Tina’s Urban Permaculture Garden
After moving into her place in 2002, Tina started gardening straight away. Slowly but surely, she converted her typical suburban backyard lawn into a vegetable garden.
When she decided she wanted to do more and being keen to help grow the permaculture movement in the south-eastern suburbs, she asked Permablitz Melbourne for a local permaculture designer – Terry Roberts answered the call. He uses permaculture design principles because it’s a “wonderful design science that doesn’t destroy the earth and leaves you with beautiful, bountiful gardens.”
During the planning stages Terry hoped Tina would like a semi-tropical food forest in her garden – and she did! A food forest garden is modelled on living forests by putting plants of different heights in one area. Since no-one waters or fertilises a living forest, the idea is that we’ll end up with a productive food garden that looks after itself.
Tina’s garden is bug friendly – she lets herbs and vegetables go to seed and plants things like borage to encourage insects into the garden. There’s also an ‘insect hotel’ for native bees made from bits and pieces of natural materials scavenged during the blitz!
A surprising success was the south-facing side of Tina’s garage. It was full of junk and she thought nothing could grow because it was so dark – even weeds didn’t grow well there! But Terry suggested they use the albedo effect to create light and better growing conditions in this area and this is now an abundant vegetable garden.
After completing a PDC herself, Tina has also recently joined the Permablitz Designers’ Guild so we can’t wait to see what amazing designs she comes up with in the future!
