Back To Eden

Quite a few years ago when I was first learning about homesteading, I watched a film called "Back To Eden". It's about this bloke who uses wood chips to cover his orchard. The wood chips eventually break down leaving a beautiful black soil, full of nutrients, that facilitates excellent plant growth.

This "Back To Eden" gardening method is essentially mimicking what happens in a forest. Branches and leaves fall to the ground, eventually break down and turn into soil. This mimicking of the forest is an excellent way to bring poor soil up to scratch in a relatively short time period (12-24 months). It is a fairly common practice within permaculture design as well.

We had about 12 trees/shrubs in the front yard that served no purpose other than to threaten our house foundation with expanding roots and provide a small amount of privacy from the road.

They had to go.

Rather than chop them up and use them for firewood which was my first inkling, I decided to have them chipped and spread them out on our front lawn and turn it into a food forest.

The boys from Matthew Clements Tree Service's came around and had all 12 of them down and chipped in about 3 hours for $1150. They dumped the chips exactly where I asked them and cut the stumps right to the ground, nice and flat. I had a pleasant experience with them and the price was great so I'd recommend them if you're around Hobart.

The next task was for me to spread the mulch over the ground. Typically when using this method, you lay cardboard down on the ground and put the chips on top of the cardboard. The cardboard acts as a barrier to stop the grass growing through, but the soil here is so sandy and the grass is so weak, I decided to skip the cardboard but make the mulch layer about twice as thick. Time will tell if I need to give myself an uppercut for skipping the cardboard, but anything that's worth doing once is worth screwing up several times by cutting corners. My logic is that 12 inches of mulch is sufficient to block out sun and impede grass.

So as you can see in the photo above, when spread at about a 12 inch depth, a full truck load of mulch covers about a 10x10m section. I'll have to get about another 15-20 loads of mulch in so I can completely cover the lawn. I'm not yet sure how much it's going to cost per load of mulch, but hopefully I can work out a good deal with a few of the chippers in the area.

It looks a lot neater than the above photo as I've gone over it with a rake and leveled the piles of mulch. I used a decent sized wheel barrow and a utility shovel from Bunnings. I really recommend the Saxon brand of tools. They're dirt cheap ($10 for a shovel) and the quality is great. The handles are fiberglass and the metal is powder-coated steel. I spent about $100 buying all the garden tools I needed. Sure, they're probably not the best you can buy, but on a value for money basis, I don't think you can do any better. They're all stored out of the weather so hopefully they'll last me a while. I'll do an update if they start to fail on me.

With the trees gone, the front yard looks huge and you can get a nice view all the way down to the back of our 5 acres. I plan on planting some sort of living fence along the existing wooden fence at the front along the road. I've had various thoughts like a grape vine, passion fruit, raspberry canes etc. That is something I will need to investigate further.

I'm looking forward to not having to mow the lawn. Lawns are such a waste of resources. Sure, the green is nice, but all the petrol for the mower, the noise, the water, all for no return. A food forest on the other hand, no lawns to mow, chop and drop pruning, bountiful harvests, rich soil, water retention, sustainability. It just makes sense.

Sure, its hard work. Don't let anyone tell you its not. I don't know how many wheelbarrow loads I'm up to. Would be over 50 I'd think. The back is a little sore and the hands have a few blisters, but I slept like a baby and I can picture all my fruit trees, my delicious veggies, a pesky possum giving me the finger as he devours my last transplant. All these things I look forward to.

At the moment I'm mowing the lawn with a Victa running a Briggs and Stratton 550 series. It does the job pretty well. It hadn't been used in 3 years as I bought it from a friend. I put petrol in it and it started first pull.

To end this post, I'll introduce the other family members. Above is "Squishy". Below is "Senna". They were adopted from 10 Lives Cat Centre in New Town. They charge $220 a cat which is a lot more than the $60 it takes to microchip and de-sex, but they've got bills to pay and they do our native fauna a favor by keeping cats out of the bush so I'm happy to pay it. We had a little bit of trouble when we brought them both home. Senna kept bailing squishy up and attacking her. I went back to 10 Lives and they sold me this stuff called "Feliway". At first I thought they'd just convinced me to buy an overpriced water diffuser, but after about an hour of it plugged in and turned on, Senna jumped up into my lap and suddenly wanted to be patted. She was a completely different cat. Apparently the Feliway is some sort of cat hormone or something that calms them down. Don't really care what it is to be honest, I just care that it works. She hasn't bailed up squish since we started using it.

Oh, I nearly forgot. We have a wild Raspberry patch growing beside the shed. I have no idea how it has thrived so well with the grass that is there, but it's self seeding and spreading really well. I've had to go out every day to pick the berries as there are so many.

I harvested a whole lunchbox full in about 20 minutes. Being able to get such tasty food, free from chemicals, literally at the back door of my house gives me a sense of satisfaction that I've never felt before.

I can't eat them all so the missus has been making me Raspberry cordial. She just squishes them up, adds water and a stevia tablet for a bit more sweetness and its tastier than anything you can buy in the store. I'm keeping the seeds so I can plant out seedlings. Hopefully sell them if I can get them to grow.

Anyway that will do it for today's post. I'm off to build the worm farm. Stay tuned.

Cheers,
Tom