The brief was; food forest for the whanau, visually appealing with some clean lines.
The Vogletown, 300m2 rear section is flat and sunny. Like the rest of Taranaki, this land gets very good rain fall in our temperate to sub-tropical climate.
A site analysis highlighted a good range of possible micro climates to obtain a diverse yield from. After a good korero with the hosts on what their vision was, a team of 3 designers put some concepts down on paper.
After some more healthy of to’ing and fro’ing, we had a final design. Not sure when the design is actually final, seems to be to be a constant process of observing and interacting. Anyway, it was time to swap pencils for spray cans and draw it out full scale… and, of course, a few more tweaks to the design : )
The design; A food forest will fill in the less traffic’ed areas. The outside bath corner, is a great sub tropical micro climate, so a grey water banana mulch pit will fill that niche. Heavy rain events naturally pool up in the middle of the lawn, so we’ll roll with that, and create a rain garden. A swale will capture and store water, this can be regulated to store more water in summer. Three annual garden beds will go down, these beds are designed to fit a chook tractor to also deal with the families green waste, and become a source of protein – eggs! If needs be, lawn space has been left to allow up to a further 4 or 5 garden beds.
Permablitz day! Nau mai haeremai ki te mahi maraa kai!
What great hearts, muscle and depth of knowledge we have here in Taranaki. Even though we had some showers and some further tweaking of the design , that didn’t slow the good mahi down, and we celebrated our hard work soon after 4pm.
A real privilege and honor to part of something much larger then myself. To take another step to create strong, resilient communities. Tuia te maara, Tuia te tangata.
The first Permablitz was run with a small team from the 2016/17 Taranaki PDC class. Be very keen now to open it up to other PDC’ers in the region, to have a small or large part in practicing permaculture via a Permablitz. Get in touch if you’ve got something in mind.
Go well
Nick
permablitztaranaki@gmail.com
