Garden Visit to Nick's food forest in Repton

Diary Dates

Nick's food forest in Repton

A warm Saturday for us in Repton began a little smokey, but eventually a welcome seabreeze lifted the atmosphere.

Nick started us off with an outline of his garden challenges and endeavours, describing how he manages water collection & dispersal. We saw two stainless steel water tanks and Nick uses a small tank as his first flush diversion. Water from this tank is then used for watering food crops. The garden has definite drier and wetter zones and little watering takes place apart from watering in new plants and utilisation of grey water. An old tank has been converted into a pond that overflows to provide water into the wetter part of the garden.

Having identified the various microclimates, he plants with quick growing top covers & successional understories. Nick starts his shade canopy with weedy plants such as wild tobacco bush and Senna. This is followed by quick growing natives such as bleeding heart and then by the plants from the food forest such as pigeon peas, macadamias and fruiting plants including the yellow jaboticaba which confused many a fruit loving seed saver.

Soil amelioration techniques were also discussed. The grass was smothered with sweet potato which kept the soil covered. Organic matter was then increased by adding chipped tree mulch, and chopping and dropping the plants mentioned previously mentioned. Nick is an avid composter and worm lover.

To finish off, we all trooped back up to the verandah for a well earned lunch.

Thanks to Nick and family for a lovely day

Protect our soil

AND

"A species that destroys the soil, destroys itself." Me

Depending on climate, a healthy forest creates topsoil at a net rate of about 1mm per hundred years.

BSS Feature Article

Nick Radford is a multi disciplinary environmental designer of housing, landscapes and waste water systems and member of Bellingen Seed Savers. A recent article of Nick's was published in the Bellingen Courier Sun:

"You can measure the viability of a society by looking at their soil. When archaeologists study extinct societies such as Easter Island, they have a rule of thumb – topsoil loss roughly equals environmental degradation, and environmental degradation roughly equals societal decline.

Organic matter is a dark, rather mysterious substance that is the essential ingredient in brown topsoil. Unlike subsoil, organic matter is chemically balanced, well drained yet moisture conserving, and is responsible for virtually all of the fertility in soil. Organic matter is created by dead plants, animals and micro organisms, laid down at the floor of forests and swamps. Depending on climate, a healthy forest creates topsoil at a net rate of about 1mm per hundred years."

Read the full article at the link below:  Organic matter can save the humans

Build soil by minimising the use of ALL nitrogenous fertiliser

Link:  A ‘New’ Discovery – Soluble Nitrogen Destroys Soil Carbon

Well worth the read.