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 refit, you have to work with what you have, and in our case, that meant a tall, windowless garage wall and a narrow concrete path occupying the prime, north facing aspect.

But, as the permaculture saying goes, the problem is the solution, and our problem was a catbird. Just one. With an insatiable taste for strawberries. It also rather likes tomatoes, and given its sweet tooth (beak), we suspect that as the raspberries and blackberries start to bear it might develop a taste for them too. That north wall would make a perfect spot for a berry arbour. The side benefit is that it keeps them up out of slug range too.

The strawberry troughs are made from waste packing material used to import glass – one of the advantages of living in suburbia is easy access to vast quantities of wasted commercial and industrial pallets and packing materials. They have holes drilled in the bottom for drainage, and they’re attached to a frame attached to the wall, that slopes at a small angle, just enough so that water from the top one drips down to the next. Because the wall faces almost dead north, the troughs never shade each other. The neighbour’s garage shades the lower levels at some parts of the day, but using height allows the higher beds to harvest sun most of the day.

The troughs are filled with a mix of chook produced compost and cracker dust, and fertlized rather more often than the deep beds with worm leachate or seaweed brew. The troughs are relatively shallow, which wouldn’t work for many vegetables but strawberries are shallow rooted and don’t mind so long as they get regular fertilizing. The troughs won’t last very long, but strawberries need to be replanted every few years anyhow, and the troughs are easily relplaced, at least so long as we are still importing glass (may need to rethink that one, sooner than I might hope).

Blackberries and raspberries live in the arbour too, in big pots, with a ladder so they can climb the wall too, and along the fence is a narrow bed planted with tomatoes that will climb the fence and take advantage of the soil along the driveway edge on the neighbour’s side. The arbour over the top is steel mesh, arched from fence to wall, covered with netting.

The strawberries are very tasty.