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PRI Zaytuna Farm Morning Harvest – You Are What You Pick! (NSW, Australia)

Here’s a typical morning pick of diverse vegetables from the main crop at Zaytuna Farm — today it’s potato, amaranth, spinach, turnip, carrot, long red radish, snow peas, silver beet, sweet root, cassava, arrow root, rocket, Egyptian mustard, turmeric, lettuce, Ethiopian cabbage, daikon radish, beetroot, bok choy, yellow cherry tomato, sweet potato, zucchini and taro.

This is nutrient dense super-food — with zero food miles and zero food guilt.

You are what you eat and it’s even better if it is what you grow.

Geoff Lawton

Geoff Lawton is a world renowned Permaculture consultant, designer and teacher. He first took his Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) Course in 1983 with Bill Mollison the founder of Permaculture. Geoff has undertaken thousands of jobs teaching, consulting, designing, administering and implementing, in 6 continents and close to 50 countries around the world. Clients have included private individuals, groups, communities, governments, aid organizations, non-government organisations and multinational companies under the not-for-profit organisation. In 1996 Geoff was accredited with the Permaculture Community Services Award by the Permaculture movement for services in Australia and around the world. Geoff's official website is GeoffLawtonOnline.com. Geoff's Facebook profile can be found here.

22 Comments

  1. I cant wait to get some produce from my new garden. Sunchokes, goji berries, okra, blackberries, strawberries, clammy ground cherries, hardy kiwi, potatoes, rhubarb, and “moon and stars” melons. Then my three sisters(corn/beans/squash) garden with 100 of each plant. No lettuces this year but will have some next when the garden triples in size. :) Most of what I’ve learned was due to Geoff and his great videos. My 5 acres will sustain me forever thanks to the info he has given. MANY THANKS!

    1. 28 degrees south, 45 kilometres inland from the east coast of Australia, 45m altitude above sea level, subtropics with a leaning towards mediterranean climate.

  2. Great to see you happily working in your garden Geoff. I’m sure you have to find time to squeeze that in.

    1. Every morning everyone on Zaytuna Farm meets me at 6.30am in the main crop garden and works till 8.30am when we stop for breakfast.
      Everybody every day unless you have a very good reason – it is a farm policy and a condition of being here and eating this food.
      Three times late then you’re through the front gate as another “geoffugee”.

      1. That’s great…I’ll have to remember that Geoff if I have the pleasure of visiting your farm. Great idea…

  3. Impressive autumn harvest i must say. The Turmeric on third down left of first photo (with the large autumn-yellowing leaves and bright yellow rhizomes, is well worth the effort of washing meticulously which i know Geoff and Nadia crew do as they do with all things, the Cassava on the top right brings in huge starch crops doesn’t it love it in soups too! Love the white japanese Daikon Radish style on the left: grated, sliced (with mandolin) for instant skemono pickle gratification and its very nutritive leaves. Love the turnip for winter soups with beef bones, marrow bones, for broth (makes my mouth water) Top left with large green leaves looks like achira, purple arrowroot, Canna edulis? an Andean crop that feeds people (best roast them) and animals cow relish it for its roots, dirt and leaves (super easy to make arrowroot (biscuit flour or as a gluten free thickener) smash the tubers or grate them, add water, and leave the large carbohydrate molecules fall on the bottom of dish, recover them and dry them on muslin?). What else is on the photo? Anyone volunteers to name a few please or the varieties if you are keen, or planted it at Zaytuna farm. Come on…there is yam a dioscorea sp, Taro (which sp.?) yellow tomatoes is it? and more. What a treasure of edible diversity.

  4. Geoff, what are you doing to maintain SOM levels and soil fertility? Annual veggies are pretty heavy feeders, especially when grown in the same area over time.

    Nice to see annual vegetables being considered an important part of the larder. I assume that you close the circle by saving seed. That’ll bode well since you will be selecting for plants that do well on your site and micro-climate.

    Well done.

    1. The main crop garden is 12 years old and it was grey sand when we started now it is now dark charcoal and brown crumbly loam full of beneficial soil life with a high organic matter content. There are 12 sections to the garden each 54 meters long by 7 meters wide with 4 full length 1 meter wide raised grow beds in each, 50 chickens are tractored over each garden for 2 weeks in an electric net fence at the end of the 24 week cycle and the grow beds are re-shaped and raked and 4 cubic meters of compost are added to the top of the grow beds and 16 cubic meters of mulch added to the footpaths which is latter pulled up onto the grow beds as the seedlings become large enough and robust enough to be heavily mulched. We also use oxygenated compost tea, worm juice, and bio fertiliser 2 or 3 times in the 24 week cycle of each section. We charge our home made biochar in our compost and compost tea, plus use our own home made bone char in our compost.
      We also save our seed, plant root divisions and cuttings, some have been with us now for over 20 years.
      Our refractometer BRIX readings are always high indicating nutrient dense food.

      1. Our refractometer BRIX readings are always high indicating nutrient dense food.

        Fantastic. Do you ever do a periodic soil test?

