Talk about food forests seem to be of growing interest this month as more people suddenly get excited about the possibilities of designing natural systems on their land that mimics how nature likes to build it’s forests.

But with a slight twist. Adding a variety of fruit trees into the mix to give you a veritable garden of Eden.

Wishful thinking?

Building a food forest that is not just populated with native tree species but has a multitude of fruit trees included to lock in food security for the owner.

Such systems are not new.

 Paradise Valley

A good example is Paradise Valley in Morocco that Geoff Lawton visited a number of times. Over 2,000 years old and still producing enough food for 800 farmers.

Treehugger recently discovered the concept and reported on Lawton’s youtube video that we at Ecofilms created and reported on when we featured it in our DVD Establishing a Food Forest.

Matt Kilby

The problem is that establishing a food forest doesn’t happen over night and will fail if the mechanics, the landscape, the framework to encourage suitable moisture and soil fertility isn’t properly planned.

Take a look at ABC’s recent report on Matt Kilby and his work on bringing Trees back to Life in southern NSW in Australia. Matt is putting in three kilometres of swales on pasture depleted soil that will eventually run a native corridor of trees, fruit and animal sanctuary system connecting forest and farms together.

This is the kind of thinking missing in action by governments.

Matt for many years has been a lone voice struggling to get his message across. He’s a bit like a modern day Johnny Appleseed character. He just gets on with it knowing that every tree is alive and every tree carefully planted will one day change the landscape.

But its not idyllic work.

Watch this video clip to see the effort required.

Terra-Forming a Garen of Eden

Swales are a kind of a ditch that needs to be perfectly level to trap water and soak it gradually into the soil where it will be used to naturally keep your plants alive.

Geoff Lawton in his Food Forest that he created

When you terra- form large sections of landscape you can’t depend on man to do the watering of plants for you.

Here we need to harness nature and cleverly design all the principles of Newtonian science to work in your favour. Geoff Lawton calls it “earth surgery” when you are working with heavy compacted soils due to poor pasture management.

Water will never run uphill – so understanding that law can make for creative possibilities when it comes to harvesting water.

Permaculture people like to rely on heavy machinery and an eye for reading the way the landscape rises and falls using dumpy levels to read the landscape. Capturing water runoff and directing it creatively is the secret.

Using natural biology – billions of bacteria to convert mulch into productive soil is what they do. Permaculture people are about actively building soil not depleting it. Imagine owning a farm that just gets better with age.

Is it possible?

Yes, but you need to be very selective and knowledge how you go about achieving the necessary ingredients. You need some species of trees to be the leaf mulch creators. You need some trees to be the canopy forming overstory to shade the smaller fragile fruit trees below. You also need nitrogen fixing trees – the sort of trees that produce these little white nitrogen nodules that build fertility into the subsoil. The mechanics is delicate but the results when you get it right – are spectacular.

What exactly are we talking about here? Nothing more than terra-forming barren, depleted, exhausted, trashed soils back into fertility. Can it be done? Yes. In the end what you score is a landscape rich in fertility, trees that moderate the climate, a habitat for an ecosystem and dare I say it – a Garden of Eden you can walk through. Such lofty dreams are worthwhile and give something back for future generations to enjoy. Wouldn’t you say?

Read about Establishing a Food Forest Here.

Most people when siting their house want to take advantage of the available commanding views. So you commonly see people positioning their homes on the highest point on their land. But that’s not necessarily the best place to site your home if you are into Permaculture and your aim is to get something for nothing. Free energy.

In this case, the owners aim was to harness the energy of gravity to water all her productive crops for free. Without pumps or any extra energy to move water where it was needed most – her food forest and vegetable garden.

Geoff Lawton points out the roof line and the food forest

We came across a great example whilst filming the Urban Permaculture DVD where the home was sited half way down the slope of the block – an ideal location to build your house.

The slope was a larger sized urban block located next to a busy arterial road.

The water tank was positioned at the top of the slope but slightly under the roof-line of the house guttering. This allowed all the rainwater to be stored some distance away from the house in the owners galvanized water tank. The overflow from the water tank spilled out to a slotted cross pipe buried just a few feet from the tank that irrigated the garden below.

