Permaculture Out West

Archive for the ‘Gardening’ Category

With careful selction of peach varities it is possible to pick fruit in the western Melbourne suburbs from late November to early April. 

Richard Hawkey has provided a local calendar

Scion Wood Collection Working Bee (10am sharp – 12pm)

Grafted fruit trees are made from two parts, the base or root stock and the top fruiting part called scion wood. 

The old heritage fruit trees are under threat due to being ring barked by rabbits or hares. 

The scion wood collected from the old trees can be grafted onto new rootstock creating a new fruit tree and preserving the old variety. 

More information here http://home.vicnet.net.au/~ahgarden/scionwood_11_july_2010.pdf

*10am sharp as Gate 5 is a security gate which will only be unlocked for a short time.

We’re having a permablitz on Saturday the 3rd July from 10am. We will be building a chicken coup, potting fruit trees, building garden boxes and making a big mandala vegie patch. A scrumptious lunch will be provided as well as morning and afternoon tea.

There will most likely be a dance off and some music so wear old clothes with your dancing shoes and bring and instrument as well as any gardening gear you have around. There will be plenty to learn about garden design, chickens, community bonding and blitzing.

The permablitz gurus will be teaching any one interested how to run their own blitz so it’s a particularly useful for anyone wanting to learn the ropes. Please call 0411 355 910 if you would like to come. Hope to see you there!

http://feralfruitmelbourne.wordpress.com/

Feral fruit trees are fruit trees growing in or overhanging public spaces that are accessible to the urban hunter-gatherer. This website seeks to promote localized food gathering in cities where food is being obtained from increasingly distant sources. The current system of food delivery into urban centres poses unnecessary strain upon both the economy and the environment due to transportation costs. Feral fruit tree harvesting transforms our current food distribution system into a more sustainable alternative and promotes a consciousness of the ecology within our urban environments. Urban hunter-gatherers can also enjoy the benefit of fresh fruit that is often organic and not to mention free.

Fruit!

From Organic Gardening and Farming, February 1972, pg 54

Kiss back breaking garden bed building goodbye with the SGA easy to follow guide on sustainable No-Dig Vegie Gardens. It’s easy, it’s organic, and it’s the perfect time to pump up your patch!
Get the lowdown on the built up vegie patch here! You dig?

Artichoke globe, baby beets, beetroot, broad beans, broccoli, leeks, lettuce, onions, spring onions, climbing & dwarf peas, radish, shallots, spinach, strawberry runners.

Herbs: chives

One of the inspirational things I discovered during my PDC course were food forests. Around the world, humans have been molding their environment, sometimes destructively, but sometimes constructively.

Here are 2 youtube videos that may interest you. One is about a 300 year old food forest in Vietnam, and the other, a 2000 year old food forest in Morocco.

300 year old food forest in Vietnam

2000 year old food forest in Morocco

For those people who live in surburbia, a trip to the Botanical gardens, or a walk along a river bank lined with trees are the closest some of us come to a natural forest system. I’ve often thought that it would be great to live (I live in Seddon), and walk out of the backyard into a forest. Until I did my PDC course with Bill Mollison and Geoff Lawton, I thought that it wasn’t possible. But in that course, I was introduced to the work of Robert Hart. Robert Hart was (he died back in 2000) a famous practitioner of forest gardens. He had a 500m2 property in England. He noticed that trying to maintain a vegie patch, an orchard and livestock is a lot of effort. One day he saw that a small bed of perennial vegetables and herbs where thriving, with little intervention. From these observations he developed, over a 30 year period, a forest garden. He observed forests and saw there were 7 natural layers in a forest.

The 7 layers are:

• Canopy – large fruit or nut trees
• Low tree – dwarf fruit trees
• Shrubs – currants, berries
• Rhizosphere – root vegetables
• Soil surface – ground covers like strawberry
• Vertical – climbers, vines

There are a number of benefits to such a system.  By incorporating all or most of these layers, you are creating a micro ecosystem that becomes self sustaining with little effort. The canopy layer and the low tree layer provide shade to the other layers, and help to reduce evaporation. There is a lot of natural leaf litter, which gets incorporated back into the earth by the various bugs and worms. It provides food.  It changes your backyard into a sanctuary, and provides privacy from the neighbours (something I’m in need of in my little workers cottage).

Looking to nature, you see that it has solved a lot of space problems, and it’s just a matter of looking and observing and learning how nature does it.

Watch Costa’s Garden Odyssey on SBS 1 at 7.30pm 22nd April.

Costa explores Melbourne’s Kevin Heinze Garden Centre where people with disabilities get their hands in the dirt, do something physical and experience the sensory delights of the space.   It’s a space where people can see, hear, touch, smell and taste a variety of plants and flowers.  The Maidstone Community Centre also wishes to create this type of garden for their members and Costa, with the help of POW, transforms their overgrown backyard into a sensory haven where people can interact and connect with nature.  It’s a philosophy that the Abbott of the Quang Mihn Buddhist Temple endorses – we need to create harmony and balance between the environment and our use of it which is why the Temple has installed a commercial worm farm to recycle the Temple’s waste.

Costa’s garden odyssey