Design notes…
Neat, accessible, productive
This small home garden offers some useful lessons in functional design.
The house and garden is in the small coastal town of Dodges Ferry on Tiger Head Bay, Tasmania. Located around 30km east of Hobart, the town is susceptible to cold winter winds blowing in from the south.
Let’s look at the garden in detail.
Scale
Designed to supplement the food supply of a family, the garden is of manageable scale. It is compact, so it does not sprawl, not that there is all that much space for it to sprawl into. Compactness is a virtue in garden design because compactness=access. Access is important to monitoring the condition of crops and for harvesting.
Gardens can fall into neglect when their scale is not manageable with gardener skill and the time available for gardening.
Garden manageability=area of garden/skill + time available for gardening.
Access
The garden is close to the house. That’s more or less inevitable as the backyard is small.
Proximity to the house, rather than siting a food garden way-down-the-backyard (if you’re one of the diminishing number with a garden large enough to have a way-down-the-backyard) means you are more likely to harvest what you grow, especially when winter’s winds howl and the rain is coming down. It also means you can keep an eye on your garden, noting plants that need attention because of insect or disease infection or lack of water.
The Inverse Access Law of garden design is relevant here: garden size + sprawl + limited time available for maintenance is inversely proportional to garden utilisation.
Sprawl is a characteristic of gardens that are not close-planted, that do not make effective use of vertical space. That might be accomplished by the use of trellises for climbing plants or by establishing taller plants behind the lower-growing so the smaller species receive adequate sunlight. Imagined in cross-section, the garden is planted to form a wedge shape to sunward, with smaller plants on the sunward side and taller plants behind. This exposes all of the plants to sunlight.
The classic, theoretical permaculture model places narrow beds — where frequently used, smaller annual crops are grown — closest to the dwelling. Here, they are of easy access as they are more-frequently visited for replanting, maintenance and harvest. Broad beds — where larger vegetables and perennials are planted — occupy the space between narrow beds and orchard area. The reality of available space often sees the different areas amalgamated into a smaller, more compact area, as in this garden where the raised vegetable beds are enclosed on two sides by fruit trees.
Another example of access are the raised vegetable containers. They are important where gardeners are aged or have mobility problems that inhibit bending to tend a ground-level garden.
Diversity
The garden might be small but it hosts raised planters of vegetables and culinary herbs as well as citrus and stone fruit. Stone fruit does well in Tasmania’s cool temperate climate and in its absence of fruit fly.
To adopt permaculture designer Cecilia Macauley’s Law of Wanted and Unwanted Diversity, we want only a desired diversity of commonly-eaten plants rather than the less-popular, seldom-used plants in our garden. That means we grow only what we usually eat, our useful diversity. We can plant a little of the less-commonly-eaten vegetables, however the more of them we plant the less space we have for what we usually eat.
The Law of Species Selection: diet is the determinant of crop diversity.
Sunlight and wind
Plants in the garden receive year-round sunlight. That’s something not all urban gardeners have, thanks to neighbours’ trees and structures.
This garden is on the western side of the house. That might not be desirable in terms of permaculture theory, however reality often relegates theory to the permaculture books. We sometimes have to make do with the aspect and characteristic of the land we have.
The most-frequent cold, damaging winds blow in across the bay from the south to south west sector. A garage/workshop on the southern side provides shelter for the garden.
Construction
The raised planters of galvanised iron and timber are strongly built of durable materials. That minimises maintenance. The less the maintenance the more time there is for gardening and other activities. The planters are the right height for an adult gardener.
The woodchip paths are low maintenance. Maintenance consists of removing the occasional weed, unlike lawn paths that require regular mowing and can be a source of weed invasion of garden beds.
The Law of Garden Design and Construction: time taken in constructing a sturdy garden is seldom wasted.
Compact, durable, productive
The small home garden produces enough vegetables and culinary herbs for a small family. Grains, other than corn which can be easily grown in a home garden, and supplementary root crops other than a small amount of potatoes that can be grown, have to be bought in. So may other vegetables to supplement the limited range that can be grown in the Tasmanian winter.
In demonstrating durable and accessible design, the garden shows what can be done in a small space in a small town.
More Permaculture 3.0
Permaculture 3.0 facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/permaculture3.0/?modal=admin_todo_tour