Between the house and the tank was a mini swale system (on contour) and a food forest of large fruit trees. Closer to the house a series of vegetable garden beds soaked up any excess water that seeped down the slope under the heavily mulched garden beds.

“We’ve got a matrix of food forest species and plants intermixed in the garden.” said Permaculture teacher Geoff Lawton. ‘Smelly geraniums distracting pests, lavender, citrus, pepper tree, feijoa, into a garden pond hidden next to the food forest.”
Pumpkins cover the floor of this Urban Food Forest garden under a weeping Mulberry and a Pecan tree. Food abounds everywhere.

“On we go through finer and finer gardens.” said Geoff Lawton. Until we arrive at the house.

espaliered apricot tree captures the thermal mass heat from the house

The brick face of the house faced west so it also collected most of the heat in winter. The radiated heat of the wall was also a perfect place to grow espaliered fruit trees.
In this case an espaliered apricot tree.

“The apricot tree does like the dry conditions,” says Geoff Lawton, “It gets a cool enough winter here, but the thermal mass of the brick wall gives it the dry conditions that imitates the more arid climates.”

If your home is built on a flat site you can still strategically build collection points for rainwater in your garden that can direct flow to desired points in your garden. Smaller barrels were used in this other urban garden to enable this principal to work as well.

These little features work well together to build a highly successful Permaculture Urban Garden with minimal energy needs.

“A good example of a sustainable system.” said Geoff Lawton.

The idea of growing food in a mulch pit is something we came across whilst filming Geoff Lawton’s Introduction to Permaculture Design DVD. Geoff was climbing over what looked like a mountain of trash. Cardboard boxes, newspaper, old clothes and tree prunings. The mulch pit stretched over 20 to 30 feet and growing in the middle were a bunch of bananas. We decided to do something similar but weren’t too sure if it would work. Being in a sub tropical zone, our banana plant would also be planted in a more manageable backyard mulch pit that would be deep enough to contain many layers of mulch but protected from the wind and shaded by a large pandanus tree. My wife always wanted a Banana circle but given our soil condition it was always a difficult thing to do.
We live on very poor sandy soil so planting bananas directly into low nutrient sand was a no-no. We decided our bananas would be planted in the center of a similar pile of rubbish – a mulch pit. We hammered our 4 star pickets and used some old recycled corrugated skylight roofing to act as our frame to keep all the matter in place.

“Bananas love lots of nutrients and water”

Filling a pit of this size proved to be difficult at first as you will need a lot of carbon to fill a pit of this size. The grass clippings went into the pit. Tree branches. Anything we could find.

We ended up just having enough cardboard, old newspapers, straw and chicken manure to lay out a mulch trench a foot or so deep. This was enough to plant out some potatoes in the first year. The potatoes grew well and so did some cherry tomatoes.

You will need some patience with a mulch pit as things take a while to break down. But break down they will – transforming the layers into a rich mixture of organic matter and thriving micro-organisms.

After a while any mulch you lay will slowly decay and settle down and the height will reduce somewhat.

This was fine because over the months you’ll be surprised how much cardboard stuff you accumulate. It became a bottomless pit.

Christmas wrapping paper, beer cartoons, junk mail and anything that will break down went into this pit. Out garbage bins got lighter. To stop paper blowing away, we ended up throwing the bottom of a large timber pallet into the pit to keep everything in place.

Watering the mulch pit occasionally is a good idea as well. Any moisture captured will help rot down the carbon a lot faster and keep the base cool and damp.

Introducing a banana plant was just a matter of digging a hole into the cardboard layers and burying it with a little compost and watering the whole thing some more. The banana was not planted at ground level and would receive all its nutrients from the surrounding layers of rotting cardboard mulch – well that was the idea!

Now it was just a matter of waiting to see if the banana plant would grow? Over the months this plant seemed to do well as it produced one leaf after another. But would we get any bananas? I was told that bananas require a lot of moisture and love rich nutrients. Lots of nutrients, so keep piling them on. You can’t have enough. Our chicken coop was nearby so their manure also went into the mulch pit. Nothing was turned. It was all left to break down naturally.

