THE Urban Bush-Carpenters’ workshop at CERES last month was on how to build bench seats. It was, needless to say, a tremendous success. We used pallets and bits and bobs collected hither and thither.

None of us had made a bench for a while, but Geoff dusted off our old design template for the legs and set about explaining the task at hand.

Our approach is quite simple – criss-crossed pieces, screwed and reinforced – but the trick is in getting the angles correct. This can take some trial and error to begin with. If you try, remember to make sure the seat is a nice height and depth, and the backrest is on a comfortable slant. Play around with the timber until it works. If in doubt, find a bench seat and copy its design.

Kavi, Thierry and Andy were hard at work, while Phil and Leharna streaked ahead of the rest.

And here are the three finished benches, together with their builders. As you can see, each bench – and each human – turned out different and beautiful, in their own way.

We’re planning on using the benches for some chair bombing. In the coming weeks, we’ll be setting them down on a nice piece of nature strip, some place where neighbours and passers-by can sit and shoot the breeze.

Next month’s workshop, on August 20, will be on making planter boxes from pallets. It’s filling fast, so contact the UBC if you’re keen.

I’M besotted with baking at the moment, so over the coming weeks, I’ll write a couple of posts about my sourdough and me.

Today, I’ll start – where else? – with the starter. If you’d like a soundtrack, I suggest The Loaf, by Darren Hanlon.

For those of you who haven’t come across the makings of sourdough before, the starter – otherwise known as the culture, plant or mother dough – is a kind of wild, bubbling, gurgling yeast. It’s the thing that makes the dough rise and contains the bacteria that make it sour. To my understanding of yeast, what happens is this: as the mix ferments, the yeast eats the sugars in the flour and releases carbon dioxide, which leavens the dough.

You can make your own starter in a week, by fermenting flour and water. I have a beautiful book called The Handmade Loaf, by Dan Lepard, in which he suggests adding raisins and yoghurt to the recipe.

But if you’ve got a liking for narrative – or convenience – I suggest you prevail on a friend for a portion of their culture. To keep it alive, you must feed it regularly with fresh flour and water (or you can store it for a while in the fridge or freezer and revive it later). This bakery in San Franscisco has been using the same “mother dough” since 1849.

While I was away hitch-hiking last year, my old starter died. I discovered the jar recently, toppled over under our kitchen bench. When I peered at the jar’s congealed innards, it I realised that both of us – the culture and I – were petrified.

Its death was apt. Over the last few years, I had made a number of half-hearted attempts at baking bread, but gave up, not really knowing what I was doing.

But then I fell in love with Les Bartlett’s small bakery near Maleny on the Sunshine Coast. There I met Penny, a fellow Melbournian, who was staying there to learn Les’s craft. Earlier this year I saw Penny again and she brought me a sample of his sourdough plant. For most of this year, I’ve been baking twice a week. I am only beginning to learn.

This is what my jar looked like the other day:

 

Last week, I was talking with a good friend whose grandmother died recently. He was driving to visit her one morning, when he received a call saying she’d passed away. While we talked, I began to think about my family.

Two years ago my grandparents on my mother’s side died within a week of each other. At that time I gained solace from the wisdom of another friend, Daniela from Argentina.

Daniela is the person who first showed me how to bake bread, while I stayed for weeks at her remote camping ground – Ecocamping Ñorquinco – on the edge of a lake, in a national park, in northern Patagonia. Here she is by the lake, with bread for morning tea:

 

She told me that while she did not believe in an afterlife, she knew that her relatives, generation upon generation, lived on through her and through her children: not only in their minds – for memories rarely surpass a few generations – but also in their bodies. Her ancestors lived on, physically, through her.

I find this profound; it seems both soulful and scientifically valid. I think of generations stretching back in time, each of us given our substance by those before us, even as we must make our days, minds and bodies our own.

Sourdough is like that. Whenever I open my jar of culture to begin a new batch, I call upon a living portion of the past. The mother loaf goes back to Les, and maybe beyond. Its family tree extends through all those with whom he’s shared it, and on and on, in turn.

ANDY and I ventured north on a sunny Saturday, to hold a UBC workshop at a Permablitz for the Reservoir Neighbourhood House.

We were asked to adapt our previous bathtub wormfarm design into something much lower to the ground, to fit a convenient spot near the kitchen and double as an outdoor bench. We scavenged timber from our own ramshackle stocks, including some gorgeous old hardwood floorboards that Tall English Stephen had earmarked for his own chook shed. He put on a brave face when he found them missing.

Despite the trouble we were in with a miffed Stephen, this was my new all-time favourite Urban Bush-Carpenters workshop. A large group of enthusiastic volunteers did all the work while we watched, imparted wisdom and ate cake. Many of the participants hadn’t had any experience using a saw or a drill, but with a few small pointers and much gusto, we produced a beautiful object.

