One of the points that Josh Byrne makes when talking about permaculture on Gardening Australia is that it “creates a habitat for life around us”.  He talks about it more on the DVD, and refers to permaculture as inviting nature in. This is something that we’ve noticed, both in our suburban yard and in our country place.

Our suburban house was surrounded by other, uninspiring suburban houses, which were surrounded by uninspiring suburban yards. Seriously, how many agapanthus, diosmas, and ugly palm trees can one suburb have?!  Over several years we transformed our yard and made it as productive as we could.  It took a while to notice, but the wildlife increase was huge! We had a heap of extra insects, which led to a multitude of birds.

I think the thing I noticed first was the spiders. I understand that spiders are a sore point for some people, but I’ve always found them fascinating. Being Australian I have a healthy respect for them, and the damage they can do, but they really can be quite beautiful. Over a few years we noticed waves of orb weavers cropping up in our yard.  They even started to spill into our neighbour’s yard, much to their disgust. 🙂

This beautiful lady made her home in our front yard.

Now we’ve noticed the same thing on our three acres.  A year ago we moved in and had a heap of sparrows and starlings. Apart from an owl we saw one time, there were no birds of prey.  Our three acres had never been used productively, and had a grand-total of 4 fruit trees on it, 3 of which had been mutilated to the point of being nearly useless.

A year on and we’ve changed it so that most of our three acres is now productive, with two acres under crop, an orchard area with somewhere near 60 fruit-bearing plants, around 400 square metres of veggie producing area, along with chooks, ducks, goats, pigs, and cows (at present).  The difference to the wildlife on the place has been amazing! We have wattle birds, honey eaters, rosellas, galahs, other-parrots-I-don’t-know-the-name-of, willy-wag-tails, magpie larks, and magpies, none of which were here a year ago. Better than that though, we have birds of prey! We have both kites and falcons hanging around.

This change would be subtle if we didn’t know why it was happening and if we hadn’t experienced it before. We’re slowly conditioning the soil and making habitats for the things that the birds and rodents prey on (the creepy crawlies). In turn the things that prey on them show up.

Of course, we’ve seen an increase in things we don’t want to see. We have a rabbit where our neighbour tells us there hasn’t been any in years.  We also have some destructive insects to deal with. However, the benefits FAR outweigh the negatives, and it’s freaking fascinating seeing a tangible response on an ecosystem scale to what we’re doing here.

I’ve always been passionate about gardening in a way that was both environmentally sound and sustainable.  To me, gardening with a lot of harsh pesticides or herbicides is counter-intuitive. It’s like you’re trying to beat nature into submission, and is simply not for me.

My gardening ethos revolved around things like companion gardening, composting, and waste reduction/reuse. Then we found permaculture, which incorporated just about everything I’d ever found on my own, along with a myriad of other practices.

Permaculture is a bit of a buzzword, and it’s tough to say whether it’s a process, design/modelling system, or ethos. I think that it’s pretty much all of those things, and can be as complex or simple as you like.

Permaculture has three overarching ideals:

• Take care of the earth.
• Take care of the people.
• Share the surplus.

Under these are twelve design principles:

1. Observe and interact.
2. Catch and store energy.
3. Obtain a yield.
4. Apply self-regulation and accept feedback.
5. Use and value renewable resources and services.
6. Produce no waste.
7. Design from patterns to details.
8. Integrate rather than segregate.
9. Use small and slow solutions.
10. Use and value diversity.
11. Use edges and value the margins.
12. Creatively use and response to change.

Principles 3 through 8 had been pretty much my approach all along, so I felt right at home with this larger approach.

The information above is ripped off entirely from this site. It’s awesome.

My introduction to permaculture wasn’t plunging head-long into an approach with 12 complex principles. Rather, it was via Josh Byrne of Gardening Australia fame. You can find out more about Josh here and here. We love Gardening Australia, and I was lucky enough to get a DVD box set a few years back. At the risk of sounding wanky, it really did help develop our gardening approach, leading directly to a desire for self-sufficiency and where we find ourselves today.

Josh’s permaculture approach is described here. I’d also recommend the DVD where he takes a year or so to convert a quarter acre suburban Perth garden into a permaculture paradise. I think it might be this one. You can get that in a box set too.  Mine is signed by Josh. I might have a bit of a gardening man crush on him.  I’m not even joking.

Josh explained permaculture a lot more simply than the permaculture principles web site does.  He basically said that it’s a way of thinking globally but acting locally for environmental sustainability. He also listed the fundamental aspects of a permaculture garden, and these were the things that we immediately adopted (if we didn’t have them already):

• Planning
• Poultry
• Worm farm
• Drip irrigation
• Grey water recycling
• Composting
• Mulching

We changed our own gardening to match the permaculture philosophy (I still see it as a philosophy) and the results were impressive.

We incorporated poultry, which is something every gardener should do, even if you’re in the suburbs.  Your waste is just about eliminated by definition, as there’s very little they don’t eat. What they produce is pure gold, be it of the culinary kind (eggs) or the gardening kind (poop). Seriously, I see chooks as being one of our best gardening decisions ever.

The Ladies!

Eggs! The second best thing to come out of the chooks.

We made a worm farm.  This can be done quite simply, and there are all kinds of guides on how to do it. Mine is quite small, but one of our next farm projects is expanding it to be bath sized.  I’ll post about that when it happens.

We changed our garden designs, reclaiming much of the yard as productive area or using available space to do things like grow potatoes under straw.

Spuds under straw.

We ended up with bumper crops all the time. Well, we ended up with bumper crops in summer.  Winter was more of a challenge as our entire back garden was shaded, and that learning experience was fed directly into the design of our giant veggie patch in the new place.

Volunteer tomatoes.

I ended up having to tie the tomatoes to the clothes line.

Rhubarb!

It ended up pulling down that fence and a gate.

Yeah, I have no control over that at all.

A pumpkin plant in the process of getting away from me.

Pumpkin!

Habanero. Lots of heat.

Lots ‘o corn.

This surplus is what led us to a couple of realisations.  Firstly, we didn’t have to just eat this stuff seasonally, but could preserve it.

Bumper chilli crop!

Pickled chillies, jalapenos mostly.

Secondly, we were producing enough of certain things that we’d never have to buy them again.  For example, we eat a lot of chillies, and with little effort had enough chillies of the pickled, dried, and popper kind that we were chilli self-sufficient.  We also had enough preserved fruit, jam, eggs, and even things like pumpkin to last us until the following season. We were self-sufficient for a heap of stuff, and I wanted more!

At the same time we had been looking at houses for four years or so.  That started with me and my kids, and expanded to me and my gorgeous girlfriend Linhda. I should also mention that Linhda was a big part of the preserving that we experimented with, and are still experimenting with years on.  She’s an amazing cook and is why I’m free to grow the things I grow.

Me and Linhda. She’s the pretty one on the right.

Anyway, we’d been looking at houses for a while, and our desire for a self-sufficient lifestyle completely altered our house requirements. All of a sudden it wasn’t about the house in the country; it was about the land.