia: The urban farmers taking over someone else’s backyard as a reprieve from the pandemic
What was once a tangle of weeds and grass is now 60 square metres of crops, ranging from tomatoes and pumpkins to bush foods like midyim berries and native river mint.
By Lisa Clausen
ABC
Mar 21, 2021
Excerpt:
On a quiet street in suburban Melbourne, there’s no sign of the transformation taking place.
Behind an old cottage in Fawkner, Catie Payne and George Clipp carefully tend to rows of flourishing crops.
The pair have long wanted to try their hand at farming. But despite years of experience working on market gardens and farms across Australia and abroad, they were unable to afford land of their own.
That is, until an innovative project in Melbourne’s north gave them the chance to try their hand at urban farming — using someone else’s backyard.
“It’s wildest dream material for us,” says 32-year-old Payne.
“We’d long chatted about how great it would be for folks with unused land to connect with those who’d love to tend a little patch of land.”
The Backyard Farmers project is the brainchild of Growing Farmers, a community regenerative urban farming group, created in early 2020 to strengthen local food security and sustainability.
By connecting aspiring farmers like Payne and Clipp with people happy to share their backyards, the group hopes to foster a win-win relationship that could be replicated across the country.
“I’d been moaning about needing to do the mowing and I saw the ad and thought, ‘that’s what I need’,” laughs Sapphire McMullan-Fisher, who decided to volunteer her property after coming across a flyer for the project at a local market garden.