It is a constant source of wonder to me that we always seem to have just the right amount and right kind of timber on hand, not more or less – but I guess that’s about making do with whatever we’ve got. 

I was so excited by the way it looked, that if it were me, I’d be inclined to keep it inside.

We’ve got our next workshop at CERES on this Saturday July 16, at 10 am. We’ll be building bench seats, like this:

If you want to take part, shoot us a message.

LAST weekend the Urban Bush-Carpenters commenced phase two of our world domination strategy: we held a free workshop at CERES on how to build planter boxes from pallets.

Half a dozen of Melbourne’s savviest citizens came along. We split into three groups. I worked with Neil and Tom (pictured) to transform these:

 

Into this:

 

And then, within a couple of hours:

Hey pesto! You could grow bunches of basil in this container (sorry about the pun). 

 As our new accomplices found out, there’s nothing tricky about the design. All you need are a couple of pallets, a saw, a hammer and some screws and nails. And a friend with whom to stand side-by-side, point and think-out-loud, while you’re figuring it all out.

Neil, Tom and Thomas (another attendee) are all part of a guerrilla community garden by the train line in Clifton Hill. They’ve promised to share their bush-carpentry skills with the neighbours (world domination begins – very slowly).

Until the end of the year, the UBC will be holding workshops at CERES on the third Saturday of every month. At the next one we’ll make bench seats – send us an email if you’d like to attend.

THE Urban Bush-Carpenters returned to Stewart Lodge, hitherto the site of our finest hour, the walk-in chook house. And we topped it.

Over the course of four weekends, we constructed a hybrid compost bay/deep litter chook-feeding system. In the absence of naysayers, we consider it to be a world’s first.

As seen on TV, Stewart Lodge is a residential care facility for people with acquired brain injury. The garden co-ordinators, Robin and Nattie, had strict design requirements for us to meet. They wanted the Lodge chickens to have access to the bays – that way, the chooks could scratch around and feed on the kitchen scraps, all the while adding their own nitrogen-rich deposits to the mix. But the design would have to be as simple as possible, so the residents could use it. No heavy lids or complex mechanisms.

Unfortunately, these demands postponed Geoff’s longstanding desire to construct a chook-powered conveyor-belt and elevator contraption:

This sketch was better:

After a frank planning pow-wow, we settled on the perfect design. We would build the bays with tall posts and doors that hinged at the top. To give the ladies access to the veggie scraps, we’d extend the run all the way to the bays, and wrap the frame in chicken wire to prevent their escape.

We’d been collecting materials hither and thither for a couple of months. My mother’s friend Pretam is renovating her home around the corner from Stewart Lodge, and we were able to construct the bays almost entirely from material she kindly donated – her old hardwood framing timber, floorboards and even a classy wire door. Late one night we scavenged sheets of tin from a footpath in Carlton North, and motored nonchalantly down a main road with several sheets protruding savagely from the rear end of a hatchback.

And so, to the construction: together with volunteers and prodigal bush-carpenter Dale, we worked on the beast. We’d confidently predicted we’d have it done in two afternoons. It took four weekends instead, including one dawn to dusk session by Geoff and Andy under a giant tarp, while the Gods wept bitter tears.

But here is the magnificent finished product, which makes everything (almost) worthwhile (maybe).

 

The final afternoon, as we basked in our own self-satisfied glory, one resident approached with food scraps to feed the chickens. “Put it in the compost bays!” I suggested, and tried to explain our grand plan.

She was unconvinced. “How are the chickens going to get in there?” she said scornfully – and perceptively. She may have a point.

A FEW months ago I wrote a column about Fowlers Vacola bottling kits, and a week later, I received a letter, via The Age. It is my all-time favourite letter. The writer had cut out the header of my article from the newspaper and adhered it to the sheet.

The handwriting was cursive like my grandma’s. “Dear Sir,” it began. “Last week you wrote a very interesting article on fruit bottling. I have the complete works, several dozen bottles and instructions. I would like to find someone interested as I am now retired and no longer do any bottling…”

Margaret included her number, and when I phoned, she called me “Mr Green”. We spoke a few times, and finally, a week ago, I drove to her house.

She was waiting by the door when I arrived. I guessed she was in her late 80s, but her physical presence had not yet diminished. She gave the impression of height. Her husband had recently passed away and she had been sorting through their effects. Over the past weeks, she retrieved the Fowlers bottles from the garage, washed them and stacked them for my arrival. There were rows and rows of them – too many to transport at once – as well as the big electric boiler and boxes of lids, seals and paraphernalia.

Margaret told me that she and her husband had both worked full time. In late summer and autumn, they would arrive home at six o’clock and begin bottling. They bought cheap boxes of fruit and stored enough to last through the year.

When she told me about her husband, she spoke slowly and looked away, towards where the wall and floor met. She had no next of kin, she said. It was a lot to do, to organise and discard their possessions, but there was no one else. She was glad the bottles, at least, would go to someone who wanted them.

