Four hundred square metres of pure happiness.
It started the way most good stories do. With a bit of free wifi - and a chance encounter - at the local library…
It was September 2019. Chris and Lauren had just returned from a 2000-odd-km bicycle journey following the closure of their cafe business and were doing what they do best - soaking up the local library’s free wifi connection in order to Google, “How to start a market garden when you’ve got no land,” - when tree-growing acquaintance, Tim, approached.
Learning of their desire to stick some seeds in the ground, Tim said he reckoned he had a few tools that might come in handy - a seeder, a wheel hoe. He told the pair he’d give them a call that afternoon.
When the phone rang later, it was Tim’s partner, Cheryl, who said that she actually thought the best thing she thought she could offer was, in fact, a little patch of ground on their own farm. The resultant crows of excitement could probably be heard from Beechworth…
Later that month, after checking out the piece of land during a particularly rainy spring afternoon, Chris and Lauren pegged out a 400 square metre garden, consisting of four 100 square metre ‘quadrants’. They rototilled the space, broadcast a cover crop into 200 square metres of it, and planted their first crops in the other half of the area - rhubarb, beans, lettuce, radishes and rocket, as a way of easing themselves into spring.
Since that time, the pair has grown vegies for their ‘hood for about 50 weeks of the year - revelling in the too-many-zucchinis of their first summer of growing; handwatering their way through the eye-stinging smoke and surreal orange light of the 2019/20 bushfires that ravaged nearby communities; whooping and high-fiving as their first ever Brussels sprouts came up a winner!
They’ve sold their vegies at a weekly Happy Underground ‘micro-market’ in the before-COVID times, and now harvest every Friday, running a rain-hail-or-shine delivery service by bike, or allowing their customers to pick up their goodies.
We can be Happy Underground.
With thanks to Ben Folds.
(You were singing about the soil’s microbial community, right?)