Commitment to community
We are in, of and for our place and its people.
And our personal politics infuse everything that we do in our lives and our livelihoods. The past eight years have been an exercise in origami-ing our impacts into smaller and smaller parcels that can accommodated within our immediate geographic and cultural space. We have wanted to see our impacts and take responsibility for them more fully - a notion that runs very much counter to the way the capitalist economy entices us to exploit our own privilege and outsource our impacts to other people living in other places, usually with little thought about the destructive effects this has on their lives and land. (And sometimes with great understanding of this destructive impact, and the desire to do it nonetheless.)
Growing food in our backyard was a baby step towards this impact-origami. Ditching our car and riding bicycles to get to the places we need to go (and rethinking our need to go places that we can’t get to by bike) was another. Caring for and cultivating a piece of land in order to produce food for people in our community is a further expression of this. These are all small rebellions against the collective choice our society seems to have made to continue pursuing personal wealth by trashing the planet (and the most vulnerable people on it). This death spiral doesn’t appeal to us. We choose to sacrifice some of our personal comforts and conveniences and to relocalise - and we actually reckon we and our community will be better for it.
We’re deeply indebted to the WormFarm Institute and its co-founder Jay Salinas for introducing us to the concept of ‘cultureshed’, which changed the course of our lives when we first learnt of it -
CULTURESHED (kul’cher-shed) n. 1. A geographic region irrigated by streams of local talent and fed by deep pools of human and natural history. 2. An area nourished by what is cultivated locally. 3. The efforts of writers, performers, visual artists, scholars, farmers and chefs who contribute to a vital and diverse local culture.
Saint Monday, the cafe we ran together, was a first tentative ‘dip of the toe’ in the waters of our cultureshed and Happy Underground now follows in its wake. The food we grow is a manifestation of the place it is growing, the soil in which its growing, and the relationships that make the growing of it possible in the first place - relationships that are unique to this community. We have been nourished by the gift economy that stretches out, mycelium-like between people in our community. Likewise, we want not just the food we grow, but the hyper-local nature of our work and lives, to nourish this cultureshed. We want Happy Underground to be a tiny hypha in this rich, vibrant and interdependent local culture.
How we work
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Waste-free.
We produce no waste. That is, we package in reusable packaging that our customers supply (think Tupperware containers, jars, old plastic packaging from supermarket purchases that they reuse); or in paper bags - many of which our customers also choose to reuse for future H.U vegie purchases!
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Harnessing sun power...and leg power!
Happy Underground vegies come with the benefit of zero carbon emissions, when it comes to transport. We love riding bicycles and use them exclusively for transporting everything we need to the garden and our vegies to our customers.
Our bikes have electric assist (because the hills around Yack can be a killer!) and we charge our batteries with solar PVs on our house. Sun power! Leg power! Vegie power! Woo!
This means that we only sell our vegies in places we can ride our bikes to - that is, within the township of Yackandandah.
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Growing on unceded land.
We acknowledge the tension that exists in this work in Australia - growing coloniser’s crops on unceded Indigenous land. Agriculture was arguably one of the first colonial tools used by Australian settlers to establish their grip on this land and dispossess Aboriginal people.
We pay the rent - and you can too - but we recognise that this is just a stop-gap measure that can never compensate for the trauma, dispossession and discrimination that Indigenous people experience as a result of ongoing colonising practices. This is an important work in progress for us.
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Unashamedly tiny.
As much as we whinge about needing extra space for more broccoli and Brussels sprouts plants every winter, we are committed to keeping things teensy. It’s about both self-preservation (which is something we quickly learnt about when we started a cafe together!) and making time for something other than earning a livelihood. There is privilege in this, but it’s a privilege that we believe everyone should have. (Roll on, Australian universal basic income!)
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Learning as we go.
Most of the time we’re makin’ things up as we go. Rollin’ with the punches. Flyin’ by the proverbial pants seat. We like experimenting and exploring new ways of doing things. We’re privileged to have the economic capacity (by which we mean, we live as though we’re not earning any money!) to make mistakes, which we’re totally open to and honest about. Mistakes usually make for the best learning opportunities.
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We believe in the solidarity economy.
Cash will be the death of humanity. And while we recognise the practical need to generate some for of income to deal with life in the status quo, we want something more! (Yes, there is something more than cash!)
We want beautiful, strong relationships with the people around us! We want to see other people in our cultureshed flourish, doing the things that make their own hearts sing! And so, we’re open to bartering when the opportunities arise. (Particularly if you have produce local, single-use-packaging-free dairy products or honey; can sew clothing or fix bikes…)