“Would this mulch pit deliver the goods?”

We eventually forgot about it until last week. I looked up into the top of the tree and immediately noticed a brace of small green ladyfinger bananas. They looked perfect. I snapped off the photo you see above! How easy is this permaculture stuff I thought!

Its not the most handsome looking thing - but it works

Now a mulch pit is probably not for everybody.

Its best to have it hidden behind a clump of bushes as we have done because – its not the most aesthetically handsome thing you’ll see for a while.

The idea is to eventually remove the pickets and the frame when the mulch breaks down and rebuild the pit somewhere else in the garden.

This way you keep making soil from stuff that would throw away anyway. It would all end up going into landfill.

You also get the bonus of growing your own food.

Although this process is used in a sub-tropical garden, I’m sure it would also work in other cooler zones with other fruiting plants and nut trees. All you are doing is adding high quality nutrients back into the soil and recycling carbon.

Oh, and our banana tree is now suckering a new little plant – so just maybe – we may get that banana circle after all!

One of the extras on Geoff Lawton’s Establishing a Food Forest DVD features him touring a  300 Year old forest system located in Vietnam. This system had stayed in the family for countless generations. Since we put this little clip up on YouTube its always been well viewed, but on New Years Day this year, it suddenly got rediscovered and twittered and went viral overnight. We had a sudden surge of visitors on YouTube with well over 13,000 views in a few hours as people rediscovered and connected with this unusual food forest system.

I realized this morning that we have never mentioned or linked to this clip on this site, so for the folks that missed seeing a sustainable food forest system and want to learn more – check it out.

The idea that can feed your family – literally forever is hard one to believe especially when we are so used to going to the local supermarket and paying for our food. Hard to believe it can be possible to grow food that will create a continual bounty but some people have managed to do it in even less time.

30 Year Old Food Forest

This little food forest system is located in Queensland Australia and bus loads of tourists used to visit this garden that was beased around food systems the owner had seen in Thailand. This is the system that  inspired Geoff Lawton to investigate Permaculture when he first saw it 20 years ago. The original owner has since sold this property and has moved on but this food forest remains in the hands of the new owners who were keen to show us around and explain their sympathetic reconstruction of this property.

What they did was thin out some of the older woody dense growth, open up a little more light and then once a week wander around the garden, collecting nuts, berries and fruit from the trees in their backyard and doing a little tidy up on any rampant under growth. There was literally lots of fruit on the ground spoiling when we visited. When nature delivers – it delivers in abundance.

If you have an acre of land or two to spare and wish to build something similar for future generations to enjoy, Geoff Lawton explains how to do-it-yourself and build a food forest system like the ones pictured above in his 90 minute DVD that we produced. One of the great surprises for us is that Geoff’s DVD has a way to galvanize into action. We occasionally get emails from people who were inspired to try something similar on their small acreage.

There’s even a movement of people inspired to create Food Forests Across America.

Here’s how Eric Ohlsen the founder of FFAA explained it to us:

“I have seen Geoff Lawton’s Food Forest DVD” said Erik.. “As a Permaculture and food forest designer, I just wanted to see how Geoff organizes his food forests. Honestly I was blown away by the video. The first time I watched it I actually had a hard time going to sleep because I wanted to go out into my property and start planting like crazy. I just moved into a new house and am currently designing a food forest there.”

“We’re going to install Food Forests like a brush fire.” he says.

There’s even a dedicated Food Forest Facebook page with a lot of inspired people looking at building similar systems in their countries.

Check it out.

In the Food Forest DVD, Permaculture teacher Geoff Lawton takes you through his Kitchen garden where he introduces students to the concept of companion planting. Here the kitchen garden is deliberately designed with a riot of flowers and vegetables deliberately designed to confuse pests from eating the produce.

Small predators like this Skink keep insects under control

Predators
Small rockeries are integrated within the vegetable garden to be a haven for small predator lizards, always on the lookout for the odd insect.

