“You don’t need as big an area as people think to be self-sufficient. I’ve talked a lot of people out of buying lifestyle blocks. I tell them to look at what they can do with the space they have now.”
“I am all about low maintenance. Soon I will get to the stage where I just spend a couple of hours a week in the garden, mostly harvesting food.”
The first time Dee Turner visited the central New Plymouth property on which she now lives, it was very nearly the end of an open home. With no time to spare, she ran past the real estate agent standing at the door with a clipboard and headed straight into the garden. After a quick turn around the one-acre space out back – which included plenty of flat areas, a few gentle slopes, a small stream and even a remnant of native forest – Dee was convinced it was the right property for her.
“So I rang the real estate agent I’d been working with and said I’d found the place I wanted to buy,” says Dee, who had been looking for the right property for more than a year by then. “And she said, ‘What do you think of the house?’ and I said, ‘Oh I haven’t been inside yet’.”
Dee, an organic gardening and permaculture teacher, had been living on a 10-acre lifestyle block just out of New Plymouth. She and her now ex-partner had spent 10 years turning it from a paddock into a permacultural paradise, complete with an off-the-grid eco-house and extensive productive gardens and orchard.
“That was a fantastic learning experience,” she says. “I loved it and loved being there. But it’s also fantastic now doing it on a much smaller scale. I look out on an acre and think ‘oh yes this is very doable’.”
The previous owners had been keen rose growers, so on that first visit the space was crammed with 600 roses and more than a dozen large exotic trees, including flowering cherries, willows and plane trees.
“They were enormous and in the wrong place. It really shut out all light from the bottom part of the garden.”
Luckily the previous owners took 450 roses with them and Dee managed to pass on the rest to her horticulture and permaculture students.
“So then it was just a matter of getting out a chainsaw,” she says.
Her aim with the property was to create a permaculture garden that could be used to run practical workshops for her horticulture and permaculture students (she teaches three nights a week at Western Institute of Technology and runs her own courses on the property too).
But she also wanted to show people that self sufficiency was not only possible but could be done within the city limits with limited space… and without spending every spare minute in the garden.
“I wanted to show people what you can do in less space. There’s an acre here but it’s separated up into garden rooms, with 300m² here and 400m² there. So I can show my students a space and say this is all the space you need to grow vegetables for four people for a year. You don’t need as big an area as people think to be self-sufficient. I’ve probably talked people out of buying lifestyle blocks. I tell them to look again at the space they have now in town and just be a bit more creative in the way that they plant.”
And a productive garden shouldn’t take over your life, Dee insists. She admits that there’s a few weeks over harvest season when she needs to spend “all day every day” in the kitchen pickling, preserving and otherwise processing crops to supply her through the winter – including making her own wine from fruit as well as cider from apples and perry from pears.
“The beds are layered with carbon and nitrogen rich materials and we put in other things too: wood ash, a bit of lime, reactive phosphate rock, all sorts of goodies.”
(A self-described “big wine enthusiast”, she has been making her own fruit wines since her early 20s.)
But the garden itself doesn’t actually take a lot of work, she says, and in fact eliminating unnecessary work is at the heart of good permaculture design. Her food forest, for instance, is designed to be a self-sustaining system that doesn’t require fertiliser or much in the way of upkeep. “There’s a bit of weeding to do until it does get established, but once it does, it just gets on with it.
“I am all about low maintenance structures and solutions. My garden is still in progress but in another two or three months it will be at a level where I only have to spend a couple of hours a week maintaining and most of that will be harvesting food and remulching.”
Gardens designed according to permaculture principles are divided into different zones according to the amount of attention and space the plants in that area require. So zone one – which is always nearest the house – is where you grow the annual crops which require the most care and which you harvest the most often. “Like lettuces, radishes, spring onions, tomatoes, eggplants, herbs, that sorts of thing”. At Dee’s place, zone one showcases various permaculture methods of growing including seven round mandala beds
“I have a round chook dome that sits on top of those mandalas and as I finish a crop I put the chooks on top. They clear out whatever crop has just finished and add manure. Once they have turned over the ground I move them into the next mandala and plant.”
