Permaculture

Back in the 90’s what is now called the Djanbung Gardens was a degraded compacted cow pasture. It is now an incredibly productive 5-acre garden. This transformation was achieved by applying the principles of Permaculture.

The term Permaculture was coined by Bill Mollison in 1978. Bill was no ordinary boffin. Before becoming a senior university lecturer, he left school at 15 and did all sorts of sensible jobs (shark fisherman, forester, millworker, trapper, snarer, tractor driver and finally naturalist). Bill realised that we needed sustainable agriculture, or Permaculture.

If you look at a simple egg, for example, there are two ways to get it: it is an industrial egg bought from a supermarket or it was laid by one of your chooks. The industrial version comes from a battery chicken factory. The chooks in there eat pellet from some pellet mill where they mix tons of industrially harvested grain and fish waste. Every step in that process works against nature and the result is rather disgusting. The home chook version is quite the opposite. OK, you may give them some layers mash as a complement, but if the chooks are allowed to free-range, most of their food comes from nature. You can also use chickens as a tractor: if you let them loose on a weedy bit of neglected garden, they will clean it up, stir up the soil and fertilise it for you. Bonus! And their eggs are delicious.

We can become self-sufficient not only for eggs, but also for fruit and vegies and even meat if we are keen enough. This is what they achieved at Djanbung Gardens.

Quotes:

“You don’t have a snail problem; you have a duck deficiency!” – Bill Mollison

“Our aim is to solve the world problems by creating abundance in our lives and communities” - Robyn Francis, Djanbung Gardens