Bird baths are also a feature of the permaculture kitchen garden. By attracting small birds to enjoy the garden a lively control mechanism is put into play to keep the system in balance.

Mulching
Because of the no dig philosophy of Permaculture gardening, soil life is increased over the years. Under the mulch of a great kitchen garden are billions of bacteria, nematodes, micro-organisms and small creatures that help keep the soil friable, loose, damp, dark and rich with organic compost. Plants boom with vitality, making them resistant to disease and pest infestation. The soil food web is very much intact in a Permaculture garden. Adding straw mulch throughout the year just makes things grow better. Permaculture Soils increase with fertility as soils are continually made each year. Not lost or depleted.

Marigolds

Marigolds
Every Permaculture garden seems to have a clump of Marigolds tucked away in one corner. Their bright colours are said to distract flying insects. Apart from being a very hardy plant, Marigolds are ideal to plant next to potatoes, tomatoes and even roses. Permaculture old timers plant Marigolds in pots and place around the home. Dogs won’t cock their legs up against a pot of Marigolds they say!

Knowing what plants relate well to one another is useful knowledge to assist you in getting minimizing potential failure. Here is a list of useful vegetable to plant together and a list of plants that seemingly don’t like each other.

Companion Planting
Companion planting is the planting of various vegetables and plants next to each other.
The idea is that they help one another in nutrient uptake, pest control and pollination. Some plants just seem to like being next to one another.
Companion planting is used often by Permaculture gardeners to work with nature to get a better crop return with minimal effort.

But the idea is not new.

Many of the modern methods of companion planting are as old as the original cottage gardens in England or traditional gardening methods found in Asia.
Many of these concepts rely on a plants natural alleolpathic tendencies.

Click to download Companion Planting Chart.pdf

Allelopathy
Allelopathy is word to describe a plant’s inhibition to grow next to another plant or organism. Some plants makes good and bad neighbours. Maybe its the way plants exude a scent or root excretion that makes for strange bedfellows. But companion planting is well known amongst experienced gardeners.

Comfrey
If you visit a real permaculture kitchen garden you’ll will be hard pressed not to find this plant somewhere growing in the corner. The real use of comfrey is to build fertility into the soil. Watch out for chickens and cows as they love eating the stuff. It is said that Comfrey sends down deep roots and brings up minerals from the subsoil. Its leaves is often used as a compost activator as well as being an excellent nutritious mulch. Just rip out a few leaves as you walk past and throw them around your growing vegetables. Some people even use it to make a liquid feed.

Its never too late to start working on a modest kitchen garden. The basics are easy and you can start on an instant permaculture garden and have it done in an afternoon. Some people get so motivated they start looking for a bigger challenge – like growing a food forest in their back yard!

Food Forest at Tagari

Walking through a Food Forest can be bewildering experience at first as you try to understand all the design features inherent in Nature. The canopy and diversity of the forest in its complexity can be hard to comprehend at first. Geoff Lawton once remarked that he felt many of his permaculture students had a lot of difficulty seeing the structural features of a forest. So how do you make sense of it all if you don’t have a botanist’s knowledge of plants?

In designing a food forest system, lets break it down visually to the seven basic patterns that define the look and feel of a food forest. By working with these patterns we can simplify the design process to its essentials and then gradually reiterate these patterns when we design and plant out our forest with added plant complexity. Think of these seven patterns as notes on a musical scale that could be used repeatedly to build your forest into a symphony of form and function.

Lets kick off our Food Forest by building it next to a water harvesting swale. A swale system that is built on contour can soak rainwater into the soft lower mound and be a constant source of moisture for our plants.

Think of this list as a recipe of shapes that define the patterns of a forest.

Canopy
The top Canopy (10m+) layer towers above your forest. Nut trees such as Walnut and Pecan, Coconuts, Cabinet Timber trees and various shade and wind-break trees can also be grouped into this lot.

Low Tree layer
Smaller fruit trees (3-9m), plums. peaches apples and pears, pawpaw, custard apples, lemons and orange trees. Faster growing leguminous pioneers can also fit into this category. Shorter living trees can be recycled for their mulch, shade and nitrogen capabilities.

