Design notes…
Small but productive: Jill’s inner-urban home garden
I wrote this story for ABC Organic Gardener some years ago. It looks at the thinking and design process that Jill Finnane used to create her small but productive home garden in Sydney’s Inner West.
Jill Finnane was a permaculture educator, international development worker and social justice advocate for the Uniting Church’s Edmund Rice Centre. She was instrumental in setting up Action for World Development whose premises in Surry Hills became a permaculture teaching venue in the 1990s. She was one of the crew, as was I, who produced the book Getting Ready, a manual for aspiring international development workers that was heavily influenced by permaculture thinking. Jill now lives in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs.
A process of creeping gardenisation
There they were… moving stealthily behind the wire fence. Partly concealed by vegetation, the three of them would stop to watch us, their black, beady eyes observing our every move.
Jill Finnane’s chooks are perhaps the most unexpected part of her small garden in Sydney’s Inner West. It comes as a surprise to discover livestock of any sort in this part of the city, yet the chook pen is only one surprise of many in this small but highly productive food garden.
“It wasn’t like this when we moved in”, Jill said, sweeping her arm over the convoluted garden edges and cascading vegetables as we look out from the verandah.
“There was concrete that needed moving because water was collecting and mosquitos were breeding. One of my son’s friends dug it dug up and I put in a little herb garden. That was the first step — getting rid of a problem.”
I drew up a design, starting with a base plan of what was actually there. I fiddled with possibilities…
As a teacher of the permaculture design system, Jill knew the wisdom of permaculture co-inventor, Bill Mollison’s dictum about protracted thought rather than thoughtless action being the first step in garden design.
“I drew up a design, starting with a base plan of what was actually there. I fiddled with possibilities. More than half our backyard was carport. Getting rid of that was a big decision. We lived with the place for a year humming and harring about the big effort of getting in the pneumatic drills. But we did eventually get rid of it and that made a huge difference because we got sunlight into the yard.”
Then began a process of ‘creeping gardenisation’ that followed the principle of modular development, taking on only so much as you can manage, consolidating that area and pushing out incrementally from the edges of what you have done. It was a means of developing a garden as time allowed and it completely transformed the back, side and front yards of Jill’s Federation era semi-detached cottage.
A garden of useful plants
It is not all that common to find front gardens in the Inner West brimming with mango, macadamia and sweet potato. The narrow side passage as Jill’s house is home to a tall, narrow rainwater tank, banana trees and an assortment of ground covers such as the Asian root crop, galangal, that is used to flavour food. It is in the backyard that the diversity and productivity of Jill’s home garden is most evident.
“Here I do my annual plants because they get a little bit more sun, not loads, but enough to grow annuals”, Jill explained. Around us were tomatoes, leafy greens and a few fruit trees all contained within the twisting, winding borders common to permaculture gardens. Permaculture design favours convoluted garden edges because they are supposed to increase the growing area.
Visible over the fence are the strap-leafed heads of sugar cane and the radiating leaves of pawpaw, all growing along a narrow strip in the rear lane.
“People pinched the rock melon and pumpkin I earlier planted out there, so now I grow sugar cane and pawpaw. The pawpaw are far and away the most successful plant in the garden.We get delicious pawpaws all spring and into summer. We give away pawpaw.”
This garden in Jill’s backyard is what is known in permaculture as the Zone 1 garden, the place where annual vegetables, culinary herbs and some perennial vegetables like Jill’s madagasacar or lima beans are grown. The theory of permaculture garden design says the orchard’s fruit trees and shrubs, Zone 2, is further from the house on the edge of Zone 1. Theories require adaptation when faced with reality so, as in many small inner-urban gardens, Jill has compacted the two zones by placing fruit trees along the fence and integrated them into the vegetables so that they do not overshadow the veges.
The aesthetics of chooks
Jill’s three bantams give one or two eggs a day. That’s enough for her and Michael, her husband. Small her garden is, she is adamant that chooks have a place in the limited space of inner-urban home gardens.
“I’ve spoken to so many people who say the grew up with chooks in the backyard, so of course chooks in the home garden are viable. People have always kept chooks. It’s only that, somehow or other, we’ve come to look on our backyards as having to be neat and tidy and we’ve forgotten how beautiful chooks really are.”
More than mere avian ornaments in some decorative garden, Jill’s chooks fulfil useful roles such as producing eggs, manure and scratching up the litter that she uses to make compost.
