What do you get when you combine traveling long distances for work and a garden placed inconveniently away from the house? A neglected patch of grass with a few hardy fruits and veggies trying to hold there ground. This garden, containing annual and perennial vegetables and a few fruit trees, has been productive at times but more recently neglected due to a few issues stemming from an initial lack of design. The main ones being proximity to the house and the layout. But its never too late to turn things around!

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Whenever we decide to start gardening we come up against challenges, usually brought about by our preconceived ideas of the way things should be.  For example, the neighbors might get annoyed by the untidy look of a permaculture garden, or perhaps instead of understanding a particular garden niche and growing something to suit the conditions, we decide to change the site to grow what we want.

Attaching the corrugated sheets. Chicken tractor and poly tunnel in the background.

The raised garden bed is something that is often used in both of these situations, to “tidy up” or make a site appear more ordered and to change the growing conditions by increasing drainage.

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Would you like to have food for your family now and into the future — food that is truly fresh and packed with flavour, and food that doesn’t cost the Earth? Would you like it to be grown in a way that not only doesn’t destroy soil, but builds it instead, so that people can be fed long after you’re gone? Would it be asking too much for this food to be grown in a way that cleans the air and the water as it passes through, and which contributes to climate restoration?

What you need is a food forest.

Once a rainforest, then cleared for timber and grazing land, a food forest now
grows around this old decaying stump from the original forest.

It has been known for a long time that wild forests provide ecosystem services of purifying air and water while building soil. These systems are capable of supporting large predatory and opportunistic species of animals with no substantial inputs from outside the system other than sunlight and the weather. (In reality the weather is more of a relationship between the forest and the sun than an input.)

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The Arts Factory backpackers resort in Byron Bay, New South Wales, has just been blitzed by an efficient team of Permaculturalists taking part in a five day course focusing on bringing permaculture designs from the page into the landscape.

The Arts Factory backpackers resort sees travellers from all over the globe come to relax and soak up the  sun and surf. During their stays they chomp their way through countless meals consisting of food that could have travelled just as far as they did. In an initiative to reduce the impact of the food consuming hordes of travellers the Permaculture Research Institute has provided a helping hand to set up a kitchen garden.

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