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Permaculture's healthy harvest

Susan Parsons

Red stemmed chard from Michael Wilson and Fiona Buining's garden in Ainslie.
Red stemmed chard from Michael Wilson and Fiona Buining's garden in Ainslie.Melissa Adams

When Dr Michael Wilson and Fiona Buining moved into their house in Ainslie in 2009, they did a passive solar renovation and extension to the original house.

The temperature does not fall below 15C in winter, and even during heatwaves this summer the maximum was 27C. The block is large and north-facing, and the soil is good from a former market garden and animals kept on site.

After they married, the couple moved from Sydney to Hepburn Springs, where they built a solar passive house and planted fruit trees. They were both taught permaculture by David Holmgren and Bill Mollison, and Buining then taught permaculture design courses while Wilson did his PhD at the University of Ballarat. When they moved to Canberra in 2004, Buining began teaching school science and Wilson started work at the Murray Darling Basin Authority.

Cupboard of preserves -sour cherries, apricots and rhubarb.
Cupboard of preserves -sour cherries, apricots and rhubarb.Melissa Adams
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It was Wilson's great aunt, Myrtle, and her partner, the author and dancer Thea Stanley Hughes, who taught him about beekeeping in their Sydney garden. He has two hives in Ainslie that provided 30 kilograms of floral garden honey in January.

Nine chooks free-range in the orchard, and their manure contributes to the soil along with animal manures, blood and bone, compost and mulch. Household urine diluted with water and Seasol are used on the vegetables, and wood ash from the wood heater is added in winter. Legumes are grown for long-term fertility, so wattles and albizias are planted in the large orchard.

There are six varieties of plums, and the satsuma blood plums are ripe for picking and juicily luscious eaten straight off the tree. Non-astringent and astringent persimmons, quinces and the couple's first crop of nashis are ripening. Wilson keeps a garden diary and has drawn a map of the orchard to scale. On the map are marked three varieties of peach trees, two nectarines and two apricot trees, a pear, a loquat, lemon and mandarin. There were only two existing trees in the garden when they moved in, a cherry and a plum.

Michael Wilson, of Ainslie, with Satsuma plums and chooks.
Michael Wilson, of Ainslie, with Satsuma plums and chooks.Melissa Adams

Wilson is raising an Isabella grape vine from a cutting taken in the garden of his youth in Epping, Sydney, and there are black and redcurrants, and seven varieties of berries. Harvested during our visit were decorative edible hazelnuts from a tree under which the chooks foraged.

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Buining saw a sink with taps set up in a school vegetable garden and now has one of her own. It is attached to the rainwater tank and is used to wash soil from harvested root vegetables, including beetroot and baby carrots. The water is returned to the garden.

The day before our visit to the garden she had harvested a bucket full of Heavenly Gold climbing beans and four varieties of green bush beans, yellow button squash, dwarf Lebanese cucumbers, striped zucchini and red-stemmed chard, as well as a bowl of tomatoes from the 12 varieties they are growing.

Green beans and button squash from the garden.
Green beans and button squash from the garden.Melissa Adams

Towering plants of Polaris bi-coloured super-sweet corn, an F1 hybrid, are covered with large cobs.

Seeds for garden sowing are bought from New Gippsland Seed Farm, Diggers, Bellchambers, and the zucchini came from The Italian Gardener.

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As part of the permaculture ethos, many plants, such as rocket, mizuna and lettuce, are allowed to go to seed and beds are not vigorously weeded. There is also a young asparagus patch. Wilson uses a planting calendar from Michael Plane and Joyce Wilkie at Allsun Farm in Gundaroo and says it is invaluable. You can buy it from their website. He also uses their Ho Mi and Gundaroo tiller.

Members of the household don't eat dairy or gluten and, at the moment, they are not eating grains. Fiona Buining does the cooking, and that includes her own recipe for zucchini puffs using grated zucchini, herbs, eggs, buckwheat flour and baking powder, and says these are yummy with red capsicum sauce or homemade chutney. In December and January she bottled sour cherries and rhubarb using old Fowlers Vacola preserving jars from her mum.

>>Susan Parsons is a Canberra writer.

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