        Geoff, you’ve just done permaculture a huge service by not only saying that annual vegetables have an important place in permaculture but by also showing folks who grow annual vegetables how to maintain soil fertility and tilth from within the farm.

        It would be an interesting exercise to measure the nutritional output from the garden for say 1 year. It would simply be a matter of weighing each vegetable and then plug the grams into the relevant USDA nutrition database, eg carrots – https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/show/2949.

  5. Geoff
    Has the condition of the chickens in the ‘on steroids’ tractor improved now they have had a few months of adaptation to the grain free existence?

  6. I form up raised grow beds mostly on contour 1 meter wide about 200 mm high because we are in a wet climate so the beds can drain, and are still easy to keep damp in dry hot periods. With one cubic meter of compost I covers 50 square meters of growing bed which is 20 mm deep (20 litres per square meter) and 4 cubic meters of mulch which covers it 80 mm deep (80 litre per square meter) this is what I consider a minimum for a 24 week growing season, so I add two 10 litre watering cans of oxygenated compost tea 50/50 mixed with water twice in 24 weeks (1 litre per 5 square meters), two 10 litre watering cans of worm juice 50/50 mixed with water twice in 24 weeks (1 litre per 5 square meters), two 10 litre watering cans of bio fertiliser 50/50 mixed with water twice in 24 weeks (1 litre per 5 square meters). I grow in the composted grow bed top and weed very thoroughly as soon as I can see the germinated crop clearly and make sure my crop always has an advantage over the weeds and is bigger and faster, I mulch the tiny young weeds onto the bed by scratching the surface. Once my crops are big enough to handle thick mulching I weed once more then mulch from the footpaths to the grow bed every week getting thicker so that in the end there is very little mulch left in the footpath. I find that 50 square meters will easily grow most if not all of the vegetables needed for one person and we have 48 of these beds in our main crop garden, we work and teach from the main crop 2 hours a day 5 days a week from 6.30am to 8.30am and we pick weigh and record all our production from the main crop and the whole farm.

  7. An excellent vegetable harvest. I’ve been saving seeds here for a few years now and their progeny is becoming hardier every season.

    The three strikes and you’re out is an outstanding conservation strategy. With so many people to teach, systems to experiment with, infrastructure to implement and maintain, plus people to supervise, a passenger can end up being a serious energy sink. Nice work.

  8. Geoff,

    Given the climate you are in and the amount of mulch you use, can you please share how and when you water. On my tour of your farm on the 4th of May, I saw your dripline irrigation in both the main crop garden and Kitchen garden, but forgot to ask.

    Are you watering at a schedule, or on other factors like soil moisture, or sun saturation? Are you soley using dripline, or doing other things such as furrow irrigation, or overhead watering on any specific plants? How to do handle plants that need more water vrs plants that need less? Do you have raised beds designated as X% water and others at Y% water schedules? Or do you just test each bed and flick on the water at 8:30am as needed when you guys head to breakfast?

    I am still trying to work out the kinks in my flooded furrow irrigation design https://forums.permaculturenews.org/showthread.php?16708-Designing-a-Passively-Irrigated-Chook-Clock-System-Based-on-Chinampas and am considering adding dripline. Possibly a temporary dripline only for seedlings. Really not sure. Things seem to be working out but our new dam leaked and we got some very wet plants during the last flood. Hopefully next flood out dam will be leaking less, otherwise we may need to glee or benonite the whole thing. (or pen up some pigs in there)

    This is in Main Arm, NSW so similar but potenitally more flooding as we are right up against a large catchment for the Brunswick River.

    Thank you,
    Martin

    1. We just drip irrigate as required, so often more at the start up of a crop and less at the end. It does depend on crop types a bit and seasonal weather, but we try and limit our water use to a minimum and check soil moisture by feel most of the time, we keep a close watch on the crops for wilt or flooding and adjust accordingly. In the 4,800 m2 main crop garden we try not to grow crops that are fussy, have regular problems and difficulties by selection of crop types and variety. Companion planting crops is part of our choice selection as a general approach.

  9. Thanks Geoff for the great response. Just to clarify when you say you check moisture by feel, does this mean that daily someone sticks their finger in each bed, and turns on that dripline accordingly for that specific bed; as possibly the top rows may be drier than the bottom rows. Sorry for so many questions, I would just love to know what exactly you guys have found to be the best. Your farm is an amazing showcase for the world and I love that you are willing to share all of your information freely with everyone. It is great that the Permaculture movement is so “open source” as this is the only way to halt the world spiraling out of control as it seems to be everywhere around us.

    1. We work in the garden everyday 6.30 to 8.30am and we can generally tell what needs water. We have never ending river of people coming through for monthly stays it is all a lot less accurate than it would be on a well disciplined family farm. Generally more concentration is focused on the recently seeded and young seedlings in the growing beds, then once these are large enough to take heavy mulching there is less focus until cropping.

  10. Great to see you with wet muddy jeans, thats what I look like all the time. LOL.
    Gardeners delight…

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