Get the dirt on your vegies, and your farmer, with community-supported agriculture.

On Saturday mornings, somewhere in Ashwood in Melbourne’s south-east, a front yard looks like this: flocks of neighbours swap their backyard produce and chirp to one another over tea and cake. Kids buzz around. Then they all chat with their farmer.

It’s the Damper Creek Co-operative. About fifty families collect a box of organic vegetables, weekly or fortnightly, for $28 each. The boxes are delivered by the farmer, Rod May, from Captain’s Creek Farm near Daylesford. “He comes and hangs out with us for morning tea,” says co-op founder Katie Greaves. “People get to ask him questions about the food. The kids call him Our Farmer Rod.”

The vegie box group is a type of community-supported agriculture (CSA), where growers sell directly, and regularly, to eaters. “We want to know where our food comes from and we want to build a relationship with the people who grow it,” Ms Greaves says.

The co-op, run by volunteer members, began buying boxes in January. “We were concerned about our climate impact and dependence on fossil fuels,” she says. “I wanted food that hadn’t travelled halfway around the planet. I wanted to ride my bike to collect it, and to create a world where my young children get to know their neighbours.”

Members receive produce according to season. “We get vegies pulled straight from the ground, covered in dirt. We never know what we’re going to get, and people have really embraced that,” Ms Greaves says, noting the keen cookery discussion that followed delivery of daikon, an East Asian radish.

The co-op held an excursion to Captain’s Creek Farm, and plans to return for a spring feast and working bee. “Rod took us on a tramping tour around the vegie paddocks. The kids were hanging off his legs and asking questions about beetroot,” she says.

Ms Greaves is full of encouragement for people who want to create or join a CSA. “The key thing is to start small and keep it simple. Just go ahead – gather a group of interested people and begin making contacts.”

The Farm Gateway website, coordinated by Michelle Yang, is a great place to start. You can use the site to find active groups around the city or register your interest.

“The term ‘community-supported agriculture’ came out of America in the eighties,” Ms Yang says. There, it refers to groups that pay their farmer upfront for a season’s produce, rather than buying week-to-week. “It’s about supporting the farmer financially when they need it most.”

That kind of structure is less common in Australia, but can be invaluable for growers starting a scheme from scratch. However, vegie box groups such as the Damper Creek Co-op also give farmers a guaranteed market and close contact with their customers.

Ms Yang argues that CSAs bring householders benefits in spades: cheap, fresh, healthy food, with proof of its provenance, plus friendlier neighbourhoods and less transport, waste and packaging. “It re-establishes that sense of community around food, which we’ve lost in our society,” she says.

If a co-op isn’t for you, CERES Food Connect will soon offer a similar distribution scheme. They’ll buy and sort local, organic produce, then deliver boxes to a designated ‘city cousin’. Neighbours will pick up their produce from that house.

Plan your reno well, from design to details.

IF YOU’RE thinking about a green renovation, you need the right advice. Where should you begin?

There are many websites and workshops to help you turn the right sod. For an overview of the issues, the Your Home Renovator’s Guide is a great place to start. Also, you can still book in for a free home sustainability assessment through the federal government’s Green Loans program.

Architect David Hallett, from Archicentre, says the first step is to choose between moving, building or renovating. “Increasingly, people are deciding to knock down their house and build a new one on the same block. Renovating is often a more sustainable alternative, because you’re not building a whole new dwelling.”

Archicentre is the building advisory service of the Australian Institute of Architects. It runs regular free seminars on home renovation, covering topics such as design, construction and permits. The next one will be on June 15, in Hawthorn.

The organisation also offers a ‘design concept’ service. “It’s a feasibility study for people who want to know what’s possible,” he says. For between $1000 and $2000, an architect will visit your home, draw up concept plans and, most importantly, give you a cost estimate.

Over the last five years, Mr Hallet has observed among clients a growing appetite for sustainable add-ons. “But by and large,” he says, “people haven’t fully grasped the value of passive solar design.”

He recommends would-be renovators learn the basic concepts – such as placing living areas to the north to admit winter sun, minimising windows to the south, shading west windows and insulating heavily. “You can add solar panels or heavy curtains later, but you can’t add passive solar design. You have to build it into the house.

“It’s sometimes challenging with a renovation, because you can get buildings that face exactly the wrong way. That’s where the fun starts, and where good design skills come in,” Mr Hallett says.

Judy Glick agrees. Last year, she led the renovation of the EcoHouse at CERES Community Environment Park. “I can’t emphasise enough the value of clever design,” she says. “You can achieve what you want without making the house larger.”