Shrubs
Bushy Shrub plants (up to 3m) such as Currents, Gooseberry, Raspberry, Blueberries, Blackcurrents can be used.

Herbaceous
Perennial herbs and vegetables such as Thyme, Sage, Rosemary and various Medicinal Herbs, Onions, Rhubarb, Asparagus, Chives, Yarrow, Mustard Greens and Comfrey all fit into this category.

Rhizosphere
The Root Zone or underground area, allows Artichokes, Yams, even Mushrooms to coexist. Garlic, Yacon, Shallots, Horseradish and Ginger.

Ground Cover Plants
Nitrogen fixing green manure plants like alfalfa, clover, vetch, and winter rye grow quickly and then break down, providing nutrients for the soil and a boost for the other plants living in this community. Even annuals such as pumpkin can be inter-planted between the trees to sprawl out and fill in the gaps.

Vertical Climbers
Grapes, passion-fruit, Beans, Peas, Runners and assorted vines.

The construction of a Food Forest can be very low maintenance affair if some careful planning goes into the initial design process. By integrating these 7 layers into our designs and alternating the patterns with a variety of different plant species we can build an amazing complex Food Forest system that goes on for years providing an endless supply of food, moderating the local climate around it as well as a becoming a habitat for all sorts of creatures that live nearby.

When filming Geoff Lawton’s “Food Forest” DVD we went to film a forest system that had been abandoned for about 10 years at Tagari in Northern NSW Australia. Originally designed by Permaculture founder Bill Mollison, Tagari was a transformed dairy farm that under Geoff Lawton’s subsequent management was transformed into a series of dams and interconnecting swales, ponds canals in a food forest system that was abandoned suddenly and left to manage on its own without human activity.

When we revisited Tagari Farm it was like stepping into a forgotten wilderness. The grass had grown right up to your waist. Paths were impossible to find. The camera crew nearly stepped on a deadly brown snake sunning itself in the stillness. The old farm buildings were slowly being swallowed back by the wilderness. Ivy had burst through the windows. The doors were wrapped by its fingers and it had spilled into the rooms enveloping the floors and slowly with the help of white ants was reducing the place back to the elements.

It literally looked like a jungle. Having Geoff Lawton explain what you were looking at was necessary to understand the interconnections of the Food Forest system. Cutting through the tall grass we made our way into the cooler over growth. Inside the Food Forest – the grass stopped growing due to the shade. It was much quieter and cooler. Looking around at the canopy of trees above him you could see Geoff remembering all the plants he had planted years before. They had grown to maturity.

Geoff Lawton with a Jak Fruit at Tagari Farm

A lot of the trees look insignificant to me. Because they are not bearing fruit at the time of the year so you tend to dismiss them. But that would be missing the point that this system produces food throughout the entire year – constantly. There was coffee grown wild on the forest floor. The coffee beans had started to self seed. My wife Jane picked up a few plants to take home with us as the canopy was too dense – too dark for these little plants to survive. Geoff pointed out some custard apples that were in season growing well out of reach. But closer to the ground students were picking up scores of passion-fruit that were spilling over the undergrowth.

This Food Forest was really a vertical garden with a number of levels to it. From the bottom tubers under the ground like Yacón to the climbing perennials, Pioneer species, Nitrogen fixing Legumes, coffee trees and smaller fruit and nut trees, larger pawpaw trees and up through the various layers of Mango and Jak Fruit, to the mighty shade trees, this food forest was an ever changing garden canopy that was left to its own devices and left to run riot.

Tagari Farm (click for larger view)

There were over 43 bodies of water on this property said to be able to support 20,000 fish. Not that you could see them now. You could hear the water running in the background nearby. A thick canopy of weeds covered the dams. There were silver perch stocked originally and the fish were breeding and still thriving. Geoff remarked recently that he caught a heap of them on just a baited hook with a little bread. The fish were so easy to catch because they have not seen any humans for quite some time. There was also meant to be a chinampa canal growing here somewhere.

