“Lemons for free?”

True story. A fortunate woman living in Wollongong bought a house. From a vibrant lemon tree in the yard fell more than enough lemons. The woman didn’t like lemons so she put them in her garden waste bin. There were enough lemons that the garbage men noticed and reported the incident.

Council told the woman, “You can’t put your lemons in there.”
The woman said, “But there’s not enough room in my regular rubbish bin.”
They said, “Why don’t you eat the lemons?”
“I don’t like lemons.”
“Share them.”
“Give them away for free? No way.”
“I'm sorry? . . . I thought you said you don’t like lemons.”
“Yes, but I’m not giving them away for free when they're sold at the market for so much a kilo.”
“[Sigh] Why don’t you take them down to the corner and sell them then. You can’t put them in your garden waste bin. That’s for non-food garden waste like weeds and branches.”

I pray the woman didn’t cut the tree down as one last spiteful resort.

Did you know that many trees and bushes share root systems? If you poison a large Camphor Laurel tree, for example, you may see another tree fall dead 100 meters away! So if I treat my neighbor with poison (or stinginess), how do I know it won’t also poison or devour who and what I know and love?

Did you know that your neighbor is not only the one living on your block? Even God is a neighbor. As unknown as God typically is, God treats every neighbor with free sunshine and rain along with the breath of life. What a great neighbor!

Say I have a lemon tree in my backyard, not of my own planting, along with a home which I can afford because I've been welcomed into my particular socio-economic class. Am I the kind of neighbor that accepts these gifts thanklessly? Am I the kind of neighbor who hordes? Do I poison or steal? I’m trying to be honest about these questions this year so any neighbors can be healed and my own lemon tree, which I could never earn, can bless others.

Permaculture Class, part 1

I began my first permaculture class today. Here are the highlights:

The ethics of permaculture:

Care of earth
Care of people (consider others)
Fair share

The Camphor Laurel tree, for example, shares its root system with other plants and trees. So if you poison it, you also may kill every other tree in a 100 meter radius!

1. Observe [nature] and interact
2. Catch and store energy
3. Obtain a yield [eg food or enjoyment]

This class is free. We meet every other week over 10 weeks. I ran into two people with whom I'd previously volunteered in bush regeneration and community gardens.

I believe growing food [well] is a largely lost skill among Westerners. Perhaps if I become better at it, I can pass on the gift of permaculture gardening to others.

Here's a neat quote from Bill Mollison when asked to define "Permaculture":

It's hard to get your mind around it - I can't. I guess I would know more about permaculture than most people, and I can't define it. It's multi-dimensional - chaos theory was inevitably involved in it from the beginning.

You see, if you're dealing with an assembly of biological systems, you can bring the things together, but you can't connect them. We don't have any power of creation - we have only the power of assembly. So you just stand there and watch things connect to each other, in some amazement actually. You start by doing something right, and you watch it get more right than you thought possible.

Read more here, here, or here.