(MILLIE) This little garden belongs to Kat Lavers.
Kat is a permaculture designer and educator,
and she's been cultivating this
pocket-sized patch for the last ten years.
Kat how big is this garden?
The whole block is a 14th of an acre or 280 square meters
but the area that we're standing in where most of the food is coming from
is around 12 x 8 meters.
This is an amazingly abundant little garden. What was here when you first started?
It was a really typical suburban garden.
A rundown house, a garden that was overgrown.
There was a lawn that was barely alive.
and really, really poor quality soil.
You tested the soil when you got here?
Yeah, we tested it for lead and found that we did
have a lead contamination problem, which is common
throughout most areas where humans have settled.
So how did you go about designing a garden full of food on contaminated soil?
Well one of the most important steps that we've done
is use the raised vegetable beds. Obviously when we're eating
that much produce, it's really important. So we have clean soil
that has been brought in for those.
We also know that lead
doesn't generally transfer into fruits...
So this beautiful blood plum behind us is totally safe to eat from.
Kat rotates crops across three main garden beds
which had been carefully designed.
To make things easy, they're the same size, just over 1 meter x 3 meters, which
means she can rotate crops and easily move infrastructure -
like the trellis system - from bed to bed.
The beds that are the same size are quite an important step for us.
As really productive food gardeners
we have a planting design and I found initially
when I had beds of different shapes and sizes it was so complicated
working out how many of what plant to fit in what position in the bed the next year.
These days we have more like a script for planting.
We know how many tomatoes we need.
We know where we're going to put them in the bed.
Next year, we just pick the trellis up
and we move it to the bed over and then we start the process again.
What were the first things you put in the ground?
The trees went in pretty soon.
And it doesn't look like you're afraid of secateurs
when it comes to your fruit trees?
No, that's right, they do need to be quite tightly pruned to fit in a garden like this.
In a small garden where you're producing for a kitchen,
it's really important that we have fruit ripening all year round
rather than one big tree that crops all at once.
So we keep our fruit trees deliberately pruned quite small
so that we can have more diversity of fruit throughout the year.
Kat, you're a big believer in the easy plants aren't you?
I sure am Millie! So one of my favorites is the wild rocket.
Wild rocket, which is a different variety to the
standard rocket seed that's usually offered to gardeners.
This variety is perennial and it's also self-seeding.
In fact, in some areas it's a weed, which is important that people know.
This is an incredible plant for home food gardeners
that's drought-hardy, crops nearly all year round and you can even cut
it to the ground and it will keep re-shooting for several years.
We actually do a lot of chop and drop here so we don't
haul a lot of material away to a compost.
We don't even have room for a larger compost system here
so much of the composting actually happens in-situ
just by chopping the branches and leaving
them on the ground underneath the plant.
So every productive garden has a couple of chooks right?
In Kat's case, she's had to think small and her flock of quails
have proven a fantastic alternative for a small space garden.
So how did you get the idea to keep quail?
Yeah well this is a really small urban block and so space is always
going to be a constraint for us, but particularly because we've
had leaded soil contamination issues and we need to make sure
that we didn't have birds free ranging in the existing soil.
So the area that we're sitting on at the moment has got a concrete base.
And it's also got laser light above us, so it's stopping
flaking paint coming from the neighbors roof from above and
it's stopping the quails getting into the original soil below.
So this is just like a deep litter of mulch or something?
Exactly that's right. It's actually a compost system
in progress that were on at the moment, and the beauty of the
deep litter system is that we never have to clean out this run, ever.
We just harvest it as compost for the veggie patch
after the materials of broken down. It's also really fantastic
for the birds, as you can see they're really interested in the litter.
A quail's reason to get up in the morning is to scratch around looking for bugs
And particularly for animals that
are kept in small urban areas, it's really essential for their
health that they're in a stimulating environment
that also engages them in a way that allows them to be quails.
So you're giving them lots of greens to eat
and other things in the environment?
Yeah that's right. So we give them a basic chook layer pellet
as a ration, but we try really hard to get them away from that as
much as possible, so we give them lots of greens, and weeds
from our garden. We harvest earwigs for them. We give them
worms from time to time. So yeah as many live healthy foods that
we can produce ourselves as possible.
And... and the odd bath?
That's right, the dust baths are really important. They love it, of course. So it's really important
that the animals and have as little stress as possible and you can
see how much they enjoy dust bathing!
It's also really healthy for them.
Dust bathing is a way that birds reduce lice and mites
and so it's a good preventative health measure
that's really easy for us to take.
And what about the eggs?
Are they as delicious as a chicken's egg?
Yeah, well, I've got some of the eggs here Millie. - Oh wow!
So the eggs are beautiful
they, I think... you know... they taste almost identical to a chicken egg.
You need about four or five of them to equal the volume and
one of the amazing things about the eggs is that each quail hen
has got her own unique shape and size and pattern.
So if I take these two eggs,
you can see they were probably laid by different hens
but if I took those ones,
you could see the matching patterns there
So it could be from the same hen.
They are absolutely beautiful and I mean...
an amazingly, productive use of this little space.
A small space isn't a barrier to a great garden,
but this one also shows
that if you work out what you've got to work with
and then apply some clever design,
you can also have one that is
diverse and beautiful
and efficient and productive
that makes use of every inch.
There are so many ideas to inspire your place here.
I bet this one's got you thinking.