Creating a perennial food forest
With our summer and autumn produce drawing to a close, we naturally have been wondering about how to cram even more into our small suburban block. We’ve been reading about permaculture for a while and the idea of creating an urban food forest in our front yard seems like something we almost have to do.
We’ve had a fairly typical set up for a house in our burb – roses along a picket fence and grass. We’d tried amping this up with an attempt at a feijoa hedge and some rosemary plantings but the real stars have been our two stone fruit trees – a donut peach that tastes like pure sunshine and our recently acquired apricot, given to us from a neighbour, which makes some delicious jam.
Knowing there are a whole range of perennial veggies we want to grow, but for which we don’t have room in our annual veg beds, it was all too easy to start planning for a front yard make over! With our little hive out the back, we also want to get in as many bee friendly flowers as possible.
Enter a free trial of some landscape design software, a few hours of google searching and… drum roll… we have a plan!
We have (unfortunately) a couple of trees on the verge outside our place and next door which prevent the whole area being bathed in sunlight for most of the day. But after tracking the sun across the day (thank you work from home lockdown) we were able to see that most plants *should* get enough sun. We hope. But if it fails, we’ll start again.
Onward and upward!
First step soil prep. Our existing feijoas and roses had never really thrived which we put down to the pretty ordinary quality of our clay soil. The raised bed fruit trees with lots of compost filled soil on the other hand were rocking along.
We made a quick call to flog the roses and feijoas for a few $ and then spent a whole lot more than that on a truck load of compost and pea straw mulch.
It was time to build a no dig garden!
The weather really turned it on for us. And by that I mean, it bucketed down. Sounds like that might be the worst possible time to be moving 3.5 cubic metres of compost but actually, it was kinda perfect. We had to make sure the foundation layer of cardboard was saturated. Thank you 9am mini storm.
By the time we started our pea straw layer, the rain was more gentle and helped us pack it all down, ready for the compost layer.
It was the most incredible feeling reaching into a big bucket of compost and feeling a rush of warmth from the microbes doing their thing. So fresh, so fertile. Hopefully the makings of an excellent perennial food forest.
Halway there 
Wetting down the compost layer
After the pea straw then compost layer, we wet it all down and went for round 2 – another layer of pea straw and another topping of compost. Then we were done. High five!
Second layer pea straw 
Final layer of compost
Over the next few months, the pea straw will start to break down, hopefully we’ll get some amazing worms and bugs to come work over our soil and the level of the garden will sink by about half.
But in the meantime, it’s time to start building the mini chook run and stepping stones and sourcing our plants to fill our forest!
Stay tuned for part 2…