Pocket City Farm is located in Camperdown, just minutes from Sydney CBD.
Emma Bowen is the general manager.
In the city it's really easy to sort of take for granted that your food just comes to you
and you know, it's just there... you go to shop, you buy it,
we don't ever get that connection with the effort that goes into it
and like, the massive undertaking it is that even grow our food.
Pocket City Farm is part of a larger community focused project
supported by Marrickville Council and the Canterbury-Hurlstone Park RSL.
It's called Camperdown Commons and it's hard to believe that
where there are now vegie beds there used to be bowling greens.
When we first came to the site it was abandoned bowling club
so camperdown bowling club was operating as a lawn bowls club from the 50s.
It closed down in 2012 and it was sitting here is sort of disused for around two years.
Obviously in cities the state of our soil can be a condition that you've
got to look out for heavy metals and we've done so much soil testing here
just to make sure it's safe and we've been really lucky in that it's very clean
I guess the main objective is... well obviously to produce food, but we want to
make sure that we create this space that is a bit of an interactive hub for the
community that it's in.
Michael Zagoridis is the farm manager.
How did you set it up?
We first wanted to create the beds and we've got seventeen meters width
we wanted to just make each bed one meter wide...
so it's 70 centimetres for the bed and 30 centimetres for the path
that's kind of how we ended up laying it out.
They're quite long which is about 35 meters
which means you can fit a fair amount of veggies in the space.
We're playing around with how we can maximize the different things that we can grow in a space like this
For example we're doing a row of leaks down the center here and
to maximize what we can fit into the bed I've actually you inter-cropped some
Pak Choi on the shoulder here. So these these Pak Choi are pretty close to being ready to harvest.
Once we do harvest them that means we can bring some of the soil from the shoulder
in to blanch up the leeks. Now blanching is pretty important it's a
way of hiding sunlight from the stem of the leek which gives it that really nice
white color, which is what people really look for in a leek.
So out here Costa is something really exciting... fully-fledged food first that's gonna
run on the inside verge. So we're gonna be planting a whole bunch of fruit trees here
some edible herbs, lots of ground cover... all for the community to come and take advantage of.
I mean this is the part that I really enjoy
where a verge can be made productive and this is a huge verge space.
It's massive, it runs the whole length of the bowling club so there's gonna be tons of room to
jam-pack lots of lots of edibles.
At the moment we've planted a whole bunch of fruit trees - they're only small
still quite young - a lot of them were planted last week
but they're gonna get quite big and hopefully bear a lot of
fruit for the community.
Now Zag I felt like I couldn't come to the project without contributing
and I've brought you a selection of plants here...
there's a few different varieties of salvia, there's your classic Marguerite daisies
Yeah beautiful!
A white one and a pink one... and then this one a hummingbird mint
Oh wow!
So between those, I thought you know that can that can be a really nice
understory out here in the in the food forest...
Oh these will make a great addition.
But there's already some insects buzzing around they can see the flowers so um so
yeah what do you what do you want to do which one's...
Perfect mate! I reckon maybe we'll throw a salvia in here. - Yeah
and maybe the white daisy we can throw it...
- The white daisy... she loves me, she loves me not...
That'd be great mate, thanks so much!
This place is taking patch to plate seriously because there's also an on-site restaurant.
Gareth Howard is the executive chef.
We've got a garden 20 meters from the kitchen and we've got guys looking after it, they
know what they're doing all the time and they're gonna be in constant
communication with me telling me what's coming out of the ground next week and
next month and probably next year and what they're planting in time for next
year and I've got the ability and the and the tools now to write my menus and
to plan my menus for the future according to whatever is coming out are
there and that's a an amazing place to be for a chef.
In a busy place like this, there's always something that needs to be done
- Can I get a hand planting these Costa?
- Sure can, what have we got?
And for the hard-working team here this is just the beginning.
It creates all this green space, it increases biodiversity
it improves like mental and physical well-being
it's... there's no downsides in our opinion.