The vision that leads urban gardener is the
creation of culture that is generous and abundant.
I like the idea of you know
abundant food sources and in a beautiful
landscape is a given culturally like an
infrastructure of care you know
woven into neighborhoods
The property here is a half acre in the
heart of Oxford, North Canterbury township.
And this is Urban Gardner hub.
The hub is a center that Urban Gardeners
leave from to go and do work in the community.
The hub is a place that has a sophisticated greenhouse
It has productive garden beds around it
that create a cash crop that cover the
costs and then pay urban gardeners to go
out in mentor edible landscapes and
community resilience.
So we get to roll out and touch base with some of the
pensioners in the units and have an
initial interview process and see what
they want to eat what they do and
don't like and also just have ears for
what their knowledge base is and then work in
with what they want.
The urban gardener work we can go out and do for
elderly is providing social contact for them.
It's an opportunity for the elderly to
share their knowledge around
food gardening because they've pretty much
all got knowledge around food gardening
so we can engage in conversations around that
It's almost like it's not about food
it's about the activity
of Urban Gardener become a catalyst for all these
interactions that we call community or
noticing that neighborhood is enriched
by the arrival of this care worker that
facilitates something that otherwise
wouldn't have been there.
This model of a hub is a really great example
of the kinds of changes that need to be made in urban
areas. The idea to use revenue from the
business to find volunteer work helps
create food resilience, builds community,
provides affordable healthy food, and
works towards making the town less
reliant unsustainable imported goods
that are shipped from all over the world.
It's also inspiring to see the abundance
of food that can be grown in an urban space.
I really hate mowing lawns and
lawn mowers drive me insane.
I've never had a good one.
So the idea to get rid of as much
lawn as possible is highly appealing.
It's to use it as an example too
for an urban property, how much you can
actually produce and we've got huge
amounts of food growing here.
And there's heaps of land in urban spaces that can
be utilised for food.
You can pretty much grow you know anywhere
in an urban property so
it's just being able to show people
that you can be as self-sufficient as you
want to be in vegetables in a town
and it's all at your place.
Part of what we are aiming or working
towards ourselves is just to live
quite simply.
And to reduce our outgoings so that we
don't have to be striving and working
really hard in some sort of frantic way that
seems to happen so much for people
in society. That we can just work in a
really gentle way doing work we love and
reduce our requirement for money.
And we'll get rid of those bills so that we're freed
up to be doing the work that we're in love with.
That protects our enthusiasm and then we
can love life.
It's far more fulfilling to be able to
share that knowledge with people don't
have it for growing their own food and
essentially making ourselves redundant.
I would measure success for Urban Gardener when I
can look out into the local community and I
can see edible areas and edible
landscapes and people growing their food,
and sharing their food, sharing seeds, swapping seeds.
Connecting like that and
the success as well would be to show
this model working in a small town and
be able to see this model taken into
another into another town and put in
place as well. That would be
that a pretty significant success.
Wendell Berry said that there are no big solutions
to big problems but the solutions are
when millions of people take
responsibility for small problems
locally.
Or something like that just Google it man, just Google it.
Hey everyone I hope you enjoyed our latest short film.
This is the 4th of 12 short films in the
Living the Change series.
So if you want to be notified when the
new films are released
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happenfilms.com or you can subscribe
to our YouTube channel.
I wanted to say a special thanks to Giuseppe Di Franco,
the Namaste Foundation and Paddy McCann
for their generous donations to Happen Films.
Thanks again for watching guys and I'll
see you all in the next film.