Page updated:
Friday, 7 September 2007

PEOPLE making a difference - jill Finnane...

Woman with a chook

It comes as a surprise to discover livestock of any sort in this part of the city, yet the chook pen is only one surprise among many in this small but highly productive garden.

Jill Finnane's home garden is small but productive in fruit, herbs and vegetables.
The fenced area behind the garden houses the chooks.

Jill and her husband occupy a dark-brick, terracotta tile roofed, Federation style house in a street of similar homes in Sydney's Inner West, a typical street in this part of the city. Where Jill's home differs, however, is the edible landscape that spills onto the footpath and the chooks that strut around her small backyard.

“It wasn’t like this when we moved in”, Jill said, sweeping her arm over the convoluted garden edges and cascading vegetables. “There was concrete that needed moving because water was collecting and mosquitos were breeding. One of my son’s friends dug it dug up and I put in a little herb garden. That was the first step - getting rid of a problem.

Jill knows that protracted thought rather than thoughtless action should be the first step in garden design.

“I drew up a design, starting with a base plan of what was actually there. I fiddled with possibilities. More than half our backyard was carport. Getting rid of that was a big decision. We lived with the place for a year humming and harring about the big effort of getting in the pneumatic drills… but we did eventually get rid of it and that made a huge difference because we got sunlight into the yard.”

Then began a process of ‘creeping gardenisation’ that followed the principle of taking on only as much as you can manage, consolidating that area and pushing out incrementally from the edges of what you have done. As a means of developing a garden as time allows, the process has completely transformed the back, side and front yards of Jill’s Federation style semi-detached cottage.

Garden of useful plants

It is not all that common to find front gardens in the Inner West brimming with mango, macadamia and sweet potato. The narrow side passage is home to a tall, narrow rainwater tank, a cluster of fruiting banana trees and an assortment of ground covers such as the Asian root crop, galangal, which is used to flavour food. But it is in the backyard that the diversity and productivity of Jill’s home garden is most evident.

Jill uses a scoop on the end of a pole to harvest ripe pawpaw

“Here I do my annual plants because they get a little bit more sun... not loads... but enough to grow”, Jill explains. Around us is a garden of curving edges full of tomatoes, leafy greens and a few fruit trees. The shape of the garden beds increases the area of ‘edge’, an ecological term that describes the supposedly-productive zone in which different ecosystems meet.

Visible over the fence are the strap-leafed heads of sugar cane and the radiating tops of pawpaw, all growing along a narrow strip of garden in the rear lane. “People pinched the rockmelon and pumpkin I first planted out there. The pawpaw are far and away the most successful plant in the garden… we get delicious pawpaws all spring and into summer… we give away pawpaw.”

The beauty of chooks

Jill’s three bantams give one or two eggs a day, enough for her small family. Tiny though her garden might be, she is adamant that chooks have a place in the home gardens of our biggest cities.

“I have spoken to so many people who say the grew up with chooks in the backyard, so of course chooks in the home garden are viable. People have always kept chooks. It’s only that, somehow or other, we’ve come to look on our backyards as having to be neat and tidy and we’ve forgotten how beautiful chooks really are.”

More than mere avian ornaments in some decorative garden, Jill’s chooks fulfil useful roles, producing eggs and manure and scratching up the litter that is used to make compost.

There are psychological as well as utilitarian reasons why Jill advocates the keeping of poultry in the suburbs, difficult to understand though these reasons might be for people who have never kept domestic birds.

“Chooks add to your quality of life. They are so delightful and you don’t have to look after them in the same fanatical way that you do dogs. Their manure is not as dangerous as dog manure. Hens make a beautiful, relaxing sound like waves on a beach, it’s a beautiful murmur.” Clearly, Jill is hooked on chooks.

Organic by default

A science teacher by background, Jill started in gardening the synthetic way. “I tried that approach and it didn’t work. Then I  discovered composting and no-dig gardening and found that it actually did work… it was the logic of the approach. Once I started looking at the science of composting and working with the soil and nature and understanding ecology, it all made sense.The other reason I adopted organic gardening is because I care about sustainability, caring for the earth and that kind of thing.”

Jill's approach to gardening is practical and science based. Organics is basic to her approach to life in which she combines her interest in local foods with a practical appreciation of nature, social justice, family, friends and community. A woman who values friendship and the sense of commonality it engenders, Jill has formed a gardening group of three women who take turns to work in each other's gardens. These are social as well as working sessions.

Presently with the Edmund Rice social justice centre where her role is to integrate environmental concerns into the centre's work, Jill has taugh the permaculture design system and has shared her knowledge with women in Sri Lanka, where she has made a number of visits to offer training in food production and Permaculture design. In 2005 her book on gardening - Lawns Into Lunch - was published. To write it, she visited the home gardens of a number of Sydney people and described how they are returning the productivity of food gardening to the city rather than maintaining tracts of agriculturally useless, water-consuming lawn.

Harvesting and storing rainwater is sensible in a city that experiences drought

Sustainable suburbs, productive cities

Jill talks of sitting in the train and looking into Sydney’s backyards. She sees maybe a few that still grow vegetables, but most support nothing more than lawn and, perhaps, a couple trees. Here, Jill sees potential.

“We’ve got a beautiful climate for growing things here in Sydney and the soil is not too bad, except perhaps, for people with really sandy soils. But even they can do something if they build it up with enough organic matter. My mother is always giving me oranges and lemons from her backyard, which is basically pure sand. She manages, so it is possible.”

Jill learned the practical way that, when it comes to turning small urban backyards into food gardens, there are going to be challenges.

“Oh, sunlight is probably the major limiting factor, but so is time to the city person. This is where fruit trees are great because they don’t take so too much time.

“You look for time-saving, low-maintenance ideas. You work out a convenient slow way to make compost and put the compost bin as close as possible to where you are going to use it.  It is important to think about the people in the household… how they are going to use the yard. If you have children their needs will come first in terms of how you design the yard… they need their play area. You fit your food growing around the other important social needs of the household.

“Then you consdier what you like to eat… and think about what you want to do with the whole garden. Produce your design, your ten year plan, what you might do with the whole thing, but start where it is easiest or start close to the back door or where you have enough sunlight… not in a corner because in a corner is usually up the back. When I started gardening I made a garden way out the back… it was a real effort to get to, to look after and harvest. Once my thinking changed and I grew vegetables and herbs near the back door it made it so much easier and took so much less time".

Jill collects water chestnuts from a garden pond

The politics and spirituality of gardening

The act of growing some of her own food is more than a simple interest to Jill – it is a political and spiritual act. Consciously or unconsciously, gardening teaches us about how change happens in society.

 “Permaculture gardening is part of the process of change, but in a constructive way. It shows that things can be different.

“For me, spirituality is very important. In many ways it is about what  it means to be fully human and how we relate to others in that caring sort of sense. I think Permaculture lends itself to a lot of the spirituality that underpins much of the world’s nature religions. Getting in touch with nature and sustaining ourselves seems to be what it is about. Some people looking at it from the outside see it as getting dirt under your fingernails and they think of gardening as lowly. But people who actually produce their food in a garden find it ennobling. It appeals to the very best in themselves, which I think is what spirituality is about, bringing out what is good in us.

“The Permaculture approach to gardening with nature and having a concern about the bigger issues, like sustainability, connects with my spirituality, anyway.”

Practicality, spirituality, peace of mind and local food – these are the qualities that Jill Finnane derives from gardening a small patch in an inner suburb of Australia’s biggest city.