The EcoHouse is a 1920s weatherboard home, relocated to the Brunswick East site in the mid-1980s as a sustainability education facility. The recent makeover set out to prove that older homes could be retrofitted to be sustainable, affordable and appealing. It included an internal reshuffle to create an open-plan kitchen and living area, as well as a refurb of fittings and furnishings.

Wherever possible, Ms Glick opted for local, natural, non-toxic, second-hand, renewable or recyclable materials. “You can examine the environmental impact of every decision, from the broad to the very fine,” she says.

But that’s an agony of issues to grapple with. To make things simpler, she recommends seeking out products bearing the Good Environmental Choice Australia tick. “If you get guidance from third-party accreditation, you can make decisions without having to go through all the research yourself.”

The EcoHouse is open every Saturday morning, from 10 am until 1 pm, with staff on hand to answer questions. “We have before and after photos, so you can see what it looked like,” Ms Glick says. “It’s a fantastic place to start, and to see what you can achieve.”

Community composting improves your sense of humus.

SEVERAL afternoons a week, Glenda Lindsay pedals to two cafés near her home in Fitzroy. It’s not from their coffee she gets her buzz, but from their spent grounds and potato peels.

“Compost is an obvious connection in the food chain between the people cooking and selling food, and the people growing it,” she says. “When you use kitchen scraps from those businesses to create beautiful soil for growing food in, it helps join the dots.”

Last year, Ms Lindsay helped coordinate Compost Mates, a six-month trial in which teams of householders were rostered to pick up the compostable kitchen scraps from four cafes in Melbourne’s inner north. “That material would otherwise end up in mixed landfill producing methane,” she says.

The trial was run by food-growing advocate, Cultivating Community. Peta Christensen, from the organisation, says even at a small scale the scheme had a significant effect, because methane is such a potent greenhouse gas. “According to our calculations, across the four cafes, it was the equivalent of taking 100 cars off the road for a year.

“The model is about reclaiming that waste and using it as a resource in the community. Anyone can get a few neighbours together, make a roster and approach the local café,” she says.

It’s an idea that also works well for community gardens and schools. The Compost Mates trial included Fitzroy Primary School, which collects scraps from a nearby café for its school garden program.

For most enthusiasts, composting is a clandestine passion. Ms Christensen argues, however, that it makes a perfect collective activity. “Lots of people want to compost but they live in an apartment, don’t have the skills or worry it’s going to turn into a mess. Team-supported composting makes lots of sense.”

Community composting projects vary, from more formal proposals such as council collection or bike-powered tumblers in parks, to casual arrangements between neighbours. In the Sydney suburb Chippendale, the residents of Myrtle Street have installed compost bins on the footpath. Locally, residents involved in Transition Darebin held a public autumn leaf harvest. The fallen leaves help build healthy compost – they’re an excellent carbon-rich balance to the nitrogen-rich vegie scraps.

If you’re keen to try but would prefer not to bare your innermost peelings with your neighbours, most councils run home composting workshops or offer discounted bins. Contact your council for more information.

In her backyard, Ms Lindsay has several cubic metres of compost cooking at once. “In the city, there’s something very grounding about growing even the smallest bit of your own food,” she says, “just to see the miracle of the seed that goes in the soil and produces something you can eat.”

She recalls the proverb that “houses are the last crop of the land,” but is adamant that we must not let it be so. “It makes sense to try and grow as much food as close as possible to centres of population, but city land has often been neglected or contaminated.

“Compost is a really important factor in remediating soil – it increases its water retention and the nutritional value of food grown in it. With all of these food businesses in Melbourne, we have an amazing resource at our fingertips.”

The first little piggy had the right idea.

MARK Dearricott had worked for a decade as a bricklayer when he decided to help a friend with his straw bale construction business. “I thought it was pretty dodgy, building houses out of straw,” he admits. “But after the first few, I realised its potential was tremendous. It’s a brilliant material.”

Mr Dearricott now runs Professional Strawbale, and has built about 200 houses across Victoria. He’s flat out with projects and inquiries, often for the suburbs. “It’s a very versatile material. It suits any design, from a cute little cottage to a super-straight, ultra-modern house.”

He says a professionally built straw bale dwelling costs about 15 per cent more than standard brick-veneer, but makes for a much more comfortable home, with exceptional insulation and sound proofing.

Construction techniques vary: straw bales can be used in load bearing walls or as in-fill for a timber frame. In both cases, the bales are laid like giant bricks and then sealed with lime, cement or earthen render.

Mr Dearricott favours conventional post-and-beam frames for ease of construction and compliance with council regulations. He warns that while regional councils are now accustomed to straw bale homes, the planning process may not be so smooth with inner-city councils.

