How to start a permaculture garden

This suburban Sydney garden has been transformed into a thriving permaculture garden in just three years. Photo: Phil Aynsley

With so many of us growing our own herbs and vegies, our gardens are becoming the new produce stores. But take it one step further and you can enter the realm of backyard farming, where fruits, vegetables and herbs might mix in with a few chickens, each working in harmony with the other as part of a self-supporting productive system. Welcome to the wonderful world of permaculture!

Permaculture in action

Permaculture is an eco-friendly food production system. It’s all about working with Mother Nature, and it’s possible in any sized space, including an average backyard. This garden in Sydney’s suburbs is living proof of the theory in practice. The owner, Selena Griffiths, harvests and eats from her urban plot just as if she lived on a country farm. The diversity of produce is fabulous, from all sorts of vegetables and herbs, to grapes, bananas, citrus, coffee, native tamarinds, eggs, honey and lots more. What’s even more impressive is that once set up correctly, it’s as low maintenance as it gets, as the garden is never watered (really!). And equally impressive is how quickly this self-sufficient plot came together – it’s only three years old!

Chickens are beneficial to the system as they recycle waste food, dig up weeds, fertilise the soil and reduce grub populations. Photo: Phil Aynsley

How do I do it?

There are a few key features that characterise the design of a permaculture garden. Here’s what you need to know.

• Zones break the garden into different areas based on how near or far they are from the house. Zone 1 is the area immediately outside the back door – here you grow the herbs and leafy greens you’ll need close by when you’re cooking. As you move further into the garden, you enter zones 2, 3, 4 and so on, featuring the plants you harvest less often (fruit trees, etc). Right up the back of the garden is the zone reserved for compost bins, rainwater tanks and poultry enclosures.

• Mixed plantings benefit the permaculture garden over rows of lettuce or tomatoes. Mixing up vegetables and herbs reduces the damage pests can cause by disrupting their preferred food sources, along with ensuring the soil’s nutrients are being used in as balanced a way as possible. For example, a mass planting of lettuce will tend to draw out all the nitrogen, but a mixed planting will use a lesser volume of a greater range of nutrients, so the soil doesn’t become depleted.

• Water is an obvious component, but a permaculture garden needs a body of it, such as a garden pond. This ties in with its basic principle of imitating Mother Nature, as the most productive natural environments are always near rivers or streams. The pond supports aquatic plants (including edible varieties, like water chestnuts) and it provides a habitat for beneficial insects and animals like frogs, which eat garden bugs.

• Flowering plants are just as important as edible plants. In featuring pockets of flowering plants (both native and exotic), permaculture gardens have the capacity to attract birds, bees and other insects in order to pollinate crops. Birds also play a vital role in preying on caterpillars and other pests.

• Other elements will vary depending on the space available, but there are numerous ways you can improve your permaculture garden – compost bins, worm farms, rainwater tanks, and insect habitats such as native bee hives. Chickens offer numerous benefits to the system: they recycle waste food, dig up weeds, fertilise the soil and reduce grub populations. This type of garden production system requires minimal chemical use.

Self-watering garden

One of the most intriguing features of this garden is the way it is set up to irrigate itself. Two large water tanks have been installed at the top of the sloping yard, fed from the house roof. When full, the tanks overflow into a 16m-long gravel-filled channel that runs across the top end of the slope. This captured water slowly soaks into the soil, distributing itself through the garden, just as it happens in the natural bushland.

This clever garden design basically waters itself. Photo: Phil Aynsley

For you to know

Permaculture was developed in the 1980s by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren. The word is a hybrid of ‘permanent agriculture’.