Landscape architect and urban farmer, Hilary Hoggett – President of Fawkner Food Bowls in Naarm (Melbourne) – takes us on a journey into hyper-local food systems.

This is part 3 of our 5 part  Urban Agriculture podcast series celebrating Urban Agriculture Month (Nov 2022).

Fawkner Food Bowls is a community market garden which grows herbs, vegetables, and seedlings for their very local area. They work with volunteers and community members providing culturally relevant food in a thriving growing space where community can learn about urban food growing through sustainable and regenerative growing practices. They strive to address local food security through growing and distributing food, support social cohesion within their diverse community, and build community resilience in the face of climate change.

Fawkner Food Bowls started with two local residents who wanted to grow food on a larger scale than their front yards AND find a family-friendly place to relax, enjoy and meet other locals. Their ideas was supported first by the Fawkner Bowling Club and also by The Neighbourhood Project, an urban placemaking initiative of CoDesign Studio – and it has grown from strength to strength – particularly meeting local food and community needs during the long lock-downs in Melbourne.

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Urban Agriculture Month
This special Urban Agriculture series on Sense-Making in a Changing World is brought to you by the Permaculture Education Institute in collaboration with Sustain Australia – celebrating growing food in cities and towns for Urban Agriculture Month.

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Full transcript below.

Morag Gamble:

Hello, and welcome everyone to the Sense making in a changing world show. My name is Morag Gamble. And this is our special Urban Agriculture Series. Each each week during the month of November, collaborating with Sustain Australia with Urban Agriculture Month, we’re speaking to someone who’s deeply involved in an amazing urban agriculture project. And today, I’m speaking with Hilary Hoggard who’s based in Melbourne and more specifically, the area of Fawkner, with her project called Fawkner Food Bowls. And she describes it as a hyperlocal Food Project, and it’s a delight to welcome you here today. Thank you for being here, Hilary.

Hilary Hoggett:

No worries, thanks for having me.

Morag Gamble:

So I’ve always talked about the importance of local food, can maybe we just start right there – hyperlocal? What does that mean? And how did you come to really describing your project in that way?

Hilary Hoggett:

Well, really, it came about as something that we wanted to do as a community project that was for locals by locals. And that was really looking at just trying to take care of our own community basically. And ideally, that kind of thing, there’s one in every suburb. And everybody helps everybody else to learn and share and that sort of thing. In Fawkner, we’ve had quite a lot of problems with things like food  and security, I think at one point during down the lockdown, so something like 1 in 4 households were food insecure. Which meant that they ran out of money to buy food and couldn’t buy more. It also suffers from being a bit of a food desert as well. So it was particularly important for us to try and address that. Sally Beattie and Kelly Gillespie got together in I think it was 2017 along with help from Moreland Council, and bought off this old Bowling Green. Kelly’s got a horticulture background and Sally’s got a community development background. It was the perfect match basically to sort of get something started in the community. So Bowling Green hadn’t been used in something like 20 years. When they got together, they spoke to council, they spoke to the Bowls Club, everybody was all on board with the idea that this could be used as some form of community garden, but we weren’t really sure how it would work or anything like that. I got involved when I think they had their first sort of community call out to see who might be interested in getting involved. So I got involved very early on, and met myself and one other person, the four of us then started the committee. And yeah, then we officially launched halfway through 2018. So there was a whole lot of just even just things like mowing, because there was an entire Bowling Green that was basically just overgrown grass.

Morag Gamble:

So what got you involved, like you’ve studied your landscape architect? What drew you to be involved in an urban agriculture hyperlocal community garden project on a bowling green light? What drew you?

Hilary Hoggett:

Well, when I moved to Fawkner just before that I was keen to see what community was around that I could sort of get involved with. At that point, that was before I decided to study landscape architecture. I was actually still working at a bank as an audio visual technician, which is something entirely different. But yeah, I  saw the spark, I got very excited. And I saw  the potential of this place, I guess. And yeah, I’ve been involved ever since.

Morag Gamble:

So now it’s set up and it kind of happened all throughout COVID, as you were saying, and addressing food security. How did that how did that come about? How did you actually get this food system up and running in the middle of COVID and get that food distributed out to the people that were needing it? How did that work?