He says would-be clients have three main concerns: mice, water and fire. The render, usually about five centimetres thick, protects the bales against all three. “The straw is completely sealed,” he says. “Everything is rendered, including the tops of the walls.”

Nevertheless, it’s wise to include well-designed eaves to shelter the walls from the prevailing weather – they’re a must if you use earthen render.

Surprisingly, the bales don’t present an added bushfire risk. CSIRO testing, conducted in 2002, found that rendered bales are non-combustible under bushfire conditions. “The straw is compacted tightly and it won’t burn because there isn’t enough oxygen flow,” Mr Dearricott says.

Chris Rule and his family built their straw bale home near Bendigo five years ago. Mr Rule, a cartoonist and writer, has since designed and built another straw bale house and recently became a registered builder. “Straw bale enticed me into it,” he says. “It looks beautiful and its possibilities are so interesting.”

One of those possibilities is for householders to do some of the construction, and save on their costs. On a recent project, the owner and his friends spent a day laying the bales. “They had a lovely time learning how to do it,” Mr Rule says. “There was a real picnic atmosphere and they were building a house. It’s very low-tech, forgiving and fixable, so you can be involved. In the housing industry, people generally don’t get involved.”

He acknowledges that although the insulation provided by the bales is excellent, it’s just one part of good solar passive design. “If the house gets sun at the wrong time of the year and you haven’t designed your windows well, a straw bale home can shocking because the heat stays inside.”

As a building material, bales have many pluses. Straw is a waste product, often burned at season’s end; using it in construction stores carbon. It’s also renewable, biodegradable and non-toxic. When it’s sourced locally, Mr Rule says, it has very low embodied energy. “We got our straw from 2 kilometres down the road, opposite our family farm.”

For more information, see the Australasian Straw Bale Building Association, and Your Home’s straw bale fact sheet.

Compact homes take less and give more.

WHEN Edward Vinas and his family began planning their new home in East Brighton, they thought they’d go big. “It was probably because everyone else was building big places,” he says. “In our area, there are so many new houses and they’re built almost fence to fence.”

They visited volume builders, but it wasn’t long before they realised a large home would mean wasted space. “We’re a small family – my wife, myself and our son. When we thought out what we needed and why we needed it, a small house suited us better,” he says.

Zen Architects designed the family a two-bedroom home, with a convertible third bedroom and a study. It measures 140 square metres, including the outdoor decking. “It’s the perfect size for us. It feels spacious and we’ve got enough room to entertain both inside and outside,” Mr Vinas says.

The cost savings due to the modest size allowed for design and sustainability features they couldn’t otherwise have afforded, such as a reed-bed and sand filtration system that treats all greywater onsite.

“We don’t feel as though we’ve lost anything,” he says. “We feel like we’ve gained spare time. We didn’t want to be slaves to the home for its cleaning and maintenance. We’ve got better things to do.”

If house size is a guide, Australia is becoming a nation of constant cleaners. Research by the Australian Bureau of Statistics last year showed that our new houses are the largest in the world. The average floor area of new free-standing dwellings is 245 square metres. Meanwhile, through the decades, our households are comprised of fewer and fewer people.

Sustainability consultant Malcolm Wilkie says house size isn’t just a matter of lifestyle, but also ethics. Larger homes require more materials, more appliances and more stuff to fill the space, as well as more energy for heating and cooling. Inevitably, extra bathrooms mean higher water consumption.

“To sustain human life on the planet we have to conserve our resources and use only what we need,” he says. “We’re beyond the point where we can just say, ‘I earned it, so I can spend it.’ There’s a moral obligation to the next generations.”

Mr Wilkie argues that choosing a humble abode doesn’t mean sacrificing quality of life. With thoughtful, elegant design – and consideration of what really makes a house a home – a compact residence can improve your day-to-day existence. “A good way to think about it is, ‘What makes the building sing?’ I think a small house, with the right-sized spaces in it, is a nicer house to live in. If it’s too big, you lose the heart.”

In the US, the ‘small house movement’ is setting out to counterbalance oversized dwellings. The trend is founded on affordability, sustainability and simplicity, and a belief that larger lives are lived in littler spaces. The Small House Society, founded in 2002, acknowledges that ‘small’ is relative to occupancy and needs. Its supporters own homes ranging from just a dozen square metres, up to hundreds. Jay Shafer, author of The Small House Book, lived in only eight square metres.

“That’s going to the extreme to demonstrate what’s possible,” Mr Wilkie says. “They can do a lot with that living area – people start to get really clever when they’re tight for space.”

Contact Malcolm Wilkie.