Permaculture Plan

Welcome to our Permaculture site!

I have been a permaculture farmer and advocate for over 25 years, and completed the Design Certificate course in Melbourne, Australia in January 2007 as well as a Farm Planning Course sponsored by NSW Department of Agriculture in 2006 and a Landscape Design Course in 2008. We moved to our current property in 2004, and are working on redeveloping our farm into a permaculture farm, with a commercial alpaca herd and a small commercial pomegranate orchard. We also have a small herd of beef cows, as well as geese, ducks, chickens, and Australian Bass fish in our dams, as well as lots of fruit trees and a big vege garden.

As more people are becoming interested in sustainable farming and different farming practices, we thought it might be a good time to let others know what we are doing and how we are going, and what's coming up next. We started our permaculture project in 2004, with Darren Doherty (a permaculture designer) assisting with the original draft plan, and have then redesigned the plan ourselves over time and as we learnt more about the property and how better to work with it. Like most farms, it may never be "finished" but we have another 3 years to go to complete all of the foundation work. Our aim is to build a commercially viable permaculture farm, that is, to make a good living from our commercial farming activities and to be able to provide food and other useful items for ourselves and others in our community.

Our property is outside Braidwood in the southern highlands of New South Wales, Australia. We are half way between Canberra and Bateman's Bay, 3 hours south-west of Sydney, above the coastal ranges and 10km from the Great Dividing Range. The property is not far from the Shoalhaven river, with a few semi-permanent creeks starting at the ridge at the north boundary of our property, which run in heavy rains across our property and down to the Shoalhaven. Of the 250 acres of the property, just over half (all of the hilly ridges on the north boundary) are covered in regrowth bush - snow gums, apple box, black wattle, kangaroo and wallaby grasses, microleana, poa and alpine tussock. The other half has been mostly cleared many years ago, and has some good stands of native trees, and some improved pasture (phalaris oversown into the natural pasture).

Our climate is temperate, with temperature ranges of -8C to 12C in winter and 10C to 30C generally in summer. We generally have rainfall throughout the year, with an annual average of 600mm, but are currently in drought. This means that we have periods of up to 6 - 10 weeks with no rain, a few days of 3mm of rain, and sometimes heavy downpours of 50 - 100mm. We have had a singular spectacular snowfall for 1 day in each of the last 2 winters, but lots of heavy frosts and clear starry nights.

Since we started here in 2004, our major project activities completed include substantial repair of 2 dams, removal of over 25 huge mounds of cleared timbers near the house (a significan reduction in bushfire risk), fencing (repair of internal fences and new fencing into smaller paddocks to allow more intensive grazing and more paddock rotation as well as laneways to allow easy stock movement), Yeoman's ploughing of around 90 acres of cleared pasture, application of organic fertiliser to one third of the pastures and reseeding of 30 acres of pasture with a mix of over 30 types of pasture plants including native and exotic grasses, herbs and forbs. We also stocked 2 of our 6 dams with Australian Bass, which should be ready to begin harvesting next year.

Our next project activities are around water: providing more water storage for the house and sheds (zones 1 - 3), water storage above our major dams (header tanks which can be filled from overflowing dams in times of heavy rain), and water reticulation to troughs in all paddocks; tree planting to extend the orchard and productive timber plots and to provide firebreak trees, windbreak and shelter trees in the paddocks, and to revegetate gullies and semi-permanent creeks. Whilst we have established a mixed orchard in zones 1 and 2 (near the house), we also want to build a larger food forest in zone 3, and to establish more trees and plants to feed our various stock, as well as provide shelter near dams to decrease evaporation. Last spring, we planted many water plants in 2 dams, but most have died as the water levels in the dams dropped and the water's edge receded by over 2 metres. In the mean time, our alpaca herd is growing (of our 56 animals, about 20 are pregnant with crias due in early autumn) as are our poultry flocks.