The Beginning

My backyard space has undergone many changes over the past few years, from a wild mixture of elephant and wild grass, to a space containing a raised garden bed and a couple trees to its current incarnation which includes a few raised beds, a compost area, a safe space 👀 half-barrel, several varieties of trees and plants and a thoroughly mulched space with little to no wild grass.

Truth be told, not much planning went into the overall design of the backyard, I just planted whatever, wherever there was space. In comes Permaculture to (hopefully) save the day. Permaculture (permanent agriculture/culture) is a design philosophy that seeks to utilize natural systems in order to obtain a yield, be it food or other natural products. A strong component of permaculture is working with nature, living or inanimate, rather than against it.

Permaculture necessitates careful planning in order to create a system that requires minimal effort and maximises utilization of available resources. Using Permaculture principles I’ll be able to:

  1. Produce even more food.
  2. Experiment with different agricultural techniques and conditions.
  3. Increase plant and wildlife diversity.

In order to know where you’re going, you need to know where you’ve come from. I’m going to adhere to this adage and describe my current set up. Leh go.

The Plants 🌿

For such a small space, I have 15 varieties of plants and trees at various stages of maturity (and health 😌) :

  1. Several banana trees (technically a herb)
  2. Pomegranate tree
  3. Soursop tree
  4. Two lime trees
  5. Four pawpaw plants (one male and tree hermaphrodites)
  6. Five scotch bonnet pepper plants
  7. Lettuce
  8. Sweet potato
  9. Immature eggplant…plants
  10. Few spinach plants
  11. Immature suriname cherry tree
  12. Immature mediterranean fig tree
  13. Lemon grass
  14. Basil
  15. Jack or Sword Bean

The Layout

Schematic of backyard

My Attempt at Drawing a Schematic of my Backyard

This backyard space is quite small, having a total area of 100 m2 (1076 sq.ft). Two large wells, taking up 6.82 m2 in total, reduce the area usable for growing directly into the ground, however, these wells will be used in other ways.

The backyard is flanked on its western edge by my house and on the eastern edge by the neighbor’s wall and house. This results in it being partially or fully shaded for ~6hrs per day, depending on the time of year. It’s open on the southern and northern sides which, along with the placement of the houses, acts to channel and accelerate winds (imagine a wind tunnel); an effect that is very noticeable depending on the time of year.

There is a slight slope on the southern end which runs from South to North. This will invariably result in water and nutrient accumulation at the bottom of the slope and a deficit at the top unless techniques are used to minimize this effect.

All of these properties will be taken into account in future planning, plant selection and placement.

Special Features

What is a special feature? In this case, it’s any particular aspect of the backyard that may be outside of the norm and will be discussed in more detail in other posts

Raised Beds

Single Garden Bed

Raised Bed 1

Twin Garden Bed

Raised Bed 2

I have two raised beds, bed 1 and bed 2 (creative I know). Bed 1 is enclosed using leftover concrete blocks while bed 2 is enclosed with scrap pieces of wood. All beds are filled with a layered mixture of dried grass, branches and leaves, soil mix, compost and topped off with dried grass as a mulch. These beds give me greater control over the initial composition of the soil and deter pests.

Compost Space

Compost Area

Compost Area

I have created a composting space out of disused pallets for my kitchen scraps, cut grass and garden clippings. Composting is something so simple and useful that everyone should be doing it….right now. It’s so important that I will do a whole blog post on it😲.

Half-Barrel Bed

Half-Barrel Garden Bed

Half-Barrel Bed

Using a plastic half-barrel, I’ve created safe space(I know, I know) for lettuce . This barrel is filled solely with composted kitchen scraps and is full of worms and other creatures which in turn help to create delicious lettuce.

An added benefit of this setup is that when watered, all of the delicious brown liquid dripping from the bottom is collected and used as a rich fertilizer for other plants in the garden.

The End..of the Beginning

Now that we have an idea of the current backyard situation, we can go about planning for the future. In the next post I will go more deeply into the permaculture design principles and apply them to my backyard, so be on the lookout.👀