Stop Doing This to Your Soil (The Secret to Deep Moisture)

We've had rain for four straight days you would look at the surface and think that the drought was finally broken but look at this two inches down the ground is still pure dust. If we planted into this right now everything would die. This illusion is exactly why our garden used to fail. If anyone tells you permaculture is throwing a seed in the ground and watching a food forest magically appear they probably haven't spent enough time out in the dirt. Welcome to Placid Hills. Today we're going to do something a little bit different. No master classes, no guru lectures. We aren't trying to save the whole entire planet or hug every tree. What we are trying to do is build a simple quiet life here in our little patch of the shire. Over the last few years I've read the books, done the courses and looked into the research of the deep science of the soil. But the truth is the dirt is the master teacher. So today we're putting all all our biggest failures, our dead plants, and the practical solutions. that we have found out into one long video. Now, before we get into the mountain of dead plants and bad ideas that got us here. Quick pause. If you want to help this channel grow and follow along while we fumble our way through building a quiet little patch of the Shire, while watching Winston ignore every instruction I give him, hit that like and subscribe button because right after this we are looking at the exact moment the rain illusion caught us out and how we finally got the water where it actually needs to go. To be fair the biggest game changer for us wasn't spending money on fancy gear even though I did want a tractor to help with all the work. It was just slowing down and actually looking at the block. These days before I even pick up a shovel I just watch. I figure out exactly where the summer and the winter shade sits and I pay attention to where the water naturally wants to flow when the summer storms roll in. I can read a hundred books on permaculture but if I just take a step back the property basically tells me exactly where I need to dig. Winston was being a naughty boy. He got too excited in chasing this wallaby. Now just so you know the wallaby is safe and well. It got away. It was too quick for him and I don't think Winston would know what to do with it even if he caught it. I used to get incredibly frustrated when a crop failed or the pests took over. Now I treat it as data. If the gall wasp decimate the citrus it tells me the tree is stressed and the soil biology is out of balance. I learn through that failure, I jump online, I research the specific pest, I find the natural predator and then I design a plant guild to fix the imbalance. It is just constant quiet tinkering. I try things, remember what works and I leave what doesn't. So if we want to build a resilient food forest without losing our minds, the very first step we take is fixing the foundations. That means out here we catch and store water even when the skies don't give us rain. It's a beautiful day, the birds are singing, the geese are happy, no one's gonna stop this rain now, oh no. Out here when the dam gets low every single drop of rain counts. I used to just watch the summer storms roll in and wash all the good topsoil straight down the hill and into the neighbor's paddock. Now I use those observations I talked about to catch it by digging a few simple trenches, what the permaculture book calls swales, right along the natural contour of the slope. We give the water a place to pause. It just sits in the trench and slowly sinks down into the water table, hydrating the ground from the inside out. i do believe as i've aged and grown in a little bit of wisdom i really appreciate rain water never used to but now it's you could say magical catching the water is only half the battle if we leave that soil bare the subtropical sun just bakes the moisture right back out in an afternoon I've found that rolling out thick grass hay is like putting armour over the dirt. It helps to reduce evaporation and greatly reduces the heat stress on the plants. And because I am not wasting water on bare soil, I had to change how I watered. When I set up my heritage pumpkins, I drive a timber stake directly into the centre of Water of the mounds and water right at that stick. It funnels the moisture straight down past the surface and locks it deep into the root zone where it actually belongs. And the best part about using this heavy grass hay is that you don't have to keep messing with it every week. Once you lay it down thick it just settles in protects the microbes and slowly breaks down into food for the earthworms. It takes all the constant back breaking maintenance out of watering and leaves us more time to just watch the garden do its thing. The final piece of the water puzzle for me was realising the soil itself needs to become a sponge. I started doing what is called chop and drop. Instead of hauling all my green waste away to a distant compost bin, I just chop and drop it where it grows, creating a natural mulch around the trees. As those leaves break down, they pull worms up to the surface and add massive amounts of organic matter to the earth. The higher the organic matter, the more water the ground can physically hold. I am just mimicking exactly how the forest floor works. And for the people who wanted to see an update on my lemon tree, here it is. The old ant is looking very, very vibrant. And the guild is working as to plan. Once I figured out how to keep this magical water on this property, the next massive hurdle was the soil itself. Now, I started out thinking that you had to dig, till and turn the soil over to make things grow, but I quickly realised that every time I picked up that shovel to flip the soil, I was actually destroying the exact ecosystem I was trying to build. Silly me. Well, a bit over 25 years ago when I first started out, I did what everyone does. I grabbed the mattock and the tiller and I went to war with the clay. I thought the only way I could get a good harvest was to bust open the earth and fluff it all up. But the more I dug the more the weeds took over and faster the soil dried out into dust. I was actually doing massive damage. Every time I flipped the dirt I was slicing up the underground fungal