Inspiring Woman Growing a Huge Amount of Food in Her City Permaculture Garden

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 plumbery 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 Plumbery, which is a typical, quite small suburban block on Wurundjeri Country, about six kilometres from the centre of Melbourne, Australia. I live here with my partner Danny and also very regular woofers, people who come and stay with us and learn in exchange for board and food. The block is 280 square metres, which includes the house and some quite large areas that are not currently producing food. The food producing area is about 100 square metres, so a 10 by 10 metre square. In 2018 we harvested 428 kilos of herbs, vegetables, fruit and eggs from this small space. That amount of production has been enough to supply our 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 and when we first arrived it was a very run down 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 neighbours 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 and we're aiming to have most of our diet coming from either this household or within our bioregion. 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, slaving away in the garden to produce a little bowl of tomatoes but it's just not the case at all. In fact we think that we spend about four 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 prioritise that in your own life. So lots of people tell me, oh this is 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 to start really small. Start with a square metre, 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 minimises the packaging, the transport, all 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.