Do you remember when you first fell in love and all you could think of was the other person? Your whole being was so devoted to the new relationship that you weren’t interested in anything else. It’s the same when we discover the excitement of growing our own veggies and making that first compost heap and seeing it break down into gorgeous humus. Not forgetting the thrill of experiencing our own fresh, organic food straight from the garden and generally living the grass roots experience is all very exciting and reason for getting up every morning. But there comes a time, as we all know, that when the honeymoon is over, it becomes more difficult to spend all that time making the compost, seeding out, cleaning chook pens, collecting greens etc as there is always so much to do!
All of a sudden you find yourself time-poor like the rest of us, and you wonder how you can keep up all that work just so you can put some food on the table. This is where you might need some Permaculture assistance with some tips on how to ensure sustainability in established food gardens.
The following five points are the basic requirements it takes to keep the gardens ticking over all year round.
1. Keeping up with soil fertility
2. Keeping up with soil moisture
3. Keeping the weeds at bay
4. Planting for a year round supply of vegetables and fruit
5. Minimum time to keep the garden productive
If these five requirements are met, then it is possible to keep it all going even when times are busy and you are often distracted away from the garden.
Soil fertility
The soil is the stomach for the plants and if you take good care of the soil then the rest will follow. Soil fertility is maintained by building soil and this means constantly adding organic matter, microbes and fungi to the soil profile. Adding organic matter to the soil is a never ending process and the following advice is very much based on Permaculture good sense. It’s OK to import bales of mulch hay when starting out a new garden but eventually the aim is to have your mulch growing where you need it. A selection of plants is chosen for their rampant growth and these can be planted around the garden perimeters as weed barriers and pathway edges. Plants such as lemon grass, comfrey, arrowroot, pigeon pea and other legumous shrubs do very well in the warmer climates of the tropics and sub-tropics and I’m sure most of these will grow well enough in cooler climates around Australia. We call these rampant growing plants support species and they are very useful for ‘chop and drop’ and they are- well, chopped and dropped onto the garden beds. This will ensure a constant supply of organic matter added to the soil in the form of mulch. Having these support species established around the perimeters of your gardens will give you years of a steady supply of mulch in the warmer times of the year when they are in steady growth mode.
Having a supply of onsite mulch plants around the garden beds will also keep up with soil moisture and during dry times drip irrigation can be applied to individual plants under the mulch cover. It will then be a simple matter of turning on the tap for twenty minutes to water the plants and the mulch layer will of course prevent it from drying out too quickly. Weeds are also effectively kept at bay with all that mulch material constantly added to the garden beds. If you have plenty of these support species planted around your gardens then chopping and dropping is about the most work you will do in the garden besides planting your seedlings.
Cycle the nutrients
Adding manure is a great way of injecting new life into the soil. You can safely add composted manure or manure worked through a worm farm, to the garden beds around your plants. You can only add raw manure to empty garden beds and if you add a sprinkle of bokashi over the manure and then mulch over after watering it in thoroughly. Allow two to three weeks for the bokashi to break down the manure and plant your seedlings into the garden bed when all signs of manure have disappeared. This is to ensure that there won’t be a nitrogen overload on the plants which is not good for you and the plants. I have my own livestock and add minerals such as kelp, dolomite, copper sulphate and sulphur into their daily feed buckets when I milk them and any excess minerals inevitably end up passing out with the manure and into in my garden beds. You will do well to add kelp and calci-grit to your worm farm so these minerals will end up in your garden soil.
Year round food supply
Planting in season is of course the easiest way to grow vegetables, and here in the sub-tropics it is very easy to grow our favourite temperate vegetables in the cooler months of the year and grow tropical vegetables in the hotter summer months. Whilst spring and autumn are the busiest times of the year in the garden, most of the time the garden is in maintenance mode and I find there is more time spent in the gardening harvesting than there is actual work.
Routine
I have found that an established routine helps me to keep a check on seedlings in the nursery and soil moisture in the garden. When I go out to feed the chooks of a morning I walk past the gardens and the nursery, and automatically check on them because I’m already there. This is much easier than having to make a special trip whenever you happen to think of checking on your plants. An established routine is therefore invaluable as this will help to keep an eye on things even when you are time poor.
Links and connections
‘It is not the number of diverse things in a design that leads to stability, it is the number of beneficial connections between these components’ (Bill Mollison). The links between the nursery and the vegie garden when I feed the chooks of a morning is one such an example and the more of these links and connections that can be established around the gardens, the more interaction there will be between these different components. This means that it is more likely that you will find yourself where all the action is happening and it will be easier to attend to those things that need your attention. Good planning and design will allow for links and connections to be established on paper before any work is carried out but links and connections can also evolve in the garden as new projects come up. One such an example is that I needed to have a facility to load up my cattle onto a truck so I could export them off the property. I thought we should design a small holding pen that would have a side gate built into it so we can load any of our cattle up onto a truck. This holding pen has now become a useful milking pen and it is actually built on our driveway as this is where the ground becomes elevated enough to load up cattle onto a truck down below. Having a cow wait for her daily feed bucket on the driveway has resulted in a build up of cow pats and this is not so good for when I drive the car over that section of the driveway. I had a bit of a think about this and thought a worm farm would be the answer. All I had to do was install a bath tub on some blocks with a bucket underneath and shovel all the fresh turds into the worm farm. The wormfarm is under the shade of the avocado trees, right next to the tap for keeping up the moisture when necessary, and close by the gardens and the nursery for the worm juice and castings to be used. How good is that! Everything seemed to fall into place; now that’s links and connections at work for you.
Seed Saving
If a garden is to be truly sustainable then being able to save the seed of your favourite vegetables must be a part of the whole cycle. Always insist on accessing open pollinated seed and seedlings so that you can save the seed if these plants perform well for you. Be strict on this and don’t buy seedlings from the local nursery supplier if they can’t guarantee that they are grown from open-pollinated seed. Most of their seedlings are grown from hybrid seeds and the seeds from these plants are not worth keeping. When you are earmarking plants for seed saving you will need support stakes, labels, string, bags etc handy so that the plants will come to their end of life cycle intact. This means you will need to be prepared for this beforehand collecting all the things needed beforehand so everything is accessible for when you need them.
Growing our own food supply is very desirable these days and although most of us are time poor, it is still quite possible to make it all happen as long as we are prepared to build good foundations and put in the hard yards. Good design and forethought will pay of as well as understanding how natural forces are at work. Work with nature, not against it and you will be exponentially rewarded with productive gardens that will feed you and your family in disgusting good health.