Amazing Permaculture Garden in the City Grows an Abundance of Food!

Five years ago we visited Kat Lavers at her inner city permaculture property where she grows an abundance of food in her tiny backyard. In just 100 square meters of growing space Kat is able to produce up to 450 kilos of fruit and veggies each year. We're stoked that Kat welcomed us back to check out the property and see how things have changed since 2019. I just love being surrounded by green. There's this sense of having to keep up with all of the healthy produce that the garden is creating. It also just brings so much joy to look around and to see all the life that's flourishing here and to know that you're part of a food web and an ecosystem. You're just one creature amongst it all. You can't help but be completely awestruck by its complexity and its beauty and also fragility. We've been weighing our produce for the last 10 years or so and the highest we've sat at is around 450 kilos per year. Our diet is quite heavily biased towards greens because they're some of the easiest things to grow. So when you think about a 450 kilo total and a lot of that being leafy greens the volume of produce really boggles the mind. People always wonder what does 450 kilos of produce actually feel like and if I take the Australian dietary guidelines as a measure of how many serves of veggies we're supposed to eat and how many serves of fruit we're supposed to eat it turns out that at that level we'd be producing 92 percent of our vegetables for two people year round and 70 percent of fruit. And of course we're away from home sometimes we like to share meals with friends so we're doing pretty well here and it would also include 10 chicken eggs a week equivalent for the whole year. In 2005 I visited the sharehouse garden of my dear late friend Dan Palmer in the southeastern suburbs of Melbourne and it was such a light bulb moment for me. I was walking around this incredibly lush beautiful clever garden that I'd never seen anything like in the suburbs before and I just thought we need more examples of gardens that people can come and visit and really see what's possible in the urban context. The soil quality has really improved over time and if I scrape back some of this mulch you can see how alive that is with wriggling worms and got lots of springtails in here and the soil's really moist and beautiful and crumbly. When we cycle organic matter into soil it also adds significant water holding capacity it's like adding a sponge to your soil and what that means is that when the rains come it can actually hold on to them and that really improves drought resilience in plants. Life is arriving every year we've got new species showing up that I've never seen before and I think of the diversity that must just be slowly slowly climbing and the number of connections and predators and pests and other creatures that are arriving it just is so exciting. We're at the time of year where this bed is ready to be replanted with crops for the next season but I've got a problem because we have the most incredible St Andrew's cross spider that has just moved in and I haven't seen any spiders of this type before so it's really special and I really want to encourage her and hope that she has some babies. Spiders are so important ecologically because they tend to catch whatever there's most of in the environment so whenever we get a peak in population you know caterpillars or aphids things like that they'll just level off the top so they're a really nice balancing force in the ecosystem and of course they're also food for birds and other creatures themselves so I try really hard not to disrupt spiders and try and leave them wherever I can and this case I've also become quite attached to her so I'm wondering what I'm going to do now. Figuring out ways to protect people and animals from heat is a major challenge now for cities. We've taken particular care to notice the way the sun moves throughout the year and to design the landscape so that it can block it from the house in the summer to remove the heat load but also of course you need that sun in the winter otherwise the energy bills will go up so we've taken care that the sun can come in through maybe deciduous trees at that time of year as well. We have a grapevine on a north-facing pergola which is definitely a permaculture cliche but for all the right reasons it does such a perfect job of providing green leafy shaded canopy throughout the hot months of the year and also in the wintertime letting the sun come through and warm up the house at no cost. We also have some hazelnut trees down the side of the house that provide that coverage on the western wall keeping us cool through those hot afternoons. The cooling benefits are increased when the landscape is irrigated because of evapotranspiration so having this food producing landscape that is irrigated is adding a lot of extra assistance to keep us cool through the summer and you can really feel the temperature drop just when you step in from the road into this lush garden. I've completely fallen in love with earth building specifically light earth and earth plasters and we've worked on the studio the old shed out the back but more recently I've also put some into part of the house and adding these huge volumes of earth has meant we've got this thermal mass bank which is so good at stabilizing the temperature of the house. Thermal mass is like a battery and in winter it gets the sun on it and charges up and holds the heat and releases it slowly back into the room. In summer it's a cold battery so it keeps the house much more cool and stable through the hot summer days. When we repaired and rebuilt the bathroom at the plumbery the thing that I was actually most excited about was finally having access to some grey water. So the clothes washing machine here actually has a lever under the sink and I can send it to sewer if we need to but most of the time I send it down the back garden to our fruit trees. We do have to be really careful about the soap that we use to make sure that it doesn't damage the soil and we also try really hard to wear more natural fibers to make sure we're not contributing to microplastics pollution. We have made sure that there is a pelmet over all of our windows which is a box that prevents air from circulating behind the curtains and into the glass so that means that we don't get so much heating or cooling of the house throughout the year. Helmets are quite game changing and so are heavy curtains so if it's not possible to have double glazed windows they're definitely something I would recommend. There's a lot of problems in the world at the moment and it can be quite tempting to put your head down and garden. I don't want to give the impression that I think it's enough. I think it's so important that people are active politically really engaged with these bigger picture issues and contributing as best they can. The plumbery is imperfect and it's unfinished and I can see so many more opportunities here where we could optimize things a little bit more but the thing about sustainability is we need a lot of people having a go at it rather than a few people doing it perfectly and so my hope for the plumbery is that it can really prove the value of home food production systems and just encourage more people to have a go. One of the exciting things about living in a city is we just have so many resources close at hand. There's a lot of hard surfaces like roads and roofs that we can catch water off and direct it into crops. We've got huge amounts of waste streams that can be turned into compost and put back onto soil for local food production and we've also got a lot of people around that are really fun to hang out with and it's amazing to involve communities in these sorts of food producing projects. The urban landscape has so much potential that's unrecognized in cities. We can be growing food, we can be creating habitat for native plant and animal species, we can be protecting ourselves from extreme weather with cleverly designed landscapes. We can take those waste streams and water resources and really put them to good use and while doing that we can also help people feel better and save them money. So there's just so many different benefits that the garden can address. Let's do it, let's breathe this living abundance back into the city and make it this flourishing hub of life that it deserves to be. Thanks so much for watching this film everybody. We really hope you enjoyed this five year on revisit at the plumbery. If you'd like to hear more from Cat and learn a bit more about the property you can check out our page on Patreon where we've uploaded the full-length interview with Cat as well as some scenes that didn't make it into the final film. We've also got a bunch of other exclusive content up there like full-length interviews from past films and behind the scenes updates. So if this kind of thing is of interest to you we'd love to see you join our community over on Patreon. It's a great way to support these films and help us make more of them. Thanks again for watching and I'll see you in the next film.