Hilary Hoggett:

Well, so during COVID there was actually a project that was run in conjunction with Fair Share Fare that Jen Rae and that was when Sally Beattie was president. And basically we started a project called Fawkner Commons, which was all selling and distribution of food and growing quite intensively during the lockdown. So it was specifically a lockdown response. And we had a number of grants. I can’t tell you off the top of my head who those grants were from, but there was some from VIC health and some from Moreland Council and possibly other entities as well. There was a huge amount of activity actually, during lock downs, particularly because we were considered a primary producer. And so we were able to operate during those lockdowns and grow intensively. 

Morag Gamble:

You were considered as a primary food producer as an urban agriculture farmr, who designated you that title of being a primary producer?

Hilary Hoggett:

I’m not sure to be honest. But we got an exemption so..

Morag Gamble:

Wow. So you were able to have people come out and be farming outside? And how would you distribute the food back to the people that need like, who who gets the food that’s grown on the farm? And is it a paid thing? Or do people get boxes as part of a community service program? 

Hilary Hoggett:

At that time, the Faulkner Commons project had basically like a food with dignity program. And so there was some food at the time which we would grow, which would actually go to community pantries, there’s a wild amount of community pantries. I think six, like that gives you a bit of an idea of the need, because they all get completely hammered. And then there was some things that we grew that were distributed through the Fawkner Commons online shop, which was run through the Open Food Network. And so that was being sold, but it was being sold as cheaply as we possibly could. And we were able to pay a couple of farmers to be there to do that farming intensively during the during the lockdown. So that was that was pretty valuable, because that’s very rare.

Morag Gamble:

But how many farmers do you employ to look after that? And is that enough to maintain the farm? Or do you also need volunteer help to keep it going.

Hilary Hoggett:

So at times are 100% volunteer run, and our committee is all volunteer and everything else. But occasionally, we have grants that will pay for someone to do various aspects. So at the moment, we have a couple of grants through Moreland Council through their Food Hub Initiative. One of which is with Merri Food Hub, where we’re basically throwing culturally relevant food that can be distributed through the Merri Food Hub which is also operates through the Open Food Network and also through a in-person market stall near our older citizens centre in the middle of Fawkner. And another one working with growing farmers, which is another initiative that Sally Beattie also helped co-found, which was looking at integrating the various different backyard farms that growing farmers runs. I think three quarters of them are at least are backyards in Fawkner. So that does a whole lot of project, which I won’t go into. But we’re basically there’s a grant to look at how the those sort of the primary producers within our hyperlocal food system can work together to you know, share assets and that sort of thing. So we’ve got a bit of money to pay people for things like propagation, as well as harvesting and a little bit of farm maintenance. But generally speaking, the farm is maintained by volunteers. So we do get a little bit of money here and there. That’sa bonus.

Morag Gamble:

Yeah. So can you tell us a bit more about the Open Food Network? You’ve mentioned that a few times that you participate with that? So is that a Melbourne wide network? Can you tell us anything about that?

Hilary Hoggett:

That’s an online shop sort of. I don’t have a lot to say about the Open Food Network because I’m not very involved in that side of things. But basically it’s a way for us smaller farms and things like that to be able to sell.

Morag Gamble:

Yeah excellent. You mentioned that this backyard farming project, maybe we just like bring that in a little bit as well. What do you know about that? So there’s a network of people who are growing food in their backyards that are collaborating, or someone is a farmer and goes and farms, people’s backyards. How does, what is, what does that do to..

Hilary Hoggett:

So the backyard farmers project. So the organization is growing farmers, and you should look them up, because there are many. And there are another hyperlocal farming initiative. And basically, they operate where they have farms, they’re basically linking a farmer that wants to learn how to farm who doesn’t have land with someone that has land that is not being used, like a backyard or whatever it might be, that they would like to see be productive. And so they link that up, and they actually run, I think it’s a year long series of sessions to provide mentorship, essentially, to the farmers. And they go on tours, they went to Harcourt at one point, and you know, all over the place, just different aspects of farming, but people that just want to sort of like, put a toe in and see if it suits them kind of thing. I think it’s been running for a couple of seasons now. Actually one of our volunteers is also one of the growing farmers’ farmers, so they’re growing on someone else’s land. And yeah, it’s a lovely use of the land, you know that it’s otherwise unused or unruly, be used for something really valuable. And then basic idea of farms that were that produce can then be sold in various different ways  however they can they can decide how they deal with the produce.

