Visiting a homestead designed around permaculture principles | Garden Design | Gardening Australia

Hannah visits a couple who moved to Tassie to set up their dream homestead. Subscribe 🔔 http://ab.co/GA-subscribe
Nick Ritar and Kirsten Bradley featured on Gardening Australia in 2020 when they were living on Melliodora, the showpiece property set up by permaculture guru David Holmgren.

Nick explains permaculture as a way of reconnecting with ‘place’; where your food and water comes from and where your waste products go, and the ecosystem around you.

The principles of permaculture are reflected in the layout of their garden, maximizing the benefits of sunlight and small microclimates, and planning the layout to benefit each individual component.

Kirsten points out the flow from the sunny perennial border and rockery down the slope to productive vegetable beds, fruit trees, a pond and chicken house.

While it looks flowing and organic, it is very carefully planned. Nick says finding flat areas down the slope helped them divide the space up in a logical way.

There are huge rocks sourced from nearby that helped create steps down the block as well as creating habitat and providing thermal mass.

The seven vegie beds are all the same size so infrastructure such as irrigation and shade structures fit on all of them. They also use a lot of temporary trellising that can be moved around to provide a quick crop of snow peas or beans then removed to allow more light onto slower-growing crops. Having so many beds allows easy crop rotation, too, so one bed can always be under green manure.

Berries are grown on an arbour, with an understorey of herbs and ornamentals.

There’s a small edible forest garden too, with fruit trees, ground covers and mid-storey plants that offer food for the household as well as feeding insects, birds, and the soil.

Filmed in Cygnet, Tas.

