Garden of Eatin'

We've been living in our place for three years now. It was an establishing organic farm when we moved here and it was about eight years old.

So, it's pretty established and we are retrofitting what is here. The citrus are in need of replacing - they don't last long here in the subtropics, so we are slowly doing that.

There were some permaculture ideas here when we arrived, but they too are in need of another wave of updates. For example, we need to replant the food forest, cull some trees that are threatening to fall over (wattles etc), and we need to plant out support plants such as pigeon pea.

We also seriously need to redesign the place to be much more permaculture. We need it to be zoned and we need to get into some relative location strategies.

We are also slowly seeing what it could be under our watch (as the current stewards of the land).

Defining what it is we want the garden to be has taken time. It's taken observation and noticing what is happening in the garden. How has it matured? What affects what out there? For example, tall trees and overplanting has lead to problems with fungal diseases in the citrus - time to cull plants to let air and sun in.

But what type of place do we have here? I've always found it hard to define.

Then I watched the DVD Think Global, Act Local. It's produced by Morag Gamble and Evan Raymond who live here on the Sunshine Coast. It features a lot of the options we have for sustaining our food supply in the future. School and community gardens, co-ops, food box systems, community supported agriculture, all those options we have available, but are underutilised and still treated like 'novelties' rather than real solutions.

Anyway, during the DVD they talk about a mixed traditional farm. This term really struck a chord with me. It showed a farm in the hinterland which supplies fruit and veg boxes to the community and through a local farmers' market. They also keep bees, bake bread, grow flowers and preserve their excess harvest.

How wonderful - this is what I want. This is what I want this place to be - The Garden of Eatin' - a mixed traditional farm with permaculture principles.

We already grow; vegies (a wide variety of European types during winter and subtropical/tropical perennial vegies throughout the year), fruit - needs some attention to increase yield and some trees are at a point of needing to be replaced, but great structure there.

We also grow herbs, coffee, flowers (edible ones at the moment and we do have some ornamental heliconias with spectacular flowers like the parrots beak).

Now, I have the idea of adding more animals to the system (hence increasing the 'mix' on our farm). We already have extensive worm farms (very viable useful animal stock to keep), we also have chooks for their eggs, manure, feathers and recycling qualities.

So, what's next? I think one of the most important animals to have in your system is the bee. So, I'm going to learning bee keeping. As pollinators, bees are second to none - there is no way we as humans could do what they do. Lose the bees and chances are you lose your food supply. They give us honey - honey is wonderful. It's medicinal, a great food supply and if you eat local honey, it can help reduce the effects of local pollen allergies - which is something I need.

I know a bee keeping who offered a while ago to mentor anyone interested in keeping bee, so I'll contact him and see how we can go about getting a hive here on our land.

The other animals I'd like to have at our place are goats. A lot more responsibility and they will be the largest animals we have here. But they are still smaller than cows, and goat's milk is excellent for cheesemaking.

So these are my plans. First the bees, then the goats...

Onward and upward for the Garden of Eatin'!

...and then it started raining!

Well, our solar hot water system is working, but the weather isn't. We've had about 300mm of rain over the past couple of days - local flooding, roads cut etc. (By the way, we also had to put off the delivery and installation of a second rain water tank until the weather cleared up! Our timing is out of sync at the moment).

The garden coped pretty well with the heavy rain, with the excess water quickly evacuating off the land or into our dams.

These recent heavy rains demonstrated why (here in Queensland) we need to plan our gardens so that nutrients are stored in the bio mass of the plants, rather than the soil. Our soils suffer from leaching due to the huge amount of rain we get in short bursts and then we get the strong sunlight which causes oxidation! So mulching our soils and constantly adding organic matter (compost and worm castings) are vital.

We also have thick plantings of Queensland Arrowroot on the lowest points of our property, this means these plants can collect and store the nutrients that run down the hills and we can then harvest them and either; feed them to the chooks, feed them to the worms, use them in compost or as a mulch - returning those precious nutrients back into the soil. Permaculture in action! The lush thick leaves of the Qld arrowroot hold plenty of moisture and are one of those useful plants we all love.

Mulch also prevents splashback on the underside of the leaves of the plants, which could otherwise contribute to disease. Plus it eventually breaks down adding even more organic matter to our soil.