It was strange to see this place look so desolate. It was meant to be a teaching facility and was extensively planted with a living system of forestry including, timber, bee forage, animal forage, 60 species of timber and food bamboo, plus a food forest fruit system of over 300 mangoes. And now it was just a lost settlement.

You can see this all revealed in Geoff Lawton’s Food Forest DVD. It has a long 20 minute introduction of what a food forest system is and then focuses on how to build one on a swale system so that the plants have an endless supply of moisture to grow through their succession. We see the Food Forest system mature from one day to 6 months, two years, six years and finish up on this lost Permaculture food forest at Tagari farm.

Double Reach Garden Bed from the

Here’s a fast way to build a vegetable garden directly on grass or lawn without digging. Permaculture teacher Geoff Lawton demonstrates this method on his farm and has been using this method for years with instant results using discarded cardboard packaging, junk mail, newspapers etc.Here’s what you need to get before you build your no dig sheet mulch garden bed.

• Cardboard sheeting or newspapers, junk mail etc
• Straw mulch, hay, grass clipping. Lots of it.
• Horse, Sheep or Cow Manure
• Plant Seedlings

This method really doesn’t take long at all to do. First find a sunny spot in your backyard and make sure you can walk around your new garden bed to get easy access to it.

This system uses the “Double Reach Garden Method” which means your garden bed width will be twice the span of your outstretched arm when kneeling down.
Because this system will employ billions of bacteria and little micro-organisms to feed the roots of your plants you will have to make sure that you never step on the garden bed and compact the soil.

Placing the cardboard sheeting.

Compaction will limit the life in your soil so stepping on the garden bed should be avoided. Your garden bed will be only as deep as you can reach with your extended arm and touch the middle.

Define the boundaries of your garden and then sprinkle out a thin layer of animal manure directly on the grass surface . Then start laying out your old cardboard sheeting making sure your new manured garden bed is completely covered with cardboard.
Now cover the cardboard sheeting with mulch or hay. The mulch height should be around a foot deep. You can never add too much mulch. More is plenty.

Then create a small hole in the mulch, until you reach down and touch the cardboard layer. This where your plant seedlings will go. Use a sharp knife to cut through the cardboard base. Make a little hole here. You can also just slash the cardboard or newspapers with a knife to open it up a little and add a little extra compost in there if you have it and start planting out your seedlings. Water well.

Geoff Lawton describes the process. “I’m imitating the forest floor.” he says “The soil organisms down there – those millions and millions of soil organisms, will think a forest floor has just landed on them!”

Five weeks later when we visited the instant garden, the seedlings have grown very well.

Instant Garden 5 weeks later

The cardboard was still there. It hadn’t disintegrated yet, but the soil had changed. Geoff Lawton digs under the mulch bed a pulls out the darkened moist soil. A worm wriggles in his hand.

“There all kinds of soil building activity going on here.” he says, “Soil Bacteria, worms, Fungi, all kinds of imitations of layers.”

“This system is so simple.” said Lawton, “but it creates soil as quick as it creates surplus products.”

“This is an easy system to put an instant garden together and it will create half an inch or up to 4 or 5 cm of soil per year for your garden.”

“You are never sustainable in a garden unless you are creating more soil than you are using to produce.”

“You must be creating soil as you produce your food and then you’re sustainable. If you keep going that way – and use that as an indicator of soil creation – you’ll be sustainable forever.”

How to build an instant garden will be featured on Geoff Lawton’s “Permaculture Soils” DVD that will released later in 2010.

If you watched Geoff Lawton’s DVD “Introduction to Permaculture Design” you would have seen Geoff take you on a tour of a typical Permaculture Garden as he wandered through a number of circular corrugated iron garden beds. We spoke with the owner of the property, Elisabeth Hansen to get a better understanding and some tips on how to build and maintain a successful garden bed using this method of food production.

