Suburban farming: the Australians with country lifestyles, but city lives
While many people dream about living an idyllic farm life, most balk at the prospect of a country move. Hellish work commutes and the social isolation of leaving established communities being the major reasons.
But two Australian families are living their farm life dream without leaving the comforts of the city.
Potter Edwin Wise (35) and his family – wife Maria Cameron and kids Ruth (6), Winter (2) and Rye (11 months) – live with Maria’s sister, Angelica (29), and her partner Michi (32), on a thriving suburban farm in Heidelberg West, just 14km from Melbourne’s CBD.
On their 700-square-metre block they have chooks, honey bees and sprawling vegetable gardens – overflowing with celery, parsley and lettuces. “We’re good for leafy greens,” says Wise. The family also grow their own fruit. “This winter we’ve had all the citrus we need. We’ve got limes, we’ve got lemons and we’ve got mandarins.”
They’ve also kept goats for six years. “People have dogs in the suburbs,” Wise says. “Why couldn’t we have something, like a dog, that was productive?”
They applied for a permit to the council and the “excited and super supportive” ranger inspected their goat shed and gave them the go-ahead.
The goats provide them with three litres of milk a day. “We drink most of it in coffees and cereal,” says Wise. The rest is made into cheese by Angelica (chevre and “haloumi is the current favourite”, says Wise), and shared by their close-knit community of neighbours.
The family have never felt tempted to shift to the country. “We don’t want to be socially isolated,” says Wise. “There’s a whole tradition of communal living, of self-sufficient ambition – you buy a bush block and you basically remove yourself. That isn’t the idea, it’s: how can we eat from the suburbs? You’re trying to make suburbia work.”
Over in NSW, couple Emma Bowen (34) and Michael Zagoridis (35), are also living a farm life in Camperdown, just 3.8km from Sydney’s bustling CBD. The couple, with their son, Banjo (2), four rescue hens and their farm dog, Pepe, have turned an old bowling club into a thriving 1200-square-metre farm.
Just a year old and Pocket City Farms grows a huge range of vegetables, including kale, kohlrabi, coriander and cucumbers.
They also have a “community food forest”, 100 square metres of fruit trees and herbs including pomegranates, mangoes, figs and cumquats that they encourage the public to pick and enjoy‚ and three native bee hives.
During the frustrating five-year search for suitable urban land to establish the farm, Bowen says the family questioned whether they should just move out to the country.
Potter Edwin Wise enjoys farm life just 14km from Melbourne's CBD.
“But we lived in the city – we loved living in the city – but we were really disconnected from our own food production and food sources. And we began to realise: so are most people living in the city. It’s really hard to be able to gain that connection to how our food is grown, and where, and the seasonality of food growing. We wanted to set up a farm in the city primarily for us, and other people, to begin to connect with that.”
This article was originally published in Domain on February 8th 2018.
Image: Pocket City Farms