Gardening Australia

This little garden belongs to Cat Lavers. Cat is a permaculture designer and educator and she's been cultivating this pocket-sized patch for the last 10 years. Cat, how big is this garden? The whole block is a 14th of an acre, or 280 square metres, but the area that we're standing in where most of the food is coming from is around 12 by 8 metres. This is an amazingly abundant little garden. What was here when you first started? It was a really typical suburban garden, a run-down house, a garden that was overgrown. There was a lawn that was barely alive and really, really poor-quality soil. You tested the soil when you got here? Yeah, we tested it for lead and found that we did have a lead contamination problem, which is common throughout most areas where humans have settled. So, how did you go about designing a garden full of food on contaminated soil? One of the most important steps that we've done is use the raised vegetable beds. Obviously, when we're eating that much produce, it's really important, so we have clean soil that has been brought in for those. We also know that lead doesn't generally transfer into fruits, so this beautiful blood plum behind us is totally safe to eat from. Cat rotates crops across three main garden beds, which have been carefully designed. To make things easy, they're the same size, just over a metre by three metres, which means she can rotate crops and easily move infrastructure, like the trellis system, from bed to bed. The beds that are the same size are quite an important step for us as really productive food gardeners. We have a planting design, and I found, initially, when I had beds of different shapes and sizes, it was so complicated working out how many of what plant to fit in what position in the bed the next year. These days, we have more like a script for planting. We know how many tomatoes we need, we know where we're going to put them in the bed. Next year, we just pick the trellis up and we move it to the bed over, and then we start the process again. What were the first things you put in the ground? The trees went in pretty soon. And it doesn't look like you're afraid of secateurs when it comes to your fruit trees. No, that's right. They do need to be quite tightly pruned to fit in a garden like this. In a small garden where you're producing for a kitchen, it's really important that we have fruit ripening all year round, rather than one big tree that crops all at once. So we keep our fruit trees deliberately pruned quite small so that we can have more diversity of fruit throughout the year. Kat, you're a big believer in the easy plants, aren't you? I sure am, Millie. So one of my favourites is the wild rocket. Wild rocket, which is a different variety to the standard rocket seed that's usually offered to gardeners. This variety is perennial and it's also self-seeding. In fact, in some areas, it's a weed, which is important that people know. This is an incredible plant for home food gardeners that's drought-hardy, crops nearly all year round. You can even cut it to the ground and it will keep reshooting for several years. We actually do a lot of chop and drop here, so we don't haul a lot of material away to a compost. We don't even have room for a larger compost system here. So much of the composting actually happens in situ, just by chopping the branches and leaving them on the ground underneath the plant. So every productive garden has a couple of chooks, right? In Kat's case, she's had to think small. And her flock of quails have proven a fantastic alternative for a small space garden. So how did you get the idea to keep quail? Yeah, well, this is a really small urban block, and so space is always going to be a constraint for us, but particularly because we've had leaded soil contamination issues and we needed to make sure that we didn't have birds free-ranging in the existing soil. So the area that we're sitting on at the moment has got a concrete base and it's also got laser light above us, so it's stopping flaking paint coming from the neighbour's roof from above and it's stopping the quails getting into the original soil below. So this is just like a deep litter of mulch or something? Exactly, that's right. It's actually a compost system in progress that we're on at the moment. And the beauty of the deep litter system is that we never have to clean out this run, ever. We just harvest it as compost for the veggie patch after the materials have broken down. It's also really fantastic for the birds. As you can see, they're really interested in the litter. A quail's reason to get up in the morning is to scratch around looking for bugs. And particularly for animals that are kept in small urban areas, it's really essential for their health that they're in a stimulating environment that also engages them in a way that allows them to be quails. So you're giving them lots of greens to eat and other things in the environment? Yeah, that's right. So we give them a basic chook layer pellet as their ration, but we try really hard to get them away from that as much as possible. So we give them lots of greens and weeds from our garden. We harvest earwigs for them. We give them worms from time to time. So, yeah, as many live, healthy foods that we can produce ourselves as possible. And the odd bath? That's right. The dust baths are really important. They love it, of course. And it's really important that the animals have as little stress as possible. And you can see how much they enjoy dust bathing. It's also really healthy for them. Dust bathing is a way that birds reduce lice and mites. And so it's a good preventative health measure that's really easy for us to take. And what about the eggs? Are they as delicious as a chicken's egg? Yeah, well, I've got some of the eggs here, Millie. So the eggs are beautiful. I think, you know, they taste almost identical to a chicken egg. You need about four or five of them to equal the volume. And one of the amazing things about the eggs is that each quail hen has got her own unique shape and size and pattern. So if I take these two eggs, you can see they were probably laid by different hens. But if I took those ones, you could see the matching patterns there. Wow. So that could be from the same hen. They are absolutely beautiful. And, I mean, an amazingly productive use of this little space. A small space isn't a barrier to a great garden. But this one also shows that if you work out what you've got to work with and then apply some clever design, you can also have one that is diverse and beautiful and efficient and productive, that makes use of every inch. There are so many ideas to inspire your place here. I bet this one's got you thinking.