Below standard

Seems my 'living in a forest-garden' piece was not of interest to the Standard authors, either that or it went missing in the ether. No matter, here's what I wrote. Probably too flippant.Or maybe I'm too impatient. I can be impatient.

Dave Kennedy’s very good post on the politics of food in Southland provoked a stream of largely supportive comments and a chance for me to give an insider’s view of a particular brand of food production; forest gardening and an opportunity to show that Southland isn’t some insignificant southern promontory populated by thick-pelted sea mammals stretched out on cold, sub-Antarctic rocks under a pale sun, yearning en masse to relocate to Auckland, Centre of the Known Universe. Oh no, the seals and we Southlanders do not! I’m not wanting to start a regional flame-war here; I’m certain there will be regions as just as delightful as Southland but this is the soil and climate I know best and it suits forest gardening down to the ground. Our garden, situated on a gentle northerly slope formed of deep loamy soil and watered with clean rain straight from the southern ocean, is an old food-forest, by food-forest standards. There are some ancient ones scattered about the globe, mostly tropical in location and nature but most are in their infancy, begun with the recent slew of youtube clips, radio interviews and magazine articles lauding the food-forest and those who create them. Ours then, is well established, at 25+ years old, and producing like a cool climate Horn of Plenty. Our garden oozes berries, drips plums and beats visitors around the head with apples. It’s stacked, in the manner of the best permaculture orchards, like a trifle; a canopy of bird-friendly, perch-perfect taller trees, sub-canopy of pear, apple, plum, nectarine and peach trees, all bearing up under the weight of their fruit at this early-summer period, bushes of fungi and grub-free berries and currants, a Southern speciality and a herbal layer that features everything that can be added to a salad or used to cure an ill. At ground level, bulbs, creepers, carpeters and …you get the picture; abundance with a touch of abandon. It’s easy-manage gardening. We don’t mow lawns, we eschew them. No petrol-motor sounds here, what work is carried out is handy-work. Birds flock here for the peace and quiet. Or perhaps it’s the berries. It is the berries. And the fruits. We favour perennial vegetables; cardoons, sea-beet, asparagus and so on, along with colonisers like yams and potatoes that can replicate themselves and provide an easy-care harvest year after year. People visit. Aucklanders too. They seem to find it both refreshing and stimulating. We wander the self-formed paths (I let pre-schoolers on visits pick their own paths through the undergrowth then we adults use those meandering, natural trails thereafter) and swap ideas - one of our most vigorous crops. It’s biodiversity writ large and causes me some angst when I’m sitting around the polished boardroom table at Environment Southland, when the issue of dairy farming comes up, and that’s every sitting day, when I want to shake my fellow councillors and shout “What about biodiversity! How about we require a standard of naturalness on those too-simplistic-to-be-healthy farms!!!” But I hold my tongue. I’ll a peaced-out kinda guy. If, in my dotage, I look about me and find that forest-gardens have spread like a beneficial contagion, I’ll fade away a happy man, knowing that finally, we’ve got it right and have settled with the planet. My sincere belief is that forest gardens, food-forests, permaculture farms, call them what you will, are the panacea for the hack-job we humans have done on our home-planet so far and that once we all have one to recreate in, or at least a shared-space that fits the description, we’ll come right as a species.