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— Terry Leahy, 2016
In “Permaculture Principles”, David Holmgren advises us to “obtain a yield” and makes this the third principle of permaculture. Indeed species that fail to obtain a yield from their environment will go extinct. While aesthetic delight and relaxation may be yields of some kind, it is “consuming the harvest that provides us with the visceral reward” (Holmgren 2002: 61). Without this, he suggests, we will not maintain our enthusiasm for permaculture very long.
It is eighteen years since I started this garden here in Newcastle and my enthusiasm has not waned. While I have been heavily committed to my work at uni, I have been lucky enough to have time to work in the garden. We have an 800 square metre block, quite a big one for suburban Newcastle. It is North facing and slopes down with a lot of yard stretching out behind the house. The average rainfall is generally about 1100 mm and the climate is subtropical. Despite this promising context, I have not really captured a yield, at least as far as food goes. While I enjoy my gardening, the sense of bashing your head against a brick wall always interferes to an extent. The problems are complex and interrelated.
One is the desire to maintain the wild beauty that attracted us to the block in the first place. The yard is like an Edna Walling creation with little paths leading down through bamboo groves, hidden vistas through a gateway fringed by bananas and passion fruit vines, a multitude of flowering shrubs. Partly through my own choice and partly through vetos from the others who share my house, I have never really tackled the problem of shade adequately. To start with, the North end of the block is shaded by a grove of mature gum trees in the next door property – a five acre block. Our block also has problems with shade. There were two established gum trees on the block, a large African Olive, and a huge native frangipani. More recently a Jacaranda has sprung up and has been hard to cut down as it is so beautiful in the season. A part of the Western side is plagued by self-sown Robinias that also suck the nutrients out of nearby vegetable beds. Yet they also shade the veranda from the Western sun in summer and protect us from the view from the street. Thankfully some storms have helped and knocked down one old gum tree and knocked the top off the African Olive.
All this shade has meant that it has been hard to get full sun to grow vegetables. It has been hard to get enough sun for citrus to flourish. The same with mangoes and bananas. Of course I have tried every food crop that grows in shade but see below for problems with this. My three veggie beds are in the best spots but are shaded respectively by (a) the gum trees on the North (b) the Jacaranda and Bananas in the middle and (c) the Robinias, Mandarin, Persimmon, Lilly Pilly and Carobs on the West. This Western bed is slammed up next to the neighbours so it also cops killing hot winds in summer. The roots of these trees do not help!
A second problem is that we are near to a lot of bushland. This is an endless delight, with lots of interesting wildlife entering our yard at different times, even a family of land mullets. But from a food growing perspective it has been tragic. The typical pests are ringtail possums, brush tail possums, flying foxes and lots of parrots, with king parrots eating the bananas and lorikeets going for the figs. The other pest problem is fruit fly. These infect almost every kind of fruit. My experience is that none of the organic solutions really work to stop them. Fungal infections in the roots and wood borers in the trunks have also been a worry. I have lost three mulberries and a rose apple with one or both of these problems.
My most recent experience was the triple whammy typical of this block. In the front yard I have a tropical Anna apple that by now is bearing a lot of fruit. If they ever get to maturity they are delicious. I was determined in this, my last year here, to beat the fruit fly and put up lots of plastic bottles with organic fruit fly lure and trapping fluid. I got it very early and there were a lot of fruit fly trapped. It all seemed to be going well when the fruit started to be eaten by flying foxes, ringtail possums and every kind of parrot. I netted the tree and for good measure I put home made fly wire bags around the apples that I could reach. All good until one little fruit bat got trapped and we had to call animal rescue. It was a totally amazing animal and they rescued it in one piece. But I was warned to remove the netting. Which I did. Next, the possums and parrots started to chew into the flywire bags and eat the apples anyway. The apples that survived these attacks were infected with fruit fly despite all the precautions.
So through all of this have I caught any yield? There have been some clear successes. For my own breakfasts I have had a continuous supply of Lebanese cress, kale, collard greens, amaranth, nasturtium leaves and the like. One year I got a really good crop of green beans. There has been a lot of sugar cane. I got a hand wringer machine to juice it but realized it was not really doing my waist line any good. There have been quite a lot of macadamia nuts in some years. I have had a good crop of limes and a fair crop of lemons and mandarins sometimes. The passionfruit have been good lately.
If gardening for vegetables was just about getting sufficient vitamin A and C from vaguely edible plants I would be doing well enough. There are edible taro leaves, amaranth, parsley, collards, pumpkin leaves, chokoes, prickly pear, Leucaena leaves, Lebanese cress, violets, nasturtiums, rose of Sharon hibiscus. Some root vegetables have been ok – Canna edulis and yams. The sweet potatoes have produced a lot of leaves but not much in the way of tubers.
A key problem is that most of the stuff that is easy to grow here and easy to protect from pests is not what my housemates want to eat. As I am the cook it is hard to cook things people do not like and get lots of disparaging comments about pond life and such. Things that people do like to eat have been hard to get up consistently – cos lettuce; tomatoes; beans; carrots; pumpkins; potatoes; onions, cucumbers; potatoes. Fruit has been very hard for the reasons explained above.
Do I have any recommendations for permaculture suburban gardeners in this region – now that I am moving to Melbourne and a much smaller block?
• Do not choose your housemates for kindness, good conversation or shared politics. Insist on a rabid desire to eat anything out of the garden and to eschew all food from a supermarket.
• Remove all pre-existing vegetation on your block that is more than a metre high and do not let it re-establish.
• Dig a one metre hole and re-fill with good soil and compost for every tree you are planting. Surround with five spice herb (plectranthus spp) and lavender to deter wood borer. Partner each tree with several nitrogen fixing legume bushes or trees about three metres away. Leucaena leucocephala works really well here. A swale is also good to trap water if you can manage that.
• Do not plant any tree until you can build a large cage of chicken wire around it and once the tree is established, prune it to fit. Say five metres by five metres at the bottom and six metres high. Grow a clump of bamboo to use to construct these. I have Bambusa oldhamii. Treat the bamboo poles with copper sulphate dissolved in a bucket. For each upright post, set a stainless steel strap in a concrete footing and then cross brace it all for stability. You will also need a door to get in.
• Avoid any kind of fruit that gets fruit fly. There really is no way to deal with this organically. Do not be tempted into the delusion that you really can do this. The small fruit seems to avoid the fruit fly. I think it ripens before they can mature or it is too hot for the larvae. My current list of what I can get going despite the fruit fly is very short. Mulberries, citrus, grapes, passion fruit, carobs, bananas and nuts (Macadamias, Malabar Chestnut, Pecans).
• Grow vegetables that most people do not want to eat, but are easy to grow. See all the stuff mentioned above. For tomatoes, only grow the very small cherry size ones and enclose the bed in a possum and parrot proof cage.
• Make sure everything has plenty of sunlight. Ideally the veggie beds should go on the North side of the block with increasingly high trees coming up the block to the South.
So have I caught any yield in other ways. Well yes. The garden has been endlessly entertaining. It is complex and beautiful. We have had lots of wildlife. I have learned heaps about what grows in this climate and what is easy to grow. This knowledge has been very useful in my work in Africa in places with a somewhat similar climate. It has helped me to keep fit. Pruning the garden into some semblance of order to sell our house in the next six months will be hours of work every week and I am looking forward to it.