Suburban Garden

Kathy Yu’s garden on an 800-sq-metre block in the back streets of Derby is a striking example of what is possible for an ordinary household to achieve in sustainability and growing a constant supply of healthy, nutritious food.

Tall, lush banana plants, heavy with huge bunches of fruit line the front driveway. Some of the plants have slipped their suckers under the neighbors fence to share the bounty.

Pawpaw trees also line the fence line, they are heavy with crowds of luscious fruit.

Vibrant greens, herbs and tomatoes and eggplant fill other spaces around the block.

The secret to the vitality of Kathy’s garden is in her composting methods. Nothing goes to waste.  Food scraps are composted using the Bokashi method. This is an easy way of fermenting all food waste so that it breaks down quickly in the soil to provide nutrients for the growing plants.

Another type of compost is made using weeds and leaves.  These are gathered and soaked in the liquid from the bokashi and occasional watering until they break down into rich dark humus.  The illustration shows Kathy’s leaf composter made from a discarded pcb container that has been covered with wire mesh to keep the leaves contained while they are breaking down.

Nearly every household in Derby has plenty of leaves and many people pay serious money or put in great effort raking them up and taking them to the tip.  This is a sad waste of an important resource for the garden.  

These leaves are the building blocks of new nutritious soil which together with the food waste from the household provides everything needed to create a lush and fruitful garden.  The PCB leaf collector is a simple easy way of composting the leaves, however if you want something a bit more sophisticated follow this link to a site that has made leaf composters into art forms.

http://dailydump.org/shopping/index.php/composters/leaf-garden-composters.html

The composters you see on this site are more like very functional garden ornaments and the designers don’t mind if they are copied and utilized.

One difficult aspect of gardening in Derby is the intense heat for at least 6 months of the year.  Therefore, it is useful to grow some plants for shade to protect the more delicate edibles. Kathy uses Cassava for this purpose. 

 It can grow tall and lush very quickly, the leaves and stems are easily cut down and mulched when the shade is not required. It grows very easily from stem pieces and is happy in poor soil with minimum water.  Large potato like tubers grow under the plant, these are cooked like potatoes and provide a highly nutritious carbohydrate.  The leaves can also be eaten but must be cooked properly. Many people use the very young leaves when making bluchung.

Another method Kathy uses for growing fruit trees is cut-down blue drums for citrus. This is a way of protecting the plants from white ants and ensuring the soil is kept rich and moist.

This back-street garden is an inspiration and shows what can be done in suburbia even when all members of the household work full time.  By using the resources to hand it is possible to have nutritious, organic and totally fresh food  all year round on your doorstep.  It also means there is less waste in the household because whatever is not eaten goes back into the soil to keep the cycle going.  This might be how we are meant to live!!