Hi.
Here we go, Q&A number five.
And I'm in the kitchen garden
amongst the Papayas and a few other things.
So, we're going to use the landscape
as a reference here and I've got the manual
because I've got a pattern question or two
I'm going to answer from the manual itself.
Our first question comes from Kyle.
A question in relation to incremental design
and the settling of properties that have been disturbed.
Is it best to leave it all alone?
Would it be beneficial to only co-create
in the more open areas?
Is it ethical to live in the area that was once
inhabited but now has forest encroaching?
Well if we were to leave it all alone
everything would eventually re-forest.
It would just take a matter of time,
it just depends how damaged it is.
In some ways it's definitely better to work with open area,
but if you're in an area that is being encroached by forest,
it has been left alone,
the quality of that forest is the important thing.
So, all of us have a break point somewhere,
we've got to decide where we draw that line.
So, for me in the subtropics here,
which I can reference to you.
Here,
if I'm looking at 20-year-old regrowth,
low quality forest, I don't mean rain forest,
I mean forest that's been 20 years
slowly recovering and it's not very high quality
because the landscape's been quite damaged,
that's about the limit for me.
To cut it down and replace it
with a higher functioning ecology
like dams and water bodies,
maybe even swale links through between the dams,
but if it gets much older than 20 years, for me,
and it's still not very high quality
then I wouldn't cut it down.
I think if it was just a few years old
and it was coming back as high quality rain forest
I wouldn't touch it.
Obviously, if a client comes to me
with just a few acres and it's all
high quality old-growth forest
and they want me to design a permaculture system
for full food self-sufficiency for a family,
my client just changed.
It's actually the natural system
and I'm going to ask the client,
I'm not going to ask the natural system,
I can demand that natural system is left alone,
and the client who wants the self-sufficient system,
I'm going to describe to them,
look, most of this has got to come down
for you to convert this to productive
permaculture designed ecosystem.
And that's not an ethical thing to do.
So, my client now is the natural system
and it's to convince the human client to not do this.
If they want to live in that old-growth forest,
a very, very small house with very little disturbance
or don't sell it to anybody that's going to cut it down,
only sell it to someone who's going to
not take the forest down.
Put a conservation order on it.
Go and buy land that is either very low quality regrowth,
not very old, or open country.
So, that's my view of it.
Now if we have a look at landscape
that has encroaching forest,
that initial successional stage
is actually quite valuable
because it's often not native plants
that do the initial recovery from damage,
it's the hard-working immigrants,
the non-natives, right?
The novel ecosystem usually assembles
the fertility to move towards
something of a native, novel combination of species.
And we tend to interfere with it
and get sentimental about native, endemic
and make a judgment call on it.
Nature doesn't work like that.
Nature's not sentimental.
Nature doesn't mind a more diverse, novel ecosystem
and everywhere on Earth is more diverse
and more novel than it's ever been
if you count the hard-working immigrants,
or what we call invasive species.
But if you look at the way the incremental change happens,
of damaged country towards open country,
there's a very interesting edge
that's very high quality
and we'll show you one of those in a minute,
but that's a soil assembly that we can work with.
We can adjust that to become the forest that we would prefer
and there's nothing wrong with that whatsoever.
So, here we have succession in action.
True hard-working immigrants.
The Lantana is not native.
There are many rain forest trees in the canopy
coming through the hard-working immigrant species.
Now, if we just step back and let it happen
it's going to come right across this pasture.
That's our choice.
But we can look at that, we can go inside there,
and we can have a look at the species
and how it actually works to convert pasture to forest.
But we might want the pasture,
or we might want it in productive trees.
This is the edge that closes off the light
into the forest floor,
but it extends the forest outwards.
At this stage we can choose, it's up to us now.
If you leave it alone succession will happen.
It's very interesting to actually crash in there
and actually have a look at the soil.
So, if you actually go into this,
like this.
You have to sort of fall into it a bit.
That's the way to deal with Lantana,
just fall on top of it.
And don't get scratched too much.
Come on in and have a look.
I didn't fall in very far, it was just to body length.
Look.
There, there, just a thin layer.
Look at that, look at that.
That's pretty good.
Look, look, look at that, all those leaves it's caught.
Look, all the little birds come here and poop,
lots of animals live in here and die and add to that.
That's pretty good soil.
That's pretty good soil there.
That's what it's doing.
It's preparing the soil for forest.
And we can learn from that.
We can definitely learn from that
and we can speed up succession.
It's our choice to make that move,
nobody else's.