The Food Forest ~ Gawler, SA ~ March 2013

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The Food Forest is renowned in Australia as one of the largest, most productive, and commercially viable permaculture-style farms in the country. Graham (hilarious and gregarious!) and Annemarie (spirited and industrious!) Brookman run this festive farm where a constant stream of great food leaves the farm and a constant stream of great people flock to the farm to visit, work, help, stay, return, and return again. The property is a 15-hectare organic farm an hour outside of Adelaide, with hundreds of pistachio trees, tens of fruit trees, and a large market veggie patch – 160 varieties of fruit and nut in total! Graham and Annemarie trained as agriculturalists first and then adopted many aspects of permaculture second as a sensible ethics and design system. They are positive and pragmatic about every aspect of their work, eager to engage with mainstream culture in order to support and participate in education and positive change. I had a chance to wwoof here for three weeks in March, along with two other lovely young women, permaculturalists from Mexico and Chilli. Lucky us!

At the Food Forest, people are key. Our team of workers included Graham and Annemarie working alongside everyone else all day, a Danish fellow who had returned to the Food Forest 17 times over 20 years (!!), four or five other former wwoofers who live nearby and still come back one day a week or for a few days here and there to help, a couple of nice guys who come down for seasonal work on the farm, some local volunteers interested in permaculture and happy to help, myself and the other wwoofing ladies. We really felt like a team.

Team Food Forest picked a beautiful harvest abundance for the bi-weekly farmer’s market in Adelaide – figs, nashis, plums, grapes, apples, capsicum, eggplant, lettuces, silverbeet, herbs, pumpkins, leeks, chilis, pistachios, almonds, ETC! My personal favourites are nashis...I see an orchard of nashis in my dreams! And I was blown away by the gorgeous grapes in Graham’s orchard – I always thought of grapes as sweet and juicy, but Graham’s black and white muscat grapes have amazingly complex and floral flavours, which change into different but equally complex and delicious flavours when the grapes begin to sun-dry on the vine just a bit. MMMMM!!!! I now understand why those Romans were inspired to lounge on their philosophical cushions all day munching a bunch of sophisticated grapes.

As beautiful as the fresh and dried grapes were, we also enjoyed their re-birth through the wine press. The small press at the Food Forest gets good use -- we pressed grapes for wine and apples for cider several times, and bottled three varieties of homebrewed beer! The Food Forest strictly respects the commencement of leisure time at “beer o’clock” and enjoys toasts to the good earth at every harvest meal. Not only good food, but also good drink is an important part of sufficient abundance from the land here.

We harvested millions of smiling little pistachios – a dramatic process that involves smacking the statuesque pistachio tree with long sticks to make the bunches of nuts rain down on tarps below, then sift and sort and process in the shed. I had never seen a fresh pistachio in its mango-colored and –scented outer skin with bright pink and green flesh, before I came here – memorable! Almonds were another highlight of the nut harvest, as the small-scale method here entailed dancing on the shells to break them off the fruit inside. Yes, we cranked up the music to go nuts on the dancefloor :)

Graham and Annemarie have also worked energetically at a river conservation and re-vegetation project which was in full swing while I stayed with them. On the river adjacent to their property, they have put in enormous resources of their own by planting, watering, and maintaining much of this re-gen, organizing the community around the project, petitioning their local council for funding and resources, and spearheading a major earth-moving project to fill in a gap in the river bed to allow for more native planting and re-generation of the river’s ecosystem. Exciting to watch the bulldozers in the river every day, and good reminder of the many positive uses of heavy equipment to jump-start re-generation of natural ecosystems. Graham even made a video about this project – we went to the opening – and a short version is on YouTube!

The amazing WOMAD World Music Festival was on in Adelaide while I was in town, and Annemarie generously helped me and my wwofing partner Sarwa join in the fun. Beautiful music in Adelaide’s gracious botanical garden, hot days cooled with ice cream and the shade of ancient stately trees.

Leaving the Food Forest, I fulfilled one of my Aussie dreams: I took the looooong train ride “across the middle” of Australia from Melbourne to Perth, through the vast Nullarbor Plain desert. Three days and nights on the train. Lots and lots of flat flat flat dry country, bare soil broken by tufts of scrubby grasses, flat and dry as far as the eye can see. I was so glad to feel and experience the vast distance. As I said to my seat-mate, “I don’t want to spend too much time reading or writing on my computer, because I want to look out the window as much as possible; I don’t want to miss anything!” haha!

Out in Perth I stayed with Kim and Matt, extended members of my blueberry family from Tasie, and enjoyed the beaches. Soft while sands, warm crystal-clear water, fun waves in the turquoise Indian Ocean. Much more to discover in WA some time in the future, but a nice taste for now.