Page 641 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 9 March 2011
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Last weekend I was out at Featherstone gardens at Weston Creek. For those who do not know Featherstone gardens, it is a glorious garden. It used to be the garden when the CIT was out at Weston Creek and it has got wonderful trees. It is a wonderful exotic garden. As a fruit garden, it has got lots of mature producing fruit, it has got space to have a community vegetable garden, and the friends of Featherstone garden are looking to make that into a community garden. Schools such as my local primary school, Majura primary, have kitchen gardens. They have got a Stephanie Alexander one. Lyneham and lots of schools have community gardens.
My motion at paragraph 1(c) refers to “the high demand for the expansion of community gardens which is increasing as Canberra’s density increases”. COGS has a two-year waiting list for plots in most of their gardens. It would be even longer if more people were aware that they even existed. Paragraph 1(d) states that the demand for community gardens is far outstripping supply. Some people wonder why we even have a need for community gardens in Canberra, given that we actually have quite a lot of backyards in Canberra.
There are approximately 131,000 private dwellings in Canberra, of which 75 per cent are detached houses, so approximately 100,000 houses have some sort of backyard. Those in the newer suburbs like Gungahlin probably have fairly small backyards, but at least 25 per cent of them would have a reasonable backyard. At least 25 per cent of them probably would have at least 40 square metres, which, interestingly, the Diggers Club magazine, which is a Melbourne-based magazine, reckons is enough, if you grow it intensively, to grow all the vegies for a family of four. So this is very encouraging.
But many people do not have 40 square metres suitable for gardening, for lots of reasons; they might be renting and the landlord does not allow them to have a vegie garden or they move too often to be able to invest the time and the money into one space. A lot of them, 25 per cent of them, do not live in detached housing; they are in an apartment that does not have a garden space, or they live in a house with a garden but it has got shady trees or the house is orientated such that there is no sun in their garden space, or, as with some of the people in COGS, they are seriously trying for self-sufficiency but their backyard, their garden and their front yard are simply not big enough.
Of course, also some people just really like growing things in an environment where they can talk to other people, they can compare notes and even make friends. I note that COGS now has a group of people who are not in their community garden but are gardening at home in an organic fashion.
Paragraph 2(a) of my motion calls upon the ACT government to facilitate the establishment and operation of community gardens by setting aside space for community gardens in all new residential developments and identifying appropriate sites to develop community gardens in established suburbs. I notice that ACTPLA and the LDA are starting to do that. It was originally in the Lawson concept plan and then ACTPLA took it out and then the planning committee said to put it back in again. So it is not quite an established part of ACTPLA’s protocols for new developments, which is one of the reasons that brought me to move this motion. The LDA has been
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