networks and exposing the delicate soil life to the baking Aussie sun. Liking the swales Winston? So I just stopped digging entirely. It felt wrong at first but I realized that if I wanted to start a new patch it is so much easier to build up instead of down. Now I just mow the grass as low as I can, throw down a thick layer of plain brown cardboard to smother the weeds and pile my compost and loam right on top. The cardboard eventually rots away And the grass underneath turns into green manure. I let the earthworms and the plant roots do all the heavy plowing and aerating for me totally for free. The biggest lesson I learned is that I'm not actually farming plants. I am just feeding the soil biology and they grow the plants for me. The white threads you see running through wood chip are mycelium. They are like the underground internet for the garden. They attach to the roots of my citrus trees and pumpkins sharing water and nutrients across the whole block. Once I stopped tilling and started piling organic matter on top this unseen workforce absolutely exploded and the health of the whole property shifted. Getting the soil right gave me incredibly strong resilient trees but even with the perfect soil nature will still keep throwing challenges. The white scale still shows up and the gall wasps keep coming around looking for a free meal. I had to figure out how to defend my food forest without reaching for a bottle of synthetic poison and that meant I had to learn how to draft an army of my own. Early on whenever I saw ants farming white scale or the citrus scab taking hold, my first instinct was total panic. I thought the only way to save the tree was to run to the hardware store and buy the strongest chemical I could find on the shelf. But I noticed a brutal cycle. I would spray, the pests would die and so would all the good bugs. A month later the scale would come back twice as bad because there was no natural predators left to fight them. I was just putting the property on life support. So I changed tactics. Instead of fighting the war myself I started drafting an army to do it for me. The permaculture book calls this a guild, a group of plants that support and defend a central fruit tree. I basically built a living fortress around this old lemon tree and I gave every plant a specific job. First I brought in the medic. I planted comfrey right at the drip line. Its massive tap root mines deep into the clay to pull up calcium and potassium and I just chopped the leaves and dropped them to feed the tree. Next, I needed a shield wall to break the ants' highway. I planted a tight ring of garlic. As the garlic grows, it pumps sulphur and strong scents into the air, completely scrambling the ants' radar so they can't farm the scale. But to actually clear out the remaining pests, I needed the cavalry. I tucked sweet alyssums and marigolds everywhere I could fit them. Those tiny flowers act like a beacon for the ladybugs and parasitic wasps. Once the predators arrive the scale and the aphids become an all-you-can-eat buffet and just to make sure the whole system has the fuel it needs I added the quartermaster dwarf beans to pull nitrogen straight out of the atmosphere and fix it into the soil. Before we move on I want to address a stack of great questions I've been seeing in the comments from folks asking Gazza, what if I don't want to plant beans? Can I swap them out for something else? Can I use herbs and lavender instead? Look, the short answer is absolutely. Permaculture isn't a strict military doctrine. It is a set of principles. When I use dwarf beans as a nitrogen fixer, you don't have to use beans. If you'd rather use and plant peas, clover or even chop and drop pigeon pea, the soil biology doesn't care. As long as someone is doing the nitrogen job. And as for herbs and lavender plant them everywhere. Lavender and rosemary brings in the beneficial pollinators like absolute champions. Just keep it on the outer edges of the citrus tree. Swap things out based on what you actually like to eat, what grows in your climate and what you've got sitting in your shed. That's the whole point of this gig, making the Making the system work for you. Not locking yourself into a rigid design rule book. When I finally stepped back and let the guild do its job, the tree healed itself. That was a massive light bulb moment for me. But the danger of seeing all these interacting systems, the swales, the soil biology, the defending guilds, is that it's incredibly easy to get completely overwhelmed and paralyzed before we even put a spade in the ground. The absolute biggest mistake I made early on was looking at the whole block and then trying to build the entire shire in a single weekend. I would map out massive food forests, dig huge trenches and plant out 50 trees all at once. And every single time within a month the weeds would take over, the summer heat would hit and I would be burnt out. I realized pretty quickly by trying to conquer everything at once I was actually achieving nothing. So, I created a new rule for myself, I just focus on one square metre at a time. Instead of trying to fix the whole yard, I just focus on one sick citrus tree or one empty patch of grass and I get that single square metre right. I lay down cardboard, I add compost, I plant defending guilds and I mulch heavily. i just watch it and make sure it works then once this area is thriving and defending itself i move on to the next meter building this kind of life isn't a race and it certainly doesn't require you to be an expert for me it's just been a long series of quiet observations a lot of dead plants and a few really great victories I am going to keep on tinkering, I'm going to keep on failing forward, and I'm going to keep on sharing the reality of the dirt here at Placid Hills. Thanks for sitting down and spending time with us today. Get out in your yard, just tackle one square metre, speak friend and garden, and I will see you on the next project, if these geese allow me to. They don't like it when I pat Winston. A big thank you to Mick from Meriburra. He called me up the other day. He was watching my videos and he noticed that I didn't have any pigeon pea growing. And so he sent me some in the mail and some marigolds. Thanks again, Mick. Cheers. I'll return the favour. Thank you.