Permablitz! part 2 – how does your garden grow?
Now following on from my previous post about our permablitz…
Four weeks and buckets of rain and sunshine later, our garden has completely transformed!
Firstly and most importantly, presenting our fabulous new chickens! This is Susan.
And this is Patti (who refuses to sit still for a photo..)
They’re both very happy hens and were laying less than 12 hours after moving in. We are loving the fresh eggs! Needless to say, Tara is pretty stoked about her new friends, or as she calls them ‘our two mums’.
Post blitz, we’ve done quite a bit of work to their space. We had to move the house and construct a chook fence to keep them away from our neighbours (bless them..). And we’ve put in the beginnings of an orchard.
Their wee garden is coming along nicely!
I’ve started stitching on the fence – the ladies approve! Hoping to do more on it over the summer.
And the rest of the garden is coming along amazingly
our new garden beds are going crazy, and as you can see we’ll be harvesting out of them very soon
We’ve had our first potato harvest and they were super yummy. Even made some potato bread. It was so delicious there wasn’t even time to take a photo of it…
Everything is growing so green and luscious. We’ve been eating fresh spinach every day and the tomatoes, beans and capsicums are all flowering and starting to produce fruit. There’s some seriously awesome salads coming up.
So finally we have a wonderful kitchen garden and outdoor dining area. We had our first proper test drive this week when some of our good friends came over for a BBQ
And everyone approves!
Finally – and I’m not even showing you everything, there is SO MUCH going on in our garden – I made a little hanging strawberry garden out of some old formula tins and some jute string.
Plant pots are a great way to reuse formula tins. Just whack some spraypaint on the sides to cover the ugliness and away you go. Hanging them is a great way to fill up underutilised spaces. They’re the perfect size for strawberries. Can’t wait til these babies take off!
So our medium sized Melbourne block is currently growing: potatoes, garlic, countless varieties of tomato, chillies, capsicums, spinach, zucchini, beans, eggplants, carrots, spring onions, kale, strawberries, chives, rosemary, basil, lemon thyme, sage, pineapple sage, oregano, cress, lemon balm, parsley, chamomile, liquorice, comfrey, figs, plums, lemons and nectarines. Plus of course the chickens. And we have HEAPS more space to use. And we probably spend about 5-10 hours a week pottering around attending to weeding, pruning, staking, harvesting etc.
The increased value of our quality of life? Priceless.
Permablitz!
So a few months back we attended our first Permablitz at our friends’ house. A Permablitz is basically a backyard blitz with a permaculture design. And we had such an amazing time! So wonderful to join in with a bunch of awesome people to descend on someone’s house and transform their space into a highly functional, productive working garden. Not only did we get to meet heaps of interesting people, we got to learn a lot too.
Watching our friends’ garden grow since has been so exciting to watch so when we were offered the opportunity to have our own garden blitzed, we couldn’t be more thrilled!
As readers and friends will know, 2010 has not been the easiest for us. So we couldn’t have been happier to learn something amazingly GOOD was going to happen to us!
We had the amazing design help of Angela, Amanda and Mara, who worked with us to come up with a great plan to transform our garden. And one slightly boggy Sunday in November about 50 people rocked up to our place and made our dreams a reality. We had a pretty strict policy of buying as little new stuff as possible. In the end the new stuff we bought was dirt, sand, gravel, some chicken wire, screws, nails and a gate latch. Everything else was dug out of our shed, brought by people on the day or scavenged from around our neighbourhood. I’ll let the pictures tell the story.
BEFORE:
DURING
Pre-gardening stretches led by the awesome Lex. Coupled with the chi kung session after lunch, we cemented our role as the neighbourhood freaks 
SERIOUS mud. We had a clear day but we’d had a months rain the day before and this area was already pretty thick with clay. MASSIVE respect to the people who worked on this area!
Chook house construction. Utilising our old outdoor table, a few wooden pallets and an old cabinet unit.
Garden bed construction, featuring the old top of the outdoor table.
Planting! It’s always the highlight of a blitz, putting in the seedlings everyone brought at the end of the day.
Halfway through the morning we decided that since we had such an awesome turnout we’d do the nature strip too. Fully planted out with indigenous grasses, small shrubs and ground covers.
And at the end of the day, everyone was EXHAUSTED!!
AFTER
My favourite recycled material was the inside of an old screen door. We knocked it out of the frame, turned it sideways and attached it to the side of our courtyard frame. Perfect climbing frame for our happy wanderer!
Arguably the world’s coolest chook house!
Little window sill gardens for the chooks, drip watered from the chook house roof. Now planted out with marigolds, cress and strawberries.
And arguably the worlds first pallet chook gate with a nice mesh on the actual gate – a perfect cross stitch canvas! I’ve already stitched a small heart on it and planning a lot more. I’ve also planted beans on the right side to grow up the timber. And I just noticed the first one has sprouted today!
Well I reckon that’s enough pictures for one post. The blitz was just over a month ago and the place has grown so much. I’ll do another post with updated photos so you can see the transformation. EDIT: it’s here.
But before I wind this one up I just want to say how amazing the permablitz community is. The Melbourne Permablitz organisation just had it’s 100th blitz (we were #98). So that means 100 gardens at peoples houses, community centres and gardens and school gardens have been transformed into food producing spaces all thanks to the voluntary hard work of people who truly believe it is possible to turn this world around if we just roll up our sleeves and just bloody get on with it. And no one got paid, and everyone had yummy food and great times and learnt lots and met new people.
And if that’s not revolutionary then I just bloody don’t know what is.
Our biggest love, thanks and eternal gratitude to everyone who turned up and mucked in. Can’t wait to repay the favour at your house!