Home

While Australia has been feeling the effects of climate change, this years La Niña has been particularly savage, with ferocious cyclone activity in northern Queensland and massive flooding across Brisbane, greater Melbourne and country Victoria.

The effects can be better appreciated when you look at a satellite image of one of the inner Melbourne parks where we train.

Edinburgh Gardens - Melbourne, January 2010

Edinburgh Gardens - Melbourne, January 2011

You can really see the difference in the health of its vegetation and lawns from January 2010 to January 2011. Usually you’d expect the parks to be a little dryer, with large sections of brown grass, however given the amount of rain we’ve had over the summer the lawns are looking lush and green.

In the five years that I’ve been running boot camps at Edinburgh garden in North Fitzroy I have never seen it so green over the summer period. In fact, two years ago the winter was so dry it created large areas of exposed soil.

A number of senior meteorologist have noted that Melbourne’s recent climatic conditions are more akin to tropical north eastern Australia with high levels of humidity and torrential downfalls. A storm front will dump heavy rainfall over a 20 to 60 minute period as opposed to the more spasmodic rainfall patterns of very short periods of light rain.

In maintaining its reputation for four seasons in one day, Melbourne’s rainfall patterns are keeping everyone guessing. It’ll be interesting to see whether long-range forecasts that indicate Australia will return to drought conditions for a 7 -10 year period are right. The global phenomenon with whether patterns seems to be longer droughts and more intense, longer periods of rainfall.

With the GFC taking hold, the old ways of buy, buy, buy are changing as people are re-evaluating their lives.
The most precious things in life don’t cost you loads of money, being healthy, having great realtionships with friends and family and being less stressed.
It’s time to simplify our lives and get back to basics, take up gardening, go for walks in the park, make time to catch up with friends and family, clear the mind of stress by reducing stressful situations, over extending ourselves for a new car, home renovation, new kitchen appliances, home entertainment etc.

What a great moment to see the first lady promoting healthier living by leading by example.

If the Obama’s can grow their vegetables at home, why not try it for yourself.
To make a difference to your health and reducing carbon miles, you cannot beat the good old vegie patch.

With every negative comes a positive, well for our environment there are huge benefits. People are now starting to re-evaluate their consumption habits, monitoring electricity usage, buying products that will last more than one fashion year, repairing old clothes, re considering whether renovating the kitchen is really necessary, less reliance on the car, more time spent at home, gardening, home cooked meals, having friends and family over for dinner often, more of the old style family unity as uncertainty of employment and worsening economies means having to take a more conservative approach to our daily lives.

People are harking back to our parents & grandparents style of healthy eating patterns, more home cooked meals, entertaining at home & growing our own fruit & vegetables.

The recent boom of prosperity over the past 10-15 years has given us the financial independence to reduce our reliance on preparing and cooking our own food, we have lost the basics.

We experienced a degree of wealth surpassing that of our parents & grand parents.
We have enjoyed dining out at restaurants & cafe’s on a more regular basis while changing our eating behaviour.

In the past our parents would consume most of their meals at home, have their own vegie patch & fruit trees. Their was less relaince on buying procesed foods, the local milk bar was the source of basic food stuffs such as milk, eggs etc with a weekly trip to the local butcher & fruit and vegie shop for those items not available at home.

We really need to take control of out own nutrition.
While it’s great to buy organic based fruit, vegetables & herbs, why not get our organic requirements from the garden.

Unfortunately while the average house block has decreased in size while the house size has increased, we can still find a small plot of earth for the vegie patch.

Similarly high density apartment style living restricts this ability even further.
However there is hope, some councils have public spaces available like community gardens whereby people can grow there own vegies. While not the most convenient solution, it does reduce ones reliance on fruit shops & supermarkets.

So why bother, well it enables us to live more sustainably, reduce our carbon footprint, eat fresh, sun ripen fruit & vegetables, have more control over what we consume, have a greater appreciation for what we eat and provide a therapeutic alternative to watching or surfing the net.
We have grown acustomed to expecting that we can eat what ever fruit and vegetable we want irrespective of whether the item is in season or grown in our local area.