I was lucky enough to be invited to talk Wild Food Map business to an audience of local government managers and other environmental caretakers.

The day was centred on providing alternatives to chemical control of weeds.

A fantastic experience for me, as I finally got to meet and see in flesh people who I have been following for a long time, Like David Low, from Monash university, the person behind The Weeds Network. 

So many options to shift away from the ever present slack management practice that is now all pervasive: Round Up.

So bad. For the dirt, the microbes, the critters and little animals living in the landscape, the bees, the birds, the kids playing in the same fields that contractor spray with poison on a regular basis.

Goats! Loved the presentation by Jim Shields from Herds-for-hire. So cute to see such a simple and yet obvious way to deal with over-growth, let the goats eat it!

Jim comes in with some fencing, let the little fellows sprawl through the site and in a matter of 3/4 days it gets cleaned-up, seed stock gets digested and neutralised and all of that with minimal soil damage, or noise complains.

So cute, I want to be a goat herder too.

But also steam weeding. Blast away the unwanted with boiling how water and that's it! 

More!: salt treatment, overgrazing with rotating stock treatment, sugar treatment. So many options.

SO why use Glyphosate? Why use such an horrible compound that by now is been found present in our daily diet? Why follow blindly the ruthless marketing strategies geared up to create wealth and dependence to a few petrol chemical companies? But I guess I answered that with the very question.

One thing I came away with which made me even more convinced of the importance of what we are pushing with Wild Food Map and what I am doing with my workshop teaching about useful weeds, is the fact that an important problem with weedkiller usage is domestic.

So much gets sprayed around without thinking, it's ridiculous. So much chemical fertilisers, pesticides, and herbicides get used in our gardens by people who honestly think it is not harmful, or at least less harmful than what a plant could do, it's hard to believe.

The run off from private properties is a serious issue in our urban environments, as many council try to minimise the use of such product. Many private owners don't.

SO, here we are. THIS IS NOT A WEED < THIS IS FOOD > might sound a bit harsh a statement, but it's true. And you never know, a little at the time, we might get people to rethink next time they pull the trigger. Or alternatively you might want to read this>

For the catering I got Joey Astorga to prepare some food. The people who come to this kind of events never had this kind of service, usually it is just sandwiches or finger food. This time around was superior quality catering, prepared by a chef, and made of weeds.

Cheers, look twice next time you spray please.