No Car! Suburban garden design (winter 2011)

NB: Driveway becomes an orchard, and eventually the continuation of the quarter acre food forest.

I did this little sketch coming back from Tassie a month or two ago to prioritise the jobs that needed doing before spring. We now have bud burst and most of these things have been done, although still waiting for the Nothofagus that we ordered a month ago.

Rain changes everything

Following on from yesterday's post... yes, the rain did come:

The swales filled,

rain drove across the cellar door,

the neighbour's excess storm water was directed around two beds,

the newly planted seeds were bedded in,

the broad beans lapped up the heavens,

and my giant eucalypt pods were painted wet, among the grasses and berries.

Companion planting

Zeph and I got up early this morning and hit the garden. There was the promise of large amounts of rain on the horizon and we still had loads of soil to move in order to finish the new beds and plant them out. We worked for an hour in the balmy morning before our companion Meg put the porridge on. After breakfast we sorted seeds into companion groups, planted them in a random dispersal method about 30cm apart, and put a plank path up the middle of the larger of the two beds before adding a thin layer of pea straw.

In the large bed we planted the following companions: cucumbers (Mexican Sour Gherkin), sweet corn (Golden Bantam), sunflowers, beans (Lazy Housewife, Snake Yard Long, Borlotti, Kidney, Yin Yang, Cherokee, Flageolot), pea (Greenfast), borage, eggplant, watermelon, pumpkin (Delicata), and zucchini.

In the smaller bed we planted: dill, corriander (Delfino), carrots (Nantes, Chantenay), onions, and leek (King Richard).

And next to this bed, potatoes, corn and broccoli are already booming in the horse manure and composted soil we built over winter.

I gave Zeph the option of staying home from school until morning tea if he wanted to keep working in the garden. He accepted and we did some more mulching and pulled up green manure to lay beside the raspberries.

Strawberries, raspberries and then fruit trees line the swales to ensure they get a steady supply of water passively throughout the summer. They fill up with rain and our bath water.

I took Zeph to school and picked up some new garden stakes and chicken wire to fence off the new beds from chooks, dog and straying soccer balls.

Weeds and Swales

I've been employing two helpful, completely free strategies this winter – digging more swales and eating more weeds and wild plants.

Foraging for over 50% of our greens this winter is joyous and has become a daily ritual; walking Zephyr to school; teaching him about edible weeds and bush tucker; 'nibbling' to experiment and learn together. I estimate that between 60-70% of the autonomous flora, or what others call 'spontaneous flora', is edible in these parts. Probably a fairly universal percentage.

Similarly, harvesting winter rains passively, without having to pay for expensive synthetic storage systems (tanks, pipes, valves, etc) is a wonderful and easy thing to set up. There's a little toil in the digging of the swales on contour, but this work is deeply rewarding, especially when the swales fill up with beautiful rain, which then slowly and deeply absorbs into the soil, ready for summer's use and the bounty that follows that we haven't had to irrigate.

All the very best things in life are uncapitalised.

Greywater recycling without storage problems

I doubt very much that if you're reading this blog from another country that you live in a drier climate than we do here in Australia. We are becoming increasingly sensitive to the finite resource that is water. Companies bore it from underground stores of collective wealth, pay councils little for it and privatise it in anthropogenic plastic bottles. You can read more about my ongoing bottled water campaign here. Governments stand by and give out long term leases to companies to harvest water for massive profits. It's yet another unsustainable industry that goes against all sensitive and considered social and ecological principals. I call the bottled water industry a perfect example of 'pop fascism'.

So to cut to more positive water-based activities. Yesterday I plumbed in a hose (that I brought at a garage sale for $5) from our bath outlet to the swale. I spent a few more dollars at the local hardware for some connectors. Now, every time we have a bath or a shower the water runs out into and along the swale and seeps under the thickly mulched beds, which will soon be planted with numerous indigenous grasses and sedges, and exotic fruit trees, vegetables and herbs. Keeping produce alive in the summer months has in the past required much dependency on labourious (handheld hose restrictions) watering. This simple, cheap, gravity-fed system of recycling water will cut time, encourage worms and other organisms to thrive in the soil and provide a healthy environment for the plant life. I have been trying to figure out the best way to reuse our greywater, and knew that if I collect it in a tank it would stagnate and become septic unless we were constantly moving it around. By passively harvesting our greywater along the swale, in the soil and with daylight and microbial life engaging with it, it solves all the problems of storing this precious resource.

Just about any small garden can incorporate a swale. If you're considering harvesting your greywater consider a swale rather than a tank. The money and carbon you will save is considerable. Our swale and hose set-up cost about $50. You can do it for less if you hand dig the swale on contour. And yes, it still works in flat gardens, although you'll need to be able to gravity feed your bath water to the swale.