Tank Gardens have been around for many years but it wasn’t until the recent introduction of plastic water tanks that hit the market that farmers and people with conventional tanks began to upgrade to the newer models. There were plenty of old tanks going straight to the tip. Elisabeth who is a Permaculture teacher saw the potential of recycling the old water tanks into her garden. She organised a deal with the tank installer to buy the scrap tanks for a modest fee. Her husband Mark would use an electric angle grinder to cut a very large 50.000 litre tank into smaller sections that could be reassembled into smaller garden tanks. The tanks are essentially hoops that have no base or bottom, allowing earth worms to circulate freely underground.

Assembling your tanks and placing them into position is one thing but filling them with suitable soil to create an organic garden is another matter all together. “We have a cow and calf and chickens to provide manure but you need a lot of compost and garden scraps to fill a tank garden.” Elisabeth says any organic matter can be placed into the tank. Branches, prunings, cardboard boxes, straw, leaf matter, cow and chicken manure and any form of organic matter is ideal. Larger objects like palm fronds and tree branches will take a lot longer to break down so a better solution needs to be found.

“We put a large garden mulcher in the centre of the tank and started creating mulch almost immediately.” says Elisabeth. The larger 12 Horsepower petrol driven mulchers are more efficient than the small electric mulchers which tend to break down and clog.

Creating a compost heap is unnecessary in the sub tropics where she lives as there is already sufficient moisture in the air to break down organic materials directly in the garden tanks. Elisabeth has quite a number of tanks in her sprawling Permaculture garden.

“The tanks also prevent a number of smaller marsupials like bandicoots from eating your vegetables.” say Elisabeth.

Elisabeth is a strong believer in introducing as much bio-diversity into your tank garden as possible. It all starts at the microbe level.

“Go for a walk in the forest or anywhere where nature is undisturbed and take soil samples from these places.” says Elisabeth, “and put your soil samples into your tank garden.” The microbes that are needed in your garden will multiply if the conditions are ripe and aid in those energy transfers and growth of your vegetables.

Elisabeths tank garden soils are teeming with microscopic life. Elisabeth reaches into her topsoil and grabs a heap to show me. Rich black soil is wriggling with lively earth worms.
“I’d like to put some of this under a microscope and see what’s there.” she says.
So once you have established your garden bed what other maintenance is needed? Apart from regular watering and picking vegetables, very little maintenance is needed.
What about turning the soil over?
“Oh no! You never do that!” says Elisabeth. “That’s a no no!”
“Why not?”
Elisabeth insists that its like taking a giant shovel and picking up our house with people and contents in it and turning it over. It destroys the natural order. “By ploughing or digging over the soil, we are destroying the complex food web. The microscopic organisational structure that supports the natural order and interconnection.

“I never dig over the soil in the tanks.” says Elisabeth. “and I never walk or compact the garden beds.” The idea is to keep the soil loose and moist in texture. A layer of straw mulch keeps the topsoil cool and moist and speeds up the growth of soil organisms – the engine drivers in an organic garden.

The tank should also not be too big. Your arm should be able to reach into the centre and pick any vegetable as needed. Fresh seedlings can be popped into the garden bed on a regular basis by parting the mulch layer and disturbing the garden bed as little as possible.

As Geoff Lawton regularly says “Its not about feeding the plants – but feeding the soil.”

Because a lot of Westerners visiting the Indonesian island of Bali could never quite pronounce his name, Nyoman Sarma became known to them as just plain “Nomad.” Since the 60′s when he worked as a oil-rigger in Algerian and Tunisia, Nomad had a thirst for travel and learning more about Western culture. But the pay for a Balinese rigger was very poor so Nomad did a lot of travelling the hard way.

“I could not afford to buy a ticket. I lived on bread and water and walked everywhere on foot.” he said. “I literally became my nick-name.”

Nomad learnt many things on his travels. He returned to his home town in Ubud, Bali and built a very successful restaurant called not surprisingly “Nomad.” But being financially successful and a bit of an entrepreneur was never quite enough for his restless spirit. A guest house soon followed called “The Sari”

“I built my guest house on the town rubbish tip. It stank very bad!” says Nomad holding his nose.

In order to improve the garden Nomad began reading any book he could find on organic gardening.

The surrounding fields around his house are farmed for rice. Rice paddies and water flood the surrounding landscape. Farmers irrigate the field and toil under the hot sun to grow their four crops of rice per year. But their take home pay is very low. Many struggle to make ends meet.