Morag Gamble:

So as a landscape architect, and I know this is not a very easy question to answer, but as a landscape architect, what is your interface with urban agriculture and urban food growing? And what do you see is the possibilities that could emerge? Where would you like to see landscape architecture and urban agriculture intersect?

Hilary Hoggett:

Whoa, tricky question. I think building on that the previous idea that we were just talking about, about using unused land to be productive, I think is could be really valuable. Particularly, you know, there’s some plots that you see around where there’s no, it’s been fenced off, but no one’s using it. And no one’s going to build on it for possibly 10 years. So how could those spaces be used in an intermediate kind of way just to help support locals, whether they be sort of like a, even in a temporary way? So perhaps they’re a temporary orchard? Or whatever it might be? But yeah, I’m not really sure. I feel like, there’s certainly around here, there’s a really rich, older generation of people, and actually quite a lot of newer migrants as well, that have a passion for gardening and for food growing, and for really wanting to  get involved and share their culture and share their food from their culture and things like that. So I think like that’s part of the wonderful thing about the Fawkner food bowls actually, is that  it provides kind of a hub space where people can come and you know, we have people that will have something growing, that we didn’t even realize that you could eat a certain portion of it, but it’s eaten in a certain culture and someone will come in and say, did you realize that you could eat the shoots and stems of this plant, and then they’ll go away, and then they’ll come back next week, have cooked up a dish with those things, and are so eager for us to try it.

Morag Gamble:

Yeah, it’s amazing, isn’t it? And you know, when you start to look at that, you realize that you can actually grow probably 10 times as much as you thought possible in a small space just by simply seeing differently what is food and identifying different parts of the plant. It’s so much that’s there that we overlook most of the time, I think and that cultural aspect is so important. So is that really, is that why there’s so much food insecurity in the back part  because it’s a lot of recent migrants are like why is Fawkner so food insecure as a community?

Hilary Hoggett:

Yeah, look, it’s got a really low socio-economic population or demographic I should say. And it’s only been more recently like it was it was a sort of a cheaper place to live unti you know and there’s quite a large Islamic population as well, there’s a couple of really good Islamic schools. And so there’s quite a lot of people from non-English speaking backgrounds that live in the area as well. So it’s such a vibrant place to live. But yeah, there are there are a lot of issues just because it’s generally a poor place to live, I guess.

Morag Gamble:

So you have the market garden and people are sharing food? How else does the does the Fawkner food bowls become a hub for community a place where people meet and share? Like, do you have celebrations or events or learning spaces where people can really engage in that way.

Hilary Hoggett:

So a lot of what we do is we’re there every Sunday, and we all kind of learn off each other. So a lot of the people that have come in might have known a tiny bit about food gardening when they came. Then a couple of years down the track are now teaching new people that come into the garden how to grow certain things. And I think growing because we grow in a market garden style. So we don’t have private plots, ovals, we all  worked on communal roads. And so I think that this sharing is inherent, therefore. Which I think makes the space very valuable. And it also helps sort of increase, I guess, a sort of spatial agency with people having some collective ownership of the space as well, rather than sort of a private little one by one plot. That is the bit that you look after sort of thing. bits. So we also do run events. Most likely if we do run anything big, it has to be grant funded. So it’s a little bit sporadic, depending on where we can get money from where, but we did run an amazing Garden Festival,  about April May this year. And it was just gorgeous, like we had, we made harvest monsters. And we had all kinds of gardening workshops, we had some local artists that had a sort of maze exhibition that they’d made out of scrap material and things that were sort of in the middle of a space. We had music, we had a beautiful mural by a local artist here at Salman, who has a Pakistani background. And she was inspired by the Karachi Truck Art. And she painted a mural on one of the walls that is in a Karachi Truck Art style, but with vegetables from the garden. It’s just gorgeous. So yeah, we do run quite a lot of workshops as well on various aspects of food growing. Particularly the food growing ones tend to be run by Kelly, because she’s the certified horticulturalist, and she’s our farm manager as well. But yeah, lots of people get involved, we’ve been trying to include more and more the cooking and eating aspects as well, like we’ve run a number of zero waste workshops and stuff where we’ll have people pick things from the garden, cook it in the garden, and then we eat it in the garden. It’s just beautiful to be able to do those three elements at once and just to be able to share that with everyone. I think that’s really special.

