kapiti coast and island

Inspired by Geoff Lawton’s Establishing a Food Forest, a group has got together to explore the potential of food forest gardening on the Kapiti Coast. Our vision is to build a community food forest garden for Kapiti.

Planned, planted and maintained by the community, the forest garden will serve as an education resource, plant nursery, seed bank, outdoor community centre, meeting point and food bank. Accessible to all, the area will become an edible landscape with walkways and glades, natural in look but designed with our needs for sustenance and play. A living repository for the future, in the heart of our community.

We’ve been doing a lot of talking, thinking, researching and come up with a document that we think encompasses the project’s heart. Now, we need some input and some support from you.

Have a read of the Kapiti Community Food Forest Proposal
Please do send us an email answering the following questions:

1. Do you support in principle the establishment of a community food forest in Kapiti?

2. Would you be willing to be part of a group of volunteers that is responsible for the establishment and maintenance of a Kapiti community food forest ?

3. Do you have any resources (land or money) you would be willing to donate to help to establish the Kapiti community food forest?

First in a series looking at wonderful world of food forests, or forest gardening.

A food forest, also called a forest garden, is a productive and organic garden modeled on the ecosystem of a forest. Species are selected to create a stable, functioning environment that fulfill the needs of the gardeners by producing fruits, berries, vegetables, herbs, seeds and other useful plant material.

Each plant performs many multiple roles within the system – promoting growth of other plants, inhibiting weeds, shelter, mulch, pest control, bird food, cross-pollination, attracting beneficial insects and of course providing food, medicine and utility plants for community use.

Food forests are:
– consciously designed using permaculture principles which mimic natural systems;
– multi-layered – trees and shrubs grow surrounded by a herbaceous layer, root crops, vines;
– perennial – plants grow every year without replanting;
– highly productive;
– biodiverse;
– beautiful;
– self-renewing;
– self-fertilising;
– once established, can be low-maintenance.

Diagram by Graham Burnett via Wikipedia

rocket farmsNow that I’ve managed to make it successfully through winter, I can look back and say yes, it was a breeze! Truthfully, I’m not a fan. Living in temperate climates, I’m sure you get more colds, flus and generally nastiness than you do elsewhere. It’s these middling bits where one minute you’re warm, the next you’re freezing. Bug central.

One thing that keeps me happy over winter are my bonsai rocket gardens. Leaving the house for work when it’s dark and getting home in the some disposition, doesn’t allow time for garden therapy. So I’ve been bringing it inside. I spread them on to paper towels on an ice cream container lid, sprinkle water over it once a day and here in winter it usually takes 4 – 6 days to have yumminess. Then I just use them in everything.

High in nutrients and vitamins A, B, C and E, rocket (Eruca spp.) rocks over winter. The sprouts add a nice bit of warmth to any vegetable dish. I use them as a side vegetable for just about anything, sprinkle them on my tomato soup, add them to cheese sandwiches.

Entrachyadid wormsOur permaculture worm tower seems to be working well. But we have just noticed that lots of the thin white worms that were in the bin have gotten out and gone wriggling around the garden. There seems to be a heap of them. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, we instantly knew what they were and what to do.

Entrachyadids are a type of earthworm, and not a nematode as I first feared. They are a sign that the soil is too acid which is a result of putting in too many kitchen scraps. Although, the entrachyadids don’t do any damage, we will be adding lime to the beds to reduce the acidity.

Watch the short video on permaculture worm towers.

mollison_lawtonSeptember 21 is my birthday. It’s also the start of a 2 week PDC course with two of the godfathers of permaculture – Bill Mollison & Geoff Lawton. Which would mean 2 weeks in Melbourne around my birthday. Can I combine all these elements? It would be dreamy. But then so would this one in Jordan…  Oh decisions I wish I could make if only I had some extra coin. Dear Universe, please provide – I promise I shall do good with it!

Emilia Hazelip Synergistic garden bedsI’ve taken procrastination to whole new levels on this one and for that I apologise. We showed the Synergistic Garden video by Emilia Hazelip at the May Seedy Sunday.  Finally, I manage to get the notes up and a couple of links for your edification.

I have to admit, I’ve become a little obsessed by these beautiful beds, all curved and mounded in sweeping lines. I also love the very way they are constructed, in sort of gentle sweeping movements. Due to my terrain I’m not able to do them at my house, so I’ve been eyeing up other people’s gardens to work on.

Anyway, here are notes on the video including links to some other pieces on Emilia…

 

 

 

 

Emilia Hazelip – Synergistic Gardening

 

Based on work of Masanobu Fukuoka, The One Straw Revolution. 1978. Rodale.

 

 

 

Need to modify systems to our own location. Want to get high-yields whiile maintaining the soil’s own fertility.

 

No cultivation

 

No chemical or organic fertilisers

 

No chemical treatments

 

No compaction of the soil

 

Set out beds with sticks and then clear paths for your feet, mounding the soil into beds. Mounds should be 4 feet wide with 20 inches for the path. 10 – 30 inches for the beds deeper the beds the more room for the roots. Give them any shape you wish but make sure you can reach the centre of the beds easily.

 

Sheet mulch – cover the ground with cardboard. A good way to clear ground and you can grow potatoes at the same time.