Hens make a beautiful, relaxing sound like waves on a beach, it’s a beautiful murmur…
Jill explains that there are psychological as well as utilitarian reasons for keeping poultry in the suburbs, difficult though these might be to understand for people who have never kept chooks.
“Chooks add to your quality of life. They are so delightful and you don’t have to look after them in the same fanatical way you do dogs. Their manure is not as dangerous as dog manure. Hens make a beautiful, relaxing sound like waves on a beach, it’s a beautiful murmur.” Clearly, Jill is hooked on chooks.
Organic by default
A science teacher by background, Jill started in gardening the synthetic way.
“I tried that approach and it didn’t work. Then I discovered composting and no-dig gardening and found that it actually did work. It was the logic of the approach. Once I started looking at the science of composting and working with the soil and nature and understanding ecology, it all made sense.
“The other reason I adopted organic gardening is because I care about sustainability, caring for the Earth and that kind of thing.”
Light, time and what you eat
Jill talks of sitting in the train and looking into Sydney’s backyards. She sees maybe a few that grow vegetables, but most support nothing more than lawn and, perhaps, a couple trees. Despite this, Jill sees potential.
“We’ve got a beautiful climate for growing things here in Sydney and the soil is not too bad except, perhaps, for people with really sandy soils. But even they can do something if they build it up with enough organic matter. My mother is always giving me oranges and lemons from her backyard, which is basically pure sand. She manages, so it is possible.”
You look for time-saving, low-maintenance ideas… You fit your food growing around the other important social needs of the household…
Jill learned the practical way that when it comes to turning small urban backyards into food gardens there are going to be challenges.
“Oh, sunlight is probably the major limiting factor, but so is time to the city person. This is where fruit trees are great because they don’t take so much time.
“You look for time-saving, low-maintenance ideas. You work out a convenient slow way to make compost and put the compost bin as close as possible to where you are going to use it. It is important to think about the people in the household… how they are going to use the yard. If you have children their needs will come first in terms of how you design the yard… they need their play area. You fit your food growing around the other important social needs of the household.
“Then there’s what you like to eat to consider… and think about what you want to do with the whole garden. Produce your design, your ten year plan, what you might do with the whole thing, but start where it is easiest or start close to the back door or where you have enough sunlight… not in a corner because in a corner is usually up the back. When I started gardening I made a garden way out the back. It was a real effort to get to to look after and harvest. Once my thinking changed and I grew vegetables and herbs near the back door it made it so much easier and took so much less time.
Lawns into lunch
Jill is the author of a book about how people in Australia’s largest city are taking a do-it-yourself approach to producing local, nutritious food. The 22 case studies in Lawns Into Lunch — Growing Food in the City, provide an easily readable survey of how even tiny backyards are being used to produce food and enhance quality of life.
Jill was provoked into writing. “I have been teaching permaculture gardening for many years and I have heard people say that not much food production happens in Sydney, nor is there much permaculture”.
“That is not true, people are quietly getting on with it and I wanted to tell their story”.
Jill’s book takes a similar approach to the 2001 publication of the Marrickville Community History Group’s Marrickville Backyards. That showed in photo and text how local residents use their backyards and keep alive their immigrant culture of domestic food production.
Gardening is political and spiritual
The act of growing some of her own food is more than a simple interest to Jill. It is a political and spiritual act. Consciously or unconsciously, permaculture gardening teaches us about how change happens in society.
“Permaculture gardening is part of the process of change, but in a constructive way. It shows that things can be different.
“For me, spirituality is very important. In many ways it is about what it means to be fully human and how we relate to others in that caring sort of sense. I think permaculture lends itself very well to a lot of the spirituality that underpins much of the world’s nature religions.
“Getting in touch with nature and sustaining ourselves seems to be what it is about. Some people looking at it from the outside see it as getting dirt under your fingernails and they think of gardening as lowly. But people who actually produce their food needs in a garden find it ennobling and that it appeals to the very best in themselves, which. That’s what I think spirituality is about, bringing out what is good in us.
“The permaculture approach of gardening with nature and having a concern about the bigger issues like sustainability does connect with my spirituality, anyway.”
Science, politics, spirituality, practicality, peace of mind, home grown food, food, chooks and permaculture. These are Jill Finnane’s recipe for living in the city and growing food in a small, inner urban garden.
Finnane J, 2005; Lawn Into Lunch — Growing Food in the City; New Holland Publishers, Sydney. ISBN 1 74110 209 X
Gleeson J et al; 2001; Marrickville Backyards; Marrickville Community History Group, Sydney/ Bloomings Books, Melbourne ISBN 0 646 41212 4.
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