Humans have always connected to their landscape through food.
One of the things that's so concerning about the state that we're in at the
moment is so many people are losing that connection to the land.
So The Plummery has been an experiment in how can we regain that connection
to food in the city?
Is it possible to produce a meaningful amount of produce on a pretty
standard sized urban block?
I guess the answer is: Yes! It is absolutely possible.
My name is Kat Lavers, I live at a place called The Plummery, which is a typical
quite small suburban block on Wurundjeri country about six kilometers from
the center of Melbourne, Australia.
I live here with my partner Danny and also very regular WWOOFers,
people who come and stay with us and learn in exchange for board and food.
The block is 280 square meters, which includes the house and some
quite large areas that are not currently producing food.
The food-producing area is about a hundred square meters, so a 10x10 meter square.
In 2018 we harvested 428 kilos of
herbs, vegetables, fruits, and eggs from this small space.
That amount of production has been enough to supply two adults and regular guests
with almost all of our fresh produce, not just in summer but in the entire year.
I've been on the site for 10 years.
When we first arrived it was a very rundown house,
the garden was full of ornamental plants,
it had lots of lawn,
so we had a lot of work to do.
We've used a process called permaculture design to
really get the most out of the space that we're living in.
We've taken the time to observe the site, think about all the different seasonal
implications of where we are, think about our own needs as humans,
and how to really make the site as elegant a design as possible so that
we get more out than we put in, in terms of our effort and time.
I've tried to work out what's the optimum arrangement of vegetables to
plant together in each bed so that they are all producing well and not competing with each other.
So we do plant really densely and we have a tight rotation system.
We keep our quails in an aviary where they have concrete paving underneath and
then a layer of mulch that becomes compost over time, something
called a deep litter system.
Quail are also really quiet animals, which is a
huge advantage in small city blocks where you've got neighbors close by.
And most importantly for me this is a really really ethical solution where the quail
have got something to scratch around in looking for bugs.
For me it's really important if I am
going to eat animal products that those animals have the best
life that we can possibly give them.
So we're not self-sufficient and we're not really aiming to be self-sufficient
here, what we are aiming for is community dependence.
We're aiming to have most of our diet coming
from either this household or within our bio region.
So of course we're not self-sufficient in things like grain and dairy and oil, so
we aim to source those from producers that are as local as possible and people
that are managing land in a way that is consistent with having a future.
My main income comes from working for a local council in Melbourne's West
running a program that teaches people about organic gardening and permaculture.
I'm also a freelance permaculture teacher designer, educator, facilitator.
Many people when I explain how much food we're growing here think we must be
full-time farmers, you know, slaving away in the garden to produce a little bowl
of tomatoes, but it's just not the case at all and in fact we think that we
spend about 4 hours a week on average to grow that amount of food, which is a lot
less than I expected it to be, to be honest.
What does take a lot of time is
setting up these systems, so implementing the design and also learning the skills
to grow food. Even then, that has all happened for us in the last five or six years.
It's actually quite achievable if you do want to prioritize that in your own life.
So lots of people tell me, 'Oh this so exciting, I wish I could do that at home
but I just don't know really where to start. I don't feel like I've got a lot
of time.' And so one of the best things you can do if you're getting started is
just start really small, start with a square meter; observe that, look after it.
You'll actually get more produce out of a smaller garden that you're managing and
tending well than you will out of a huge garden that runs away and that you
can't observe properly.
It's really important that we start to build a bit
more resilience into our cities and food is just one of the ways that we can
build a level of resilience from those larger systems.
We know we have sometimes got crises going on,
large floods, bushfires, let alone occasional economic instability.
In those times one of the things that becomes most critical, of
course, is access to fresh produce, and the city might never feed itself
completely in fresh produce but we can add a buffer, we can do something which
minimizes the packaging, the transport, the fuel use, the chemical use, all the
impact that comes along with conventionally produced foods.
And something that to be honest brings us great joy while we're doing it, as well.