Morag Gamble:

Yeah, yeah, that’s wonderful. It’s such a beautiful thing to be in that environment and know exactly where the food’s coming from. I wonder what happens on the other days? You’re there just on a Sunday, what happens for the rest of the week? Is it just locked up and looking after itself or people coming through and taking care of the gardens in between time.

Hilary Hoggett:

So we have have a watering roster. So there’s someone that comes in each day to make sure that the babies get fed basically. We have people that come in to do more intensive farming for the grants that I mentioned earlier. So for propagation and for a little bit of farm management, that kind of thing and harvesting. Other than that, I think it’s generally just Sunday so it’s sort of open to the public. The rest of the time I think there’s some people that really know what they’re doing and they will occasionally sort of pop in during the week to do a specific task. But, yeah, in terms of public access, we’re just once a week because we rely on volunteer hours. 

Morag Gamble:

So is it fenced off like you didn’t need a key to get in or is it open for people to wander through? Or?

Hilary Hoggett:

Yeah, it is. It is fenced off. It’s council owned land, but it’s connected to the adjoining Bowls Club.

Morag Gamble:

So do you get access to the bowls club facilities for education? Or do is you just got the field?

Hilary Hoggett:

We do have a sort of memorandum of understanding of the Bowls Club, and we have a good working relationship with them. So we do use the clubhouse for events every now and again. And there’s a great little space to actually have someone who does meals every Friday or every second Friday using, I think, pretty local produce as well.

Morag Gamble:

So it’s still active bowling greens there as well, like, how did it come in at this particular Bowling Green is not being used? I mean,  is there many like that around that people can access and..

Hilary Hoggett:

I think the Fawkner bowling club was struggling with membership for a little while. And so they were they couldn’t afford to upkeep of all the greens. It hadn’t been used in something like, I think it was 15 years.

Morag Gamble:

Gosh, that’s a lot of time.

Hilary Hoggett:

It was a long time. Yeah.

Morag Gamble:

So your arrangement then is with the club or with the council? I’m just asking this because if people were seeing space in the urban area and then wanting to approach like, who would you approach first? Would you go to the council?

Hilary Hoggett:

It’s Council land, but the lease is with the Bowls Club. Yeah. But in terms of people coming in? They would contact us directly in terms of getting access to the space.

Morag Gamble:

I was thinking like if someone else wanted, saw a Bowls Club, or a piece of vacant land somewhere in their city, and wanted to get started, you were there as part of that starting process? What were some of the things that you think made your application or your project success to get it over the ground? I’m asking this too, because I know a lot of groups have spent a lot of years trying to actually just access land, and it’s taken them a lot of energy, even just to get to that first step of stepping on to the place they’re going to begin. So what was your process like and made it successful? Do you think?

Hilary Hoggett:

I’m not sure. I think that there was definitely a lot of encouragement from council. The balls club weren’t using that space anyway. So I guess having an active space for them was probably safer than having a you know, overgrown nightmare. And so particularly the Secretary, Vicky Kennedy has been integral to to the Fawkner food bowls being able to function. I think there was just a want for it, or for a place like that, from so many different angles that it has worked very well. That’s not to say that it hasn’t been difficult in terms of particularly some like infrastructure stuff. When you’re relying entirely on grants, that can be tricky. But I think quite early on. So we sort of got kicked off through a neighborhood project, which was run through a group called COdesign. And so we got an initial $10,000 to sort of launch something. I think at the time, we launched like a small children’s garden within the space, but the rest of it was all just for us at that point. And so that really allowed us and that that COdesign project was all about that I think there was six or eight difference community groups that were matched with their local councils and the it was all about trying to, you know, cut through red tape and how could Council make life easier for communities and vice versa to actually get things done?

Morag Gamble:

So this COdesign – is that an independent group that was facilitating this.

Hilary Hoggett:

I’m trying to remember how they started up I don’t even know if they’re still operating but um I think they had a very large grant through the Lord Mayor’s charitable foundation to run this neighborhood project. This was back in I think it was 2017. I did go to some of the sessions, but I wasn’t involved in the the initial sort of setup of it. So I can’t give you that much background.

Morag Gamble:

I’m just asking, because I think it’s really interesting looking at this idea of how how we can facilitate the startup of these projects so that each individual group doesn’t get stuck in the same thing of trying to go from the very beginning. And it sounds like this COdesign process is really very interesting. So I wonder to in what way are you connected with a broader network of local, urban agriculture projects that are [inaudible] I mean, it’s a hyperlocal project. But do you also have a sense of facing outwards towards other connecting with other local projects? Or is it just a local project? And that’s it, and you just go and garden and share food? And how’s it feel? As a.. Do you have a sense of there being a broader urban agriculture movement? Do you feel part of that? Or is it just we need food locally, that’s just getting to do this.

