Waverley Community Garden

A couple of months ago I heard about a community vegetable garden dig in Bondi. Me and a few friends went along as it was no ordinary dig!

This vegetable patch had 2 key main interesting features.

Firstly it was raised about a metre up in steel drums. This was to enable easier no back bend gardening and to keep rodents and animals away.

Secondly there was a clever "wicking bed" system installed to rethink watering techniques for the Australian climate.  A gravel under pit was installed that traps water.Water remains here, doesn't evaporate and the main point is that plants "wick" the water upwards through their root systems. Therefore conserving and using less water and using natural systems to best advantage.

Just recently I went back to have a look and took some pictures of how it was going.

It is thriving!

 Little snow pea plants!

 Snow pea! It was delicious!

 Broccoli: on the way

The classic 9 acupuncture needles

We had a lecture on the book: "Systematic Classic of Acupuncture and Moxibustion" By Fum Huang
Was heaps interesting and also great because it was a non-examinable part of the course.
The lovely lecturer Wiehung Li presented and began to expand our minds beyond the curriculum: transference of energy, self preservation energy techniques, acupuncture points used before the systematisation of Chinese medicine during the 1950s China...
It posed a question and basically was a discounting of all the three years of learning we have done. What is it with Chinese medicine and it's baffling idiosyncrasies? Is it rooted in the current Chinese culture? A population doing as much as it can but not sticking its neck out for fear of breaking the political line? You do it anyway but if someone asks you a direct question you respond in a round about way as not to take ownership. Ok Chinese medicine is difficult. Each area of learning has its own structure and thought process. So individual that it usually cannot be overlaid on to another category and still make sense. It's rote learning of one way then another and another. Try getting a direct answer out of all that info and you usually have to duck to save face as your memory climbs some impossible walls...
So now it's: you have learnt this, now think about it like this, which is smirking at your current knowledge but don't worry you will graduate so you can get your insurance if you stick to the curriculum.

The lecturer kindly brought in this framed set of the 9 distinctive acupuncture needles used in the classic book mentioned above. Not all are used today. Some are surgical acupuncture needles and trespass acceptable Western practice. For example there is a technique used in China where an incision is made in the skin above a certain acupuncture point in the back (BL 13) and a piece of chicken gut is placed in that incision as a treatment for Asthma. Are you still a vegetarian if you do that?