My garden started as pretty much a blank slate.  A lovely, sloped, north facing blank slate.   I knew I wanted a grass free back yard, fruit trees and a native habitat section.  I also wanted a bike shed, chook house, and possible a goat shed!  I decided on the design with some expert advice from the permablitz team, then bought all the stuff we’d need, like soil, plants, building material, cardboard, rocks and mulch, so that on the day we we ready to blitz.  For the main part of the garden, which was going to be built up garden beds and paths, we had to cover most of the grass/weeds with cardboard to suppress them, so my new garden beds and paths will be as weed free as possible!  Then we dug a trench around the marked boarders (I had hammered some stakes into the ground and tied string around them to demonstrate how the beds and paths would go) and started putting in the rocks.  As the walls started to take shape pepople started to bring in barrows of soil and soon the plants were getting planted.  We also laid cardboard over in the designated native habitat section and planted some lovely plants in there and mulched it all.  We had some great talks about installing grey water systems and goat and chicken care.  We never got around to building any of the animal or bike shelters, but we did move the compost heap and create a beautiful little stone path to it and all of the garden beds got done, so a very good result all up.

Thanks to everyone who helped!

allie

Caithlin, Nathaniel & Charlie hunt for suitable rocks.

Nathaniel with handpicked rocks, detail of an existing wall in background.

as i understand it, the standard rule for a permablitz is to have a few consultations with a qualified, experienced permaculture designer and draw up a basic design for your backyard.

-what are the most used areas, the ones that have a specific purpose; eg: clothes line, kids area, tool shed, firewood etc.

-what sort of plants/trees are you thinking of planting?  no use planting a quince tree if you hate eating quinces!  something that came up for me was that my folks are allergic to wattle, so that had to be struck off the planting list.

-consider pets’ needs – i plan to have chooks, so we decided to incorporate their run in the orchard area, thus needing a fence with chook wire!

- i have a toddler who likes cars, and standing on roads to look at cars broom, so a very important part of the design was to make a kids area with a sandpit, fenced.

here’s basically what Hamish and i came up with:

the first day, planning the design of the garden.

draft designs for front and back garden, list of materials needed.