At the centre of each mandala is an in situ buried worm farm, upcycled by Dee out of an old paint tin and a terracotta plant saucer.
“Just take a 10-litre paint bucket, cut the bottom out of it, drill holes in the side and then bury it so the top is the same level as the soil with a terracotta pot saucer as a lid. At the start of the season, I fill it with an animal manure, usually horse, cow or sheep, right the way to the top, then I put a handful of compost worms.
“That manure is like lollies for worms. The tiger worms turn it into vermicast, and the earthworms in the beds go in through the holes and take that vermicast out into the main bed. You could add food scraps as well.”
Zone one also includes beds made from macrocarpa sleepers (high enough to stop birds throwing the mulch around). These have been filled using the so-called lasagne method of laying carbon rich material (in this case, cardboard and hay) with nitrogen rich material (coffee grounds, animal manure and grass clippings). They are then mulched thickly with hay.
“A lot of people ask how come the weeds aren’t growing on top of the hay. I just water the hay really well when I put it down and within seven to 10 days the grass will start to grow through. All I do is flip it so you show the weeds’ roots to the sun. That kills them and you shouldn’t have to do it again.”
There are also bio-intensive beds in this zone which were double dug, composted and then covered in plastic weedmat in which holes have been burned to allow edibles to be grown in a weed-free environment.
“My students wanted to play around using plastic weed mat,” Dee says. “For myself I don’t like it very much. Those beds have been very productive and certainly it is a very good system for a commercial operation but I prefer my mulched beds.”
Zone two includes an area of food forest and a lot of espaliered fruit trees. “I am a huge advocate of espaliering. I think you get a massive amount of production in a very small space”. Figs are planted in in-ground old washing machine drums, which controls their size and helps them fruit more quickly.
In zone three are more macrocarpa beds where crops like onions, potatoes, beans and carrots are grown.
“This is where you grow things that take longer and that you harvest all at once, or just once or twice.”
There are fruit trees here too, including six pear trees espaliered around a horseshoe curve and a seven-layer food forest including a tall tree layer (walnut), a low tree layer (fruit trees), shrubs (fruit bushes and artichokes), a herb layer (comfrey and tansy), a groundcover layer (mint, strawberries and herbs), a vine layer (hops) and a root layer (M¯aori potatoes, yacon and yams).
“When you cross the little stream, you are in zone four, where the stream and the remnant of native forest create a microclimate so can I grow bananas, sugarcane and pepinos. There’s also turmeric and galangal ginger.”
Around every fruit tree on the property, Dee uses what in permaculture is called a “plant guild”, a collection of plants that work together to ensure the health and productivity of that particular fruit.
“There’s four comfrey plants around every single fruit tree here,” Dee says. “All fruit trees need potassium for flowers and fruit, and comfrey mines potassium in the soil and brings it up in its flowers and leaves. I just chop and drop the comfrey around the fruit trees and it breaks down incredibly fast and releases that potassium.
“But different fruit trees have their own plant guilds too, so around an apple you might have elephant garlic which helps black spot, pansies which helps with codling moth, phacelia which brings in the bees, and yarrow which is a great compost activator.”
Many fruit trees on Dee’s property have only been planted for 18 months, “but the pollination is so good and the amount of organic matter they have access to is so high, that I have had to take fruit off because the trees are simply too young to bear so much and need to get established. About 200 plums came off the plum tree. I had some Wwoofers (workers on organic farms) here and they were almost crying!”
So after three years on the property, is self-sufficiency in sight? Almost. Dee says she can barter homegrown produce for meat with friends on larger lifestyle blocks. “I offer a big basket of citrus, lemons, tangelos, oranges and any veges that they can’t grow. It works out well.”
But she does still visit the supermarket occasionally, she says. “I am still buying apples and pears because mine need another year. And bananas, because mine aren’t producing. And coffee!”
But she’s certainly achieved her goal of showing people what’s possible in an urban garden.
“Everyone can grow their own food,” this passionate permaculturalist says. “It doesn’t take as much space, money or time as people think.”