Apartment Choice

The long retail spine of Sydney Road, Brunswick, just north of Melbourne's CBD, was once a prosperous trading outpost on the way to the goldfields. These days it's a bohemian mix of variety stores, op shops, halal butchers and Lebanese bakeries. Take a side street to the west, however, and a different picture emerges. Sandwiched between Sydney Road and the Upfield train line is an area undergoing rapid and widespread transformation. Light industry is fast being replaced by mid- rise apartment buildings , their inhabitants attracted by the short commute into town and cheaper prices than in the city's south-east. The quality of these units is, on the whole, depressingly bad; think poor ventilation and bedrooms that "borrow" natural light (a weasel word for being dark and windowless). The occasional jazzy façade tries feebly to make up for otherwise cheap construction amid a chorus of greys. At ground level, carpark roller doors alternate with mean pocket garden...

get elephant's newsletter We gardeners often talk about what plants we would like to grow. Rarely we ask, “What can the garden grow in us?” I began my journey of learning to grow food as a broke post college graduate at the onset of the Great Recession. At the time, I viewed the garden purely as an object to help me save money by growing my own food. Little did I know the garden would grow in me. It is kind of a miracle to plant a seed under dirt. First, you see nothing. And if you are like me, you experience a sense of worry, until one lucky morning, you go outside and see that a baby plant has emerged. Just as the seed has transformed into a plant, there is also an inner transformation that happens through gardening. First, there was not much edible food growing in my garden. My carrot seeds never sprouted, my leafy greens were feeding more aphids and slugs than me, and my blueberry plant caught a disease. Needless to say, I did not save money. But the idea of gardening was s...