“I am at heart a farmer.” says Nomad. “I want my community to become organic. I want Bali to become a true organic island.”

Nomad thought about what sort of crops he could grow to support the thriving tourist market in Bali.

“Every farmer at the moment in Bali is using chemicals.” he says. ” To kill the germs. The bio-diversity is gone. The soil is dead.”

Nomad says the Indonesian government has invested heavily in chemical factories that produce large amounts of super-phosphates. These phosphates stimulate food production but at the cost of destroying important soil biota.

Its the soil biota that Nomad wants to rebuild.

Nomad believes organically grown food is more disease resistant and healthier for you. Nomad’s dream is to get the Bali to go completely organic But it can’t be done instantly.
Getting the local farmers to go organic is not easy. Many are sympathetic to the idea but lack the financial capital to spend a year converting their land to organic farmland. Its money they just don’t have. So the cycle continues in doing what they know best. Growing rice.

“Everybody talks about organic farming, but nobody would do anything about it.” says Nomad. The politicians wont do anything. Neither would the farmers.

Nomad decided to lead by example. He would try it himself.

Next to his guest house he built an organic garden. Starting a small garden on an old rubbish tip wasn’t easy. The first thing he did was remove the grass and cut a compost trench next to the planted vegetables. His neighbours watched but said little.

The vegetable scraps from the restaurant were just bucketed into the trench and dug over to speed up the composting process.

Nomad says because of the tropical heat and moisture, fresh compost can be produced within two weeks. This garden is just two months old and the transformation is remarkable.

Where the first garden beds were made the soil is rich and dark with the crumbly texture of rich vitality that resembles worm castings. The newer garden beds are less dark. Nomad instructs his gardener to follow his organic principles to the letter. Seedlings are planted into small round compost balls that are planted directly into the new garden.

“My staff won’t ask me directly what I am doing.” says Nomad, “but I see them talking about it with the gardener when I am gone.”

Nomads garden is now thriving with tomatoes, basil, beans, vanilla, rosemary, mint and many other medicinal herbs and spices.

Having seen the success of this small scale organic garden has inspired Nomad to now try his hand at a much larger scale operation.

He recently purchased a couple of acres of land in an adjoining rice paddy field. He’s already developed a business plan on paper where every plant is scrutinised for how productive it can be.

A rice farmer at the moment earns a pittance per month when compared to what he could earn if he switched to growing organic vegetables.

Nomad estimates each farmer could earn around $200 per month if they switched their farm management strategies. This is a large sum of money in Bali.

“You can get so much more money than just growing rice.” say Nomad. “You can get 15,000 Rupiah ($2 Aust) per kilo for Organically grown tomatoes. More than double what you get for conventional chemically grown tomatoes and much, much more money than growing rice.”

Ubud does have an “organic” farmers market on Sunday and Wednesday but the problem is that most of the produce comes from other towns and often imported into Bali and of questionable “organic” origin.

‘I am a true Ubudian – if there is such a word.” he says. “I want my community to support itself with real organic food grown here in Ubud.”

But in order to do that, the farmers need to learn new strategies.

Nomad explains his philosophy as two main principles. “Solidarity with Compassion.”

“I want all farmers to copy me.” he says. His community comes first. But wouldn’t he become worried by competitive farmers growing similar produce to his own for sale?
“No!” says Nomad emphatically. “In my garden there is a sign that says, ‘No one ever grows poor helping someone else.’”

“In two months, I will be harvesting vegetables on my new land. True Organic vegetables and fruit for sale here in Ubud. In six months, the Balinese farmers will all be copying me!’

And where does Permaculture fit into all of this?
Nomad grins.
“Tell Geoff Lawton to come to Bali and teach a course here in Permaculture. I will be his number one student. I am always learning.” Says Nomad.

“I feel like a forty year old man. Soon my grey beard will turn black.”

“Most people believe when you grow older – over fifty that you go down hill. But I don’t believe this,” he laughs, “I grow stronger and younger everyday.”