Two weeks on (swale work)

Click for bigger.

Two weeks ago we put a swale in and remarkably we have had regular good rain since. This much rain is very unusual for this time of year. It has spurred me on to build more food beds and other functional things (such as an all-weather path running down to the chooks) along the swale. I'm building next door and was able to use the leftover concrete mix (stone and sand) for our new path, laying it on piles of old newspaper. Tonight it rained again, and I was able to capture the swale holding water. It poured down, the swale filled up and over about 30 minutes the rain absorbed into the ground and under the thick mulch.

Making a Swale

We get a fair bit of rain in winter, though little from late spring to late autumn these days. Over the past 10 years the average yearly rainfall has been dropping and it's likely to get worse throughout southern inland Australia. Because of the seriousness of this, and because water is becoming increasingly precious, I decided it time to cut a swale across our 1/4 acre plot for the purposes of harvesting winter water for summer use.

The first thing I did was take my 2m level stick and draw a line across the chosen contour.

I hired Brian and his mini excavator to help break our hard and poor soil, which will soon be full of worms and microbes and rich for growing.

Brian's work was pretty delicate. We baked in the intense sun, Meg brought out cups of our rain water with sliced lemon and spearmint from the garden. This all took place yesterday.

Today, Meg and I started to remove the excess rocky clay and fine tune the swale.

We threw the soil (clay and rock) onto our old mattress springs which we placed over one of the compost bays. We sorted out the rocks, pulled out weeds and added vegetable waste, woodchips, horse shit and water to the sifted clay in a lasagna style compost.

I then had some top soil brought in and Meg and I got to work to spread it out.

A little more fine tuning with the level stick and a rake.

Then tested the level again, this time with water.

And found that the swale works. Yippee! Now for heavy mulching on either side of the swale – stay tuned.

The whole idea of a swale is for winter rains to collect along it and slowly absorb into the ground instead of draining downhill and away from the produce area. Heavy mulching on both sides preserves the moisture underground which in turn allows for worms, microbes, plants and trees to get established and thrive.

Combating heat wave in the garden

We have had more than a week of heat wave and I have an uneasy feeling about the Summer to come. There's been talk of record breaking 50+ degree days on the cards and I'm beginning to rethink some of the garden design to combat climate change as it intensifies more rapidly than most of us could have imagined. This post will concern swales, mulch and shade in a bid to retain moisture in the soil.

Swales are specific to a permaculture garden. I have previously dug spoon drains to take heavy winter rains down to the low point of our quarter acre. The water then escapes down a water board drain. What a waste. I now realise my mistake and am about to turn the spoon drain into a swale that instead follows the contour line through to our new food forest area. This way winter rain will remain where it's needed, absorb deep into the soil and be protected in Summer by the heavy mulching we've been undertaking for the past two years.


Above is the food forest area that we've been preparing for the past 6 months. You can just make out the curving spoon drain, edged by indigenous sedges, that wraps behind the chicken coup and off into a drain. We decided that the raised beds were good for raising seeds however we needed a more random, self-seeding area to tend (or no-tend) in a Fukuokian manner. As a transition from this form of growing in raised beds to small-scale food forestry, our sowing and plantings have become more random, dispersing seedlings and seeds throughout the garden, enabling us to conduct companion gardening experiments alongside indigenous plants. We have no pest problems to date, but even if we did all can be treated with natural methods. Intense biodiversity, either natural or created through biomimicry such as in a garden or on a farm, will only improve the health of our environments and therefore the food that we eat.

When people rejected natural food and took up refined food instead, society set out on a path towards its own destruction. This is because such food is not the product of true culture. Food is life, and life must not step away from nature. Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution, p.138

Above is the newly planted Mulberry tree, planted on the nature strip with local grasses, corn and cucumber seedings. The rocks around the seedlings protect their roots from chicken scratching. The Mulberry has been planted to provide fruit and shade equally. Deciduous fruit and nut trees will also be important to conserve water in the soil by providing shade. Many of our leaf vegetables can't be grown in the hot months with so much burning direct sunlight. Currently a potato crop is planted in the food forest area to help break up the clay. They will relish the sun, however they will also demand more and more precious water. They are growing in only 100mm of compost, horse shit and wood-chips. I'm hoping to get some sort of reasonable crop from them. The soil we inherited is very depressing – disturbed gold-fever clay stained with the blood of the Djadjawurrung. Some colonials however are less violent, and in-fact are a godsend, as the shade from our only mature tree, an English Oak, will attest. Onions, broad beans and rhubarb grow under the oak's semi-shade micro-climate along with indigenous banksias, sedges, poas and lomandras.