Hilary Hoggett:

I mean, our our sort of core goals are to address the hyperlocal issues. But we do have relationships with other organizations mind you, but quite a lot of the ones that we have strong relationships with are also Fawkner based. So we have really strong working relationships with the Merri food hub [inaudible] distribution and also growing farmers who do the backyard farms, which is all Fawkner based. So we have strong working relationships really, really locally. But then we do speak to some of the other community gardens around as well as having links to some businesses where we get things like, there’s a chocolate roastery, where we take their cocoa husks, for example, and they’re in Brunswick.

Morag Gamble:

The coco husks do they smell nice?

Hilary Hoggett:

Delicious?  So good. We tried as part of kind of regenerative farming techniques, we try to you know, use as much material from the local community as we can in terms of you know, composting, and mulch and various other things. So we really try to sort of link in as much as we can.

Morag Gamble:

So what are you using for mulch is that the cocoa husks?

Hilary Hoggett:

So the coco husk we use for the pathways. And that breaks down beautifully, by the way. Also, the snails don’t like to crawl over it. So it’s really good between rows as well. We actually don’t use a lot of mulch on our actual raised garden rows, because we are really windy there. And there’s not a lot of windbreak. And so if we put anything down, it just flows away. But we do have large mulched areas that we get from sometimes council will will give us big deliveries of mulch when they’ve just done a big tree pruning or something like that. Yeah, that’s about it at the moment.

Morag Gamble:

Yeah. Sounds amazing. I love that idea that what you said right at the start that, that we do focus on the hyperlocal. And the idea of having something like this in every neighborhood that we can walk to. Wouldn’t that be amazing to actually have people who are really looking at it and then that whole circular economy of the waste, I mean, it addresses so many different issues, from social justice issues to climate issues, too. Well, everything really. I also noticed, just as a one kind of last sort of question that I wanted to find out about your seeds. Do you have a seed exchange or a seed bank or a seed network of some sort? Like where do you get your seeds or your plants from your local seeds. Is that hyperlocal too?

Hilary Hoggett:

So we do save seed. So a lot of our crops are open pollinated, and we save what we can. We still need to buy some stuff. And in terms of seed library, we don’t quite have anything like that set up yet. But it’s certainly on the cards.

Morag Gamble:

Yeah, even some of the libraries up around where we are we go in there and they have community gardens around the libraries. And you can go in and get your books, you get some plants like herbs to take home and some seeds that have come out of the community garden. It’s such a lovely thing just to have that beautifully local plants that are locally adapted to that particular environment. And, of course, being a global reason to. How did you go with the floods? Are you flooded out where you are? 

Hilary Hoggett:

Our local Merri Creek has been quite bloated. But the garden actually hasn’t been too bad because it’s a Bowling Green, it’s actually sitting on a foot of sand  but the rest of Fawkner has a clay soil problem. And our garden is a sandy soil. So it’s quite odd.

Morag Gamble:

Well, that’s lucky, because I was a bit worried about all of the gardens, all the way around, you know, the edges of all these rivers and things with everything that’s been going on lately. So that’s good news to hear that you’re all good. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. Where can people find out more about this project Fawkner food bowls? What would be the website or resources they can go and check out what you’re doing and and see photos of it as well? 

Hilary Hoggett:

Yeah there’s our website which is fawknerfoodbowls.com and also we have a Facebook page. If you just look up Fawkner Food Bowls that’s probably our most up to date place to check us out. 

Morag Gamble:

Well, thank you so much for joining me and I hope people who have been listening feel inspired to see how to find a space in their own local environment. It just takes a few people really doesn’t it who have a shared vision and conversation with the local council, local organization. I mean, walking around with an urban agriculture lens on finding those spaces that can be transformed. And maybe it’s a collective backyard, maybe it’s a commons space like that, or even in a school, there’s places as well. I know, there’s lots of different possibilities. So thank you so much for joining me, and thank you for all the work that you’re doing in amplifying this possibilities in urban agriculture. It’s an absolutely essential, essential thing that I think we all need to be focusing on. So yeah, thank you.