 

Plants synthesise from light. Plants only take 2.5% of their mass from the soil. The rest comes from air and light. Plants give back much more to the soil then they take out.

 

Use marigolds all through the garden.

 

Beans and peas are legumes and fix nitrogen into the soil. You can use ash, which contains potash, to help grow your beans. This provides free fertiliser for your soil, the bacteria providing many benefits to your plants. These plants will also provide a living mulch between your plants. After harvest, the plants can simply be cut off, leaving the roots in the soil. the plant matter can simply be left on top of the beds. providing further mulch.

 

Synergistic gardening uses compost in the greenhouse or flats to start the plants – it doesn’t ‘force feed’ your soil with it.

 

Onions, garlic and leeks can be planted on the side of the garden beds. They function as pests controllers as well as being nutritious. They can be intermixed with other plants like lettuce or swiss chard.

 

Many plants reseed themselves – an advantage of letting plants finish their life cycle.

 

Mulching the mounds – Newspaper, cardboard, straw, leaves, wool. You can use grass clippings as mulch, but make sure you cut it and let it dry before it starts to seed. The first year the soill will be eating the mulch but as the organic contents in the soil improves, the amount of mulch needed will reduce. You will still need to weed, but it will gradually reduce – it’s all part of the evolving cycle.

 

Ducks (Indian Runner ducks), some birds, hedgehogs, lizards all eat slugs. Copper cuffs, or ones made from coke cans can protect plants from slugs.

 

When harvesting plants like lettuce, cut above the ground allowing the plant a chance to regrow, or providing dead matter for the soil to feed on.

 

Don’t stand on your beds! this will damage and compact the soil

 

Flowers are very important as they may attract beneficial insects, secrete chemicals to protect other plants (eg marigolds), or have edible, medicinal, or economic benefits as well as looking very attractive.

 

 

 

Diversity = a healthy, rich soil. Plants lots of plants with different root structures and leave those root structures in the soil when you harvest. Emilia says that force feeding your soil will create an imbalance or indigestion – let things work naturally – synergistically.

 

 

 

In nature, nothing happens in exactly the same way twice in the same spot. Diversify.

 

 

More information

The Synergistic Agriculture of Emilia Hazelip at the Fukoka Farming website

Watch Emilia Hazelip’s video on Synergistic Gardening

Dill (Anethum graveolens)I feel so gosh darn urban homesteady today. It’s been a beautiful day and I’ve spent it pottering around getting stuff done.

Off in search of a new oven this morning – depressing. It seems $2500 seems to be the going rate for a new oven that doesn’t appear to be made out of plastic. Most look like they would melt if we turned them on. I make my own bread and pizza – I need decent, heavy-duty cookware. So we’ll have to come up with plan B on that one.

Spent the rest of the day kicking it in the sun collecting more marigold seeds and gathering dill to be prepared for drying. Had a meeting to prep for the next Seedy Sunday and then began my kitchen prep for the week. I’ve made yoghurt, started some fenugreek sprouts and a rocket farm on some paper towels and a lid. Even made one for the neighbours – I’ll get them gardening eventually! Finished the day off  by cooking a big casserole in the crockpot.

So the theory is, I should be all ready set go for a busy week ahead – work, Seedy Sunday promotion, blogging and some proofreading -but I can relax knowing my kitchen is in order, even if the oven isn’t.

I love simple, cheap and appropriate ideas that make gardening easier and fun. At the first Seedy Sunday we showed three videos with this philosophy in mind.

My two previous attempts at worm farming had ended badly with the bins being overrun with nasties that killed off the worms. But I so love the simplicity and ease of this idea I’m going to give it another shot. This is a great way to get nutrients straight into your garden.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scUTrypzyY0&hl=en&fs=1]

Homegrown organic cherry tomato yumminessI think that’s the last of my cherry tomatoes. Just as well really, I was getting totally sick of them. We had sooooo many. It was a bad year for tomatoes in the Wellington region and nearly all mine ended up being cherry-sized.

I even had to buy a couple of kilos to produce the year’s supply of tomato chutney. Neither us nor our friends, can live without the all-time famed Anna & Richard’s Tomato Chutney. (Recipe not forth-coming – you can have anything else, just not my tomato chutney recipe. It’s the sauce of my popularity. I shall not share!)

We’ve made a gallant effort with our bite-sized crop but I’m fed up with the rest and I’ve been jarring them. Here’s how. Bottled cherry tomato recipe after the jump…

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As yet unidentified evil bean-sucking bugLast December I noticed a lot of what looked like little black ladybugs on my beans. I did lots of research, asked lots of questions but without handy visual references I couldn’t work out what they were. Dear internet content people, please supply more pictures! (Are there any entomologists out there who can please tell me exactly what this thing is?)

Anyway, they had seemed pretty harmless in their small little shiny baby form – until they monstrously transformed into life-sucking bean-devouring plagues of evil. Garlic spray by this time was incapable of warding off their vampiric tendencies and my carefully arranged companion plants just kind of shrugged their shoulders and like insolent teenagers proclaimed “Whateva, I’m not bovvered!” I’ve never wanted to smack a marigold around before, but it needed a wake-up clip.

Advice on how to organically deal to shield bugs and other such painful pests after the jump.
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