The biggest (by far) mistake that I see beginner food gardeners make is underestimating the payoff you get for soil building. Water, sun, the right plant for the season, heritage varieties, pest predators – they are all important, but nothing gives you more harvest for effort than building soil.
One of the very pleasant surprises of living in suburbia is just how abundant sources of organic matter for turning into soil are. One of the very pleasant surprises of living in suburbia is just how abundant sources of organic matter for turning into soil are. Maybe that will change as the need for food security accelerates, but for the moment, nobody else seems to be chasing kitchen scraps, greengrocer…
If you have only a tiny area (or a tiny window of time) for gardening, every one of the first dozen plants I’d go for would be herbs. In pots or courtyard, herb spiral or window boxes, balcony garden or flower bed, these are the 12 plants I’d plant first. In no particular order (choosing just a dozen was hard enough!):
Hugelkultur is not a solution for every site. Nor are raised beds, or hardwood edging, or anything really. Permaculture is all about intelligently, creatively, sensitively responding to the nature of a site and the creatures, human and animal, that inhabit it. But hugelkultur has worked here.
Lead paint was commonly used up till the late 1970’s. Up until 1965 paint was often 50% lead. Houses, and sheds dating from before that often had a history of being scraped and sanded and repainted, and the lead paint flakes and dust settled as a ring around the building.
I’m not going to show you the actual designing we did. It’s way too wild and messy for publishing. But this is an idealised, post hoc version. And, the ideas and principles learned in rural homesteading did help get it right in less than the decade or so it took us the first time. If nothing else, it taught us that this step is worth doing.
This is the house we moved into. A run down, unrenovated fibro cottage, built in the late 1950’s (and lived in by the same family…