So, hopefully we'll have a couple of days of sun to get things washed and dried, to give the garden a rest and time to absorb all that rain (do you know that soil that is high in organic matter acts as a dam holding a huge amount of water?) , and generally recover before we get the next bout.

Just heard on the news that they are predicting June to be very wet. So hopefully that new tank will soon be full too!

A lovely gift from all that rain has been bountiful daily harvests of field mushrooms from our mushroom compost!

It does show us how we are so vulnerable to the weather when we grow our own food. Something lost on those who shop exclusively at supermarkets.

That's why this Thursday I'm voluteering to pack organic vegie boxes at a local food co-op - you never know when you might need them!

Small and slow solutions

"the bigger they are the harder they fall"
"slow and steady wins the race"

David Holmgren's Design Principle Number 9.

Today I'm thinking about all the small changes we've made in our lives to get to where we are today. A place where we are living better on less, much less.

Behavioural changes, attitidunal changes...

A few years ago we both worked full-time. I was in the corporate world, doing a masters degree, working unpaid overtime, trying for promotions, driving a flash convertible.

My husband was working shift work full time. We had a big house with a pool, all landscaped (none of it edible mind you!). We thought money was the answer - buy the things you need... boy were we wrong.

Now, we live on a quarter of what we earned then. The flash car's gone, 'traded' for a solar hot water service and a 1kw photo voltaic solar energy system.

We eat really, really well. We don't eat out much at all, very, very occasionally we have take away (usually only we've been out running around and haven't been home). The food we eat at home is better than what we can get in a restaurant, because we grew it and it has a story to tell, our hands have touched its seeds, its leaves, we've watered and cared for it - nurtured it and now it is nourishing us.

We spend a lot of time at home, we do this because we enjoy it.

Lots of other small changes are happening. We don't have a clothes dryer anymore, instead we have a solar clothes dryer (we like to call it a clothes line). Our low water, front loading, energy efficient washing machine water runs onto the garden and waters our bananas.

We shop a lot at op shops - especially for the clothes we wear when we are working in the garden and sometimes we find a surprise and score some great going out clothes too.

I take care of our clothes. They are repaired, kept in good order and I dry them in the shade - the sun here is very harsh and will shorten their lives. I'm proud to still be wearing t-shirts that are 20 years old.

All our purchases must be practical, useful, aesthetically pleasing and useful! An example is our wood heater. We needed a more efficient, more environmentally friendly heater than the old oil heater we had (which drew a lot of electricity). We went hunting for the perfect permaculture heater (multifunctional and useful!).

We found the Australian made Nectre brand and bought their baker's oven. It heats our home, it has an oven, it has a cook top and we could have got the water jacket option too (we didn't because we have the solar hot water system which makes more sense in this climate). It's cute and very aesthetically pleasing - just perfect for our little cabin. During winter when it is lit, we do all our cooking on it, including the roasting of our home grown organic coffee beans.

We move our bed into the lounge room in winter to take advantage of the warmth it generates and the ambience. Enough said there!

Back to our diet. I now wander around our abundant garden, basket in hand and harvest what's ripe and ready. Okay, that image is a bit dreamy and you also need to have secatuers on hand, and gloves and perhaps even a bucket to collect grubs for the chooks to eat.

But I do try to make the effort of collecting our food in a beautiful basket... I then plan our meals around what's available. Back this up with a good pantry stock of staples - all bought in bulk with neighbours and stored in cleaned labelled recycled jars - and you will always be able to put together a feast - great when people turn up unexpectedly.

Cars - we sold one and now get by with one car and one motorbike. It's a small car and fuel efficient (actually more efficient than the new hybrids coming out) so it has a place in our lives.

Recycling - we recycle a lot. Green and kitchen waste goes to the chooks, the worms and the compost. Jars are cleaned, scrubbed, labels removed and kept, plastic milk bottles are washed out and put in the recycle bin, same with tins.

We scour rubbish dumps for materials to make things.

We have a small home, and keep energy use to a minimum.

I'm trying to retrofit the inside of our home to permaculture principles. Especially our kitchen, I think the kitchen is the perfect place to practice this. Zoning, multiple function, catching and storing energy... sprouts grow in jars on the kitchen window sill, shelves are full of jars full of goodies, pots n pans are sorted...

A lot of changes have happened here and many more are still to come - it will always be a work in progress. But it's good to take stock and look back at how far you've come. To be grateful with what you have. To enjoy what you've got!

S