Featured plants:
Carrot (Daucus carota cv.)
Snow pea (Lathyrus oleraceus cv.)
Raspberry (Rubus cv.)
Mint (Mentha cv.)
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[Music] this is Signet a beautiful town in the huan valley around an hour from Hobart I’m visiting some friends who a few years back made the big move to tazzy to set up their own place I had a hand in the design of the garden but Nick and kirson had a very clear idea of what they wanted and have made it completely and productively their own I love the relationship between me and the plants and the soil and understanding that I can have a meaningful relationship with the other parts of my ecosystem it makes me feel happy to be [Music] alive Nick and Kon have already appeared on gardening Australia back when they lived and worked on meladora the Victorian property owned by David hram one of the co- Originators of permaculture so what is permaculture permaculture is a way of reconnecting with Place connecting with where your food comes from where your water comes from where your waste products go um really connecting fundamentally with the ecosystem around you these fundamental permaculture principles are reflected in the layout of the garden because it’s north facing we have this section is the biggest microclimate it’s the sun catcher we’ve got Citrus against that wall we’ve got perennials catching the sun with all the these rockeries then it’s down into intensive annual garden and then Berry Arbor and then below that is the perennial fruit trees and more perennial gardens and a pond and chicken house it looks quite organic and flowing but it’s actually quite structured yeah I think that the the slope lends itself to that we we try to create these sort of flat areas and that means that you end up dividing the space up because it is a backyard not a farm and having come from farming to us the veggie garden being two steps down makes all the sense in the world so you’ve got sort of outdoor living first then intensive veggies then fruit trees it’s hard to miss the number of large rocks that have been used in the garden design they provide all this strength they provide all this thermal Mass which is so important in this kind of climate they’re absolutely just gorgeous objects that was a little bit of a a challenge to find a material that was both local and abundant and this rock came from just down the road and it allows us to really step the landscape down and provide all this amazing habitat and thermal Mass it’s a good point isn’t it it’s not just about plants it’s about all those little critters that live in those nooks and crannies and just loving life because they’re there there’s so many in insects that are borrowing in there now and so many lizards and you know a few rats at one point but I think we’ve seen them off that’s what guys to keep to keep those at [Music] Bay I reckon no Garden is complete without a veggie patch and this is a beauty I’m pretty proud of it actually it’s we’ve got like seven of these main beds here and each one I’m I’m a bit of a stickler for maths and things exactly 5 square meters in each bed they’re all nice and regular so we can swap the irrigation over or bits of shade cloth or little hoop houses to protect things from Bugs and light that’s great and I love that you got carrots but you got something else in here as well yes got leaks in between and then we’ve got a quick crop of missa in the middle and this is just salads just to keep us going in the meantime till everything else gets up and a half bed of green manure to regenerate that bed for next season in between the beds all our paths are really deep combination of wood chip and local sawdust because it gets a bit squelchy here after a bit of rain like we’ve had and it’s nice to have it not too muddy this bed we’ve got our brassas down each side but in the meantime we planted this really quick crop of snow peas to like just pop up and get a few snow peas off but they’ll stop flowering really soon once the temperature drops and at that point we’ll cut and pull out the snow peas and give a lot more light and space to the brassas do a bunch of this sort of temporary trellising and move them around from bed to bed depending on what we’re doing and it’s a really this one in particular is a really striking example of stacking your plants it’s very close proximity yeah in space and in time get six months out of the bed part of the crop rotation is giving things a rest as well so like in this bed we’ve got just a green manure few marag Golds sort of surviving but this will uh rejuvenate it so it’s ready for planting we made this compost about 3 months ago so it’s resting now we really like making our own compost here so Nick there’s so many different types of composting what type is this one yeah so this is a hot compost a thermophilic compost so that involved us making a big pile like a big more than a cubic meter pile with a lot of manure and and veggie scraps and it got really hot but that means it needs turning so you get a workout and it’s good to have a good sort of compost Fork like this so that took a couple of months of us turning it kind of once a week or so to keep it from getting too hot and killing everything but now it’s settled right down it’s dropped back down to you know right now it’s like 20° which is about the average temperature here sometimes people think it’s the sun that’s heating up the compost but it’s actually all that biology isn’t it yeah it’s just like us when we work hard uh we we we get hot and those Critters are working hard all that bacteria is working hard to break down the yummy goodness in the scraps and that generates a lot of heat [Music] yeah so this is our berry ARA it’s got a whole lot of different varieties of berries all the way along and then it’s got summer raspberries on that side and Autumn raspberries on that side in between these trailing Bramble berries yeah and you’ve also got a pretty strong understory plants as well what’s happening there yeah so we’ve got this bed is quite wet so we have a whole lot of different varieties of mint on that side and just beautiful flowers to be beautiful and wonderful on this side very important job it’s very important job be [Music] beautiful I’m loving the way your young edible forest garden is coming along with so many different layers yeah it’s great isn’t it like we’ve got this under story of flowering plants down low and ground covers and then sort of a mid story and then the over story of the fruit trees it’s all nice and stable doesn’t require too much work and we’ve made sure that all the trees here are on dwarf root stock so that yeah we can keep the trees sizes compact which makes it a lot easier to harvest and a lot easier to net them for bird pressure as well so and let a little bit more light through and air through for the underst story down here in this climate it’s important because it’s you know it’s a bit wetter and a bit cooler yeah and edible forest garden is also sometimes called a food forest and obviously we provides food for us but does other functions as well yeah yeah everyone that lives in this Garden is having a great time in terms of all the insects and the pollinators and the lizards the worms and then all the soil food web everything everything that’s happening underneath the surface we’re trying to feed everyone that lives in this [Music] Garden so welcome to our Chicken Palace pretty Specky yeah yeah it’s all made out of recycled found bits and pieces Harvest rain water off the roof yeah yeah rain water comes off the roof into that gutter into this chicken water barrel and then there’s that chicken nipple water pecky things which yeah they really like using keeps all the water really clean and we never have to wonder if they’ve got enough water gooded and the roof keeps this area nice and dry underneath for where their feet is and it’s got this um clear bit so that lots of light can come in to wake them up early in the morning in the winter it’s a very gourm chicken house and the sladed floor means that all the manure just falls through and it goes down onto this bit of slope recycled plastic here and then just when we hit the plastic all the manure falls down this Gutter and we can scrape it out into the bucket it’s nice and simple it looks really fun it’s amazing how much Nick and Kiren have achieved in just a couple of years but really they’re just beginning their latest Garden adventure with lots more still to do there’s a whole Lott ones yeah yeah yeah you’re allowed to take them out that’s all right do you enjoy gardening together I think we enjoy creating Gardens together I think we quite often need to sort of split up the tasks we’ve learned ways to delegate to each other and find our own Niche I think in each thing we do it’s very collaborative yeah oh for [Music] sure