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.”