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No one tends the bush - yet it survives much better than cultivated plantations (except when humans interfere). All a garden needs is to be planted, fed occasionally and enjoyed. This books shows you how. Australians inherited their gardening traditions from last century Europe. It's a tradition of neat, dug gardens, fanatical elimination of weeds and preferably 20 gardeners to do all the work. Most of the work we do in our gardens is unnecessary. It's also bad for the gardens. Digging is backbreaking - it also breaks down the soil strcuture so you get hard clumps, kills earthworms, soil bacteria, mycohorriza and other useful soil life. You don't have to dig your garden- just use one of the non dig methods in chapter 1. You don't have to weed your garden either- learn to live with your weeds instead. (see chapter 2). You don't have to water your garden every afternoon after work, or run up a bill for excess water (chapter3). You don't have to buy expensive and polluting pesticides - most pest control is unnecessary, as well as dangerous. You can become a hunter gatherer in your backyard, harvesting your perennial lettuce and silverbeet and brocolli year after year, without the effort of spring planting. Some people like digging, weeding and cutting neat edges (we all have our own areas of masochism.) This is a book for people who would rather enjoy their garden and its produce than sweat in the dust and sun. Gardens shouldn't be hard work - they should be fun. Rethinking Gardening Our garden is different. It's about 2 acres, and gets about an hour's work a week. This includes lawn mowing. Yet it provides most of our vegetables, nearly all our fruit, enough flowers to pick an armful every day - and also supports two wombats, the occasional wallaby, at least seven snakes, countless lizards, frogs and small animals and over a hundred species of birds. Everything grows together. Pumpkins climb up the avocado trees, strawberries ramble under the kiwifruit and limes, chokoes wander in the oranges, daisies poke through the lemon branches and there are wild parsnips and carrots and parsley coming up in the drive. It's a mess. But it works. Our place is surrounded by bush. That's where I learnt to garden. The wild fruit trees and vines on the hills above us don't need pruning or fertilising - but go on fruiting just the same. The birds eat some of them but there's still plenty for us. Weeds grow along the banks of the creek and in the paddocks where the soil is overgrazed or disturbed - but usually not in the untouched bush. The bush above us isn't separated into flower areas and grass areas and tree and vegetables. (There are wild vegetables there - you just need to know what to look for). It is a single entity - enormous complexity that functions as a whole. I've tried to pattern my garden after the bush. There are no bare spaces, neatly dug - bare ground means weeds. The trees and shrubs are planted close together - they grow tall to reach the light; the birds eat the top fruit and I get the rest, hidden from the birds in the tangled branches. I rarely prune, except to hack back the growth - the fruit is small if you don't prune but you get more of it. It's better for the tree too. Things get cut back thoughout the year not just in winter, planted throughout the year - not just in spring, the traditional planting time. Crops planted in spring get soft and sappy and are vulnerable to pests - pests breed up in spring, but the predators that eat them - and do your pest control for you - don't breed up till it gets warmer. Plant later and you won't get so many pests. Unfortunately we inherited our spring planting ideas from Europe - where you need to plant early to get a harvest. We don't here. We don't need bare soil between the rows either to maximise sunlight - our plants are better closely planted to maximise leaf cover to keep in moisture and built up carbon dioxide and keep down rampant weeds. It's time we started working out Australian ways to grow things. Australian gardens needn't follow the European pattern. Let your vegetables wander under the shrubs - most will take some patchy shade. Grow flowers with your trees and your vegetables - they'll attract predators to keep down pests, but they're also fun. Have a lawn if you must - but remember that lawns needn't be grass, needn't be mowed - and can still be rolled on by kids and dogs and host the barbecue on Sunday afternoons. |
The Wilderness Garden (Aird Books 1993): a radical new view of Australian growing methods $16.95 Australian.