Today, I want you to meet one of my gardening mentors.
Kendrick Riley's the one I turn to the most
when it comes to the millions of questions I have
about growing vegies.
Kendrick, it's looking amazing. Thank you.
We've gone through our trials and tribulations, last year,
with the weather, haven't we?
Yes, it took a good while to get over the drought.
I love coming up here to visit Kendrick.
Set on 4 hectares, in the Jiggi Valley,
about 1.5 hours inland from Byron Bay,
much of the property is set aside as land for wildlife.
But Kendrick and his partner Maree have found plenty of space
to nurture a lush market garden of vegetables and flowers
for the local farmers markets.
We've started putting some garlic in.
We've got a little bit of kale that's gone in here.
All the green manure crops here, ready to prep new beds.
A really good row of sorrel. that's just looking so bountiful.
Oh, lemon sorrel's a nice, tough plant. It will always do well.
And, of course, people at the market love it, too.
The way we operate is pretty much
like a lot of people would with their own backyard,
except on a slightly bigger scale.
How is the farm set out here?
I guess we rely on a lot of diversity -
diversity in the number of crops we grow -
we'd probably grow about 80 or 85 different herbs and vegie crops
over the year.
The best way to confuse pests
is to not give them a great big patch of one thing to eat,
It's to mix it all up.
But then there's plenty of country that we just leave go to pasture,
so that you leave all your wild animals and your insects,
you beneficials, particularly,
room for them to be able to live in.
And then around that, we've planted a lot of forest as well.
And that also provides a windbreak.
It provides a habitat for birds and other insects
and just makes the place look pretty as well.
It is very pretty. Yeah.
You've got to enjoy where you're working.
When you got to this land, what had it been previously?
This basically was an old cow paddock.
It's old dairy country
that had then been converted into running cattle.
And it had been knocked around a fair bit.
So as a result, a lot of the soil here was heavily compacted.
And it wasn't really until we put a deep ripper into our soil
and broke up all that hard pan,
and then started to plough the soil and to plant green manure crops
that we could then reincorporate back into the soil
to add carbon and nitrogen into the soil -
once we got onto that process,
all of a sudden the country started to respond really quickly.
And at the same time, we found
all of our plants were starting to grow really well.
I find immense inspiration from Kenrick,
by the work he's done on his soil,
because that's where it starts - right in the soil.
All we're doing here, now, is raking up all of that green manure material
that I chopped up with a brush cutter,
plus anything that was growing in the pathway,
which is old grass, weeds, leftover crop - the whole lot.
It all gets raked up now onto the bed.
And we'll run over that with the tractor,
and that's all going to be ploughed back in.
For a gardener at home,
any pea crop, and bean crop - any legume crop, really -
will do exactly the same thing.
And, really, you could probably take a crop of peas and beans off that,
and then chop it up and dig it back into the soil
just with your garden fork.
This row is a good example of soil that's just had a green manure crop
that was growing in it for two or three months ploughed back in.
And all that carbon and all that nitrogen
goes back down into the soil
and is making for a nice, fertile, growing medium
for the next crop that comes along.
It's better than gold. It is, in a way.
It used to be grey, this soil. It's now gone nice and black.
It's friable. So if it gets really wet here, the water will drain away.
But by the same token, if it gets really dry,
there's enough organic matter and carbon in the soil now
that it will hold a lot of moisture here,
which will keep your old, established plants growing.
We harvest all of our own mulch off our own paddocks.
Now there's a diversity just even in the mulch that we bring in,
because that mulch is coming off paddocks
that have got a mixture of old dairy farm pasture,
but also a lot of weed and everything else.
It all gets mixed in.
I put our mulch on really, really thick.
We have the luxury of a machine that can bring in a lot of mulch,
but it would be the same if I was gardening still in the city.
I mean, it's best to have a lot of mulch there
because it retains the moisture, it stops all the weeds.
It's working for you while you're away doing something else.
Kenrick, these permanent beds are just so wonderful.
Tell me about the diversity that you've got growing here.
Well, young rocket crop here.
We'll start picking off that in a week or two.
Some young coriander coming in the far bed.
What we do for a lot of our crops,
like these guys, the perennial spinach here,
like this little guy here.
That little one, there was perennial spinach
growing in this bed last year.
So that's our seed bank, really.
We come and dig these out of the ground
and pop them in over here,
and they become then our main crop.
Those plants that germinate themselves,
like the perennial spinach,
they've already done, if you like,
one season of adapting to a hotter climate,
to more extremes.
So by taking those ones and using them straightaway
means that you've got a plant that's already started to adapt itself
to whatever this year's going to bring.
And you didn't have to do the extra work of sowing the seed trays.
No, no. It's one big nursery.
These have got to be one of my favourite greens.
Me too.
Collard greens, we've been selling at the market for a good while now
because they're high in calcium and magnesium,
but they taste like a sweet kale.
And also they give us a car-like plant
that will grow through summer.
It's a semi-perennial.
In these soils, we've found that
they'll go on for 18 months, maybe up to two years.
And they're easy to propagate. That's your young crop here.
Now, this is the original crop,
and we're just about past the stage of being picked off too much now.
But they've already started to put up side-shoots.
And this is what we're going to grow the next crop off.
You just break off that little side shoot,
chop off some of the top, and then just pop him in.
And in about a month's time, we'll be picking off that.
As easy as that. Yeah.
It's a great crop, from that point of view.
Kenrick, what do you love about what you do here?
Oh, I guess, really,
it's the opportunity to nurture a piece of land, really.
I mean, we feed ourselves.
We feed a bunch of other customers at the markets as well,
which is nice.
Whether you're farming or gardening,
I think is to is to create a nice environment
that's going to be good for humans and for animals.
And protect it.