We stacked the jars in the car and I arranged to visit again in a couple of weeks, for the dozens remaining. It was a grey Sunday afternoon, windy, and the jars rattled as I passed back through the suburbs.

A couple of days later, I rode to my friends Helen and Sam’s house with half a dozen jars in my bag. They had a box of apples ready, some gleaned from a tree in their street, others from a neighbour’s sister’s yard. In a small production line, we peeled and cut them, and packed the jars. Helen made syrup, three parts water to one part raw sugar. We clipped on the seals and lids, brought the water to 94 degrees, and held it there for 45 minutes. We nattered and joked and listened to music; we were productive and joyful.

I’ll take Margaret a jar or two, and a story to preserve, when I return.

I’d like to bottle some more fruit, over Easter. I’d especially like it if I could use fruit that would otherwise go to waste – so if you know of any overburdened trees, please let me know!

A couple of weeks ago, I got a message from a woman called Anita, offering some timber to the Urban Bush-Carpenters. She lived in Brooklyn, in the western suburbs, out of bike riding range. I called her, planning to say thanks, but no thanks.

But when we spoke, she told me about her dad, Ricardo, a lifelong builder and tinkerer. “He re-used everything,” she said, “to the point where he made a wooden base for a broken wineglass.”

So on the weekend, I drove west to pick up the timber. Four years ago, when her parents became unwell, Anita had moved in next door to her childhood home. I knocked on the door, and she welcomed me into her house. Most of her belongings were packed away in boxes and the garden was bare – the place was well cared for, but with the air of a waiting room.

The yard next door was teeming with life. Above the fence line, I could see several fruit trees: stonefruit, citrus and olives. It was an abundant garden, with veggie patches near and far.

“When I was younger, an ex-boyfriend once told me he always knew I was a wog, because we grew vegetables in the front yard,” Anita told me. Both her parents had passed away, and the two houses had been sold. “Living here is just too emotional,” she said. She was about to move suburbs.

Ricardo, a carpenter by trade, had emigrated from Italy after World War II. He was lean and poised, and he liked to present himself well. In the photos clustered on Anita’s table, he wore a suit and hat.

Anita put on her gloves and helped me move the timber. She told me about how she’d grown up learning how to do things with her hands. In her street “there were Italians, Greeks, Aussies, Polish, Germans and even a French family”, and many of them shared the DIY ethic.

Recently, she and her siblings had cleaned out Ricardo’s collection of useful materials. “We grew up reusing and recycling,” she said. “I can’t tell you how much it pained me when the skip came and we threw away so much of the timber.”

Over decades, he’d built two houses and two extensions. He built the “taverna” as well, the small brick building where he cooked family meals and smoked meats. Anita showed me a photo of its interior, pointing out the sinks and stove and bench top. “Everything was salvaged, second-hand, re-used,” she said. Then she pointed out a pattern of white tiles on the floor, which formed his initials. “The man had an ego, too,” she laughed.

“He was always doing something. He carried had a notebook in his top pocket, with a list on it. But the list never ended, it just went on from one page to the next. Even as he was dying he didn’t want to stop. He said to me, ‘I can’t die yet, I’ve got too much to do.’”

WHEN I first wrote about the Urban Bush-Carpenters, I described us as “a revolutionary organisation”. Scratch that. Now we’re celebrity revolutionaries.

Two weeks ago we found out that not only we had been nominated for the Earth Hour Awards, in the ‘Future Makers’ category (by Andy’s wife, Josie), but that we had been named as finalists. Gosh. You can vote for us here.

(Otherwise, I suggest you vote for Beyond Zero Emissions, an extraordinarily effective volunteer group, which has produced a blueprint for Australia to convert to renewable electricity by 2020.)

Associated with our unexpected nomination, we have done some media interviews. We appeare on The Circle, a morning TV show on Channel Ten. We sawed and hammered, and carried chickens for the camera. Un-missable TV.

But enough of that. You’ll be relieved to know that we’ve also been keeping it real, salvaged timber style. We built a schmick planter box from a pallet and a bed base, for the Where the Heart Is Festival, a celebration for people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness.

And last week we constructed a frame and lid for a bathtub wormfarm for a community garden in Clifton Hill. We picked up the timber – old hardwood framing timber – from my mother’s friend Pretam, who is renovating her house. She had a pile of the stuff, all in great condition. (She also gave us dozens of apples from her tree.)

We made the frame with a three-part lid, each a neat prop, so the gardeners can feed their earthworm livestock in stages. Geoff described it glowingly, as “maybe the second best thing we’ve ever built”. Andy wasn’t so sure:

But the bathtub wormfarm is so alluring, in fact, that it was all we could do prevent the Lovely Melissa from planting herself on top of it for all time. The revolution I spoke of is not a violent one. We originally described it is as the three S’s: salvaging, socialising and sharing. To that, we now add a fourth: sex appeal. (Note the matching red sock on the clothes line.)