Food forests are a quintessential permie approach to food production. By layering plants that work together, a garden can offer a harvest with fewer inputs by mimicking an established forest ecosystem. The extra foliage and root matter in the system provides shade, water retention and organic matter.
After leaving their homeland in France, Claude and Helene Marmoux travelled to Australia where they settled in Sydney. After buying a house there, and running their own business for many years, they left to travel the country where they discovered permaculture through Robyn Francis. ‘Studying the PDC with Robyn Francis in the nineties was exactly what we were looking for, and gave us a new direction in life’, Claude remembers. They knew that a new life, where they provided for themselves, was the best step they could take towards saving the earth: ‘As humans living on a planet with finite resources, our first step is to reduce our impact, which begins with building smaller houses’.
It was a younger Phil Gall, writing for Source in 1971, who set out into Victoria’s East Gippsland to report on a monumental natural farming conference. He came back with a prophetic glimpse into holistic agriculture that informs his design work today.
Taj Scicluna is working to create a fertile and abundant world, where the earth’s resources are distributed fairly, with care and responsibility.
The property is in a region with a history of industrial use, close to the city of Melbourne and the estuary of the Yarra River. One person and three cats currently reside on the property, which is 960 square metres, consisting of a fairly flat and open area.
