Into suburbia
In 2019, just about the time that the horror bushfire season started, we moved into suburbia. You couldn’t get much more suburbia – a 500m2 block in a neighbourhood of low rent units and post-war houses, one block back from a major arterial road, an easy walk to a big shopping centre in one direction and a pub in the other. After nearly 40 years living off-grid, in a homebuilt house on a 1000 acre rural community property, with a platypus inhabited creek, a mountain, a patch of remnant rainforest, and three creek crossings on a dirt road just to get to the bitumin, it was a shock.
There were many reasons. One of the big ones was to see how much of what we had learned living off-grid could be transferred to a suburban setting, to see whether our very lovely low carbon footprint lifestyle was actually a solution to climate catastrophe, or whether it was just nah, nah, nah nah nah.
I can’t say that was the only reason, or even the main one. Our granddaughter was born and we had an opportunity to do grandparent day care, (and I firmly believe grandparent child care is a very good thing). I wanted to find out if the way I imagined climate change playing out in my novel held true in the wider world. And life is short, it was time for an adventure.
So here it is, the story of the experiment.
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What makes a good permaculture site in suburbia?
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…
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Site Analysis – Zones and Sectors
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…
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Lead in the soil?
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.
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Hugel beds
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.
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Gardening in Small Spaces: Go for Herbs
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…
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Our Chooks know it’s Sunday
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…
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Soil Building Part 1 – Chook Labour
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.
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Ladyfinger bananas
I think this is our fourth bunch of bananas in the new house, in three years. And there’s another three coming on, another Ladyfinger and two huge Cavendish bunches. I suspect bananas will make it onto the list of staples in this climate.
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Madagascar beans
First pick (of many to come) of Madagascar beans for storage. In my subtropical climate, I’m looking at bananas (including plantain), cassava, taro, sweet potatoes, pumpkins, yams and beans as storable calories, and these Madagascar beans look like becoming a mainstay of the system.
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Soil Building Part 2 – Seaweed brew
Chooks and worms do the bulk of my soil building, but compost can only contain the micronutrients of the ingredients that go into it. Using some ingredients from trees that deep mine subsoil, and some weeds that are dynamic accumulators helps, but the hero for micronutrients is seaweed, and the best way I’ve (yet) discovered…
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Soil Building Part 3 – Worm Farm
This is the third, and last of my three major soil building factories – the worm farm. The hardest part was getting the cast iron bathtub. It was on Gumtree as a giveaway, come and get it, bring a trailer. Beauty. What they didn’t say was that it down over the edge of the drive…
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Tardissing the Space – Part One – Sun Path
It all just boils down to sun, soil and water, and on a small, urban site, sun is the limiting factor.
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Tardissing the Space Part 2 – Working with Space Time
I have 30 square metres of raised vegie garden beds. It’s not enough! I could make good use of double that without running into soil building or harvest distribution problems, but it’s all the space I can really spare for annuals on this little 500m2 suburban block. But by halving the amount of time a…
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Two years and nine months and counting
My invoice from Daley’s fruit tree nursery says that on 28 October 2019, not long after we started our retrosuburbia journey, in the midst of a drought and just about to be thrown into the worst bushfire season ever, I bought a whole batch of fruit trees for a verge planting. Patience has never been…
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Tardissing the Space Part 3 – Dense Layered Planting
So how to make 30m2 grow enough vegetables for us, plus snow peas and carrots for the grandkids lunch boxes and the occasional excess for giveaways? Economically? I think the answer is to treat it like a jigsaw, or an art piece that has lots of elements that need to fit together.
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Tardissing the Space Part 4 – Trellises, not fences
This was our north side fence when we moved in, and it was a really attractive house feature. – it wasn’t one of those colourbond monstrosities that catch heat, block sunlight, have only one purpose, and make over the fence conversations impossible, and it needed to be replaced. The new fence going in is now…
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Zomocalypse resilience Part 1- sharing saved seed
The more gardens there are in my neighbourhood, the less likely mine will get raided. So I’m all in for encouraging, supporting, and contributing to that. And a very easy way to do it is to share seeds. Locally adapted saved seed, fresh and in season, in small quantities, bred from heirloom gardeners’ varieties rather…
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Tardissing the Space Part 5 – The North Wall
Designing new buildings for passive solar is a no-brainer – possibly the the easiest, most efficient way to reduce energy costs and make a place so much more liveable. It stuns me that so many houses in suburbia are built with no thought to where the sun is. But if you are doing a retrosuburban…
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Tardissing the Space Part 6 – Nooks and Crannies
Hanging baskets, pots, edges, all the little unused spaces. It is a little bit ironic that the beds I harvest most often are the smallest…
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Taking the Chickens to Preschool
We asked the neighbours how they would feel about a short stay rooster, just for long enough to get some fertilized eggs. They were all…