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advocate, Backyard Gardening, Resilience, Self-sufficiency, Urban agriculture

Angelo Eliades – Practising Permaculture in Preston

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A version of this article was first published in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday 9th June, 2012

A little over a month ago I introduced Angelo Eliades, and his permaculture food forest experiment in the Melbourne suburb of Preston. What Angelo has done embodies the wave of food self-sufficiency sweeping the inner north and west of Melbourne. This wave has been generated by individuals and community groups, but it’s increasingly being embraced by local governments, who are integrated policies on community gardening, edible streetscapes and urban orchards into their policies and strategic frameworks.

Angelo is remarkable for the methodical and systematic way he has built his backyard food forest, and in particular for his documentation of everything he’s done, from species selection, plantings, climate events and yields. All of this is available at his blog, deepgreenpermaculture.com.

Angelo built his food forest on the ‘leached and lifeless’ soil of his 80m2 backgarden during the winter of 2008. He calls his method ‘backyard orchard culture’. It’s based around the careful selection and strategic siting of a range of different tree species (Angelo has 30), interspersed with numerous varieties of berries (21, with multiples of several varieties), herbs (90) and other perennials, with some space left for annual vegies. Typically early, mid- and late fruiting varieties will be chosen, because ‘this gives extended seasonal cropping – instead of having one tree produce a glut of fruit all over a few weeks, you can extend your cropping [over several months].’

For Angelo, a key motivator is yield; his aim was to show what’s possible in a small space, the ‘typical suburban backyard’ in inner Melbourne. Remember, he wanted to counter the scepticism of folks in DPI and elsewhere who scoffed (and still scoff) at the idea that permaculture and backyard gardening can actually produce significant amounts of food.

Angelo Eliades in his garden in Preston, Melbourne
Angelo Eliades in his garden in Preston, Melbourne

But he’s also very interested in resilience: in selecting species that can do well in a Melburnian climate that is behaving increasingly erratically, with damp and cool summers, short and mild winters, freak hail storms, and extremely hot days in early spring. Never mind the droughts, the fires and the floods.

So he and his colleagues are looking abroad and at other cultures and agricultural traditions, trying out species that you wouldn’t think of as forming part of the ‘normal’ Australian diet, if such a thing still exists. The multi-functional and ‘very highly productive’ Peruvian root crop yacón is one. “It’s very sweet, you can eat is straight, or stir fry it; you can also produce a natural, inulin-based sweetener out of it”, says Angelo.

The cold hardy babaco, a member of the paw-paw family, is another tree that features in his food forest. It’s also known as champagne fruit, because it tastes ‘like a lemon-sherbet pineapple-strawberry blend and it’s quite fizzy’. It also has medicinal properties, having four times the bromelain (anti-inflammatory) content of pineapples. And, Angelo told me, it ‘makes great smoothies, too’. Unfortunately none were ripe when I visited. He expects the tree to yield 50kgs per year when it reaches maturity at four years.

Angelo explains the strategic thinking that informs the selection of perennials, not annuals, in this type of orchard design:

“They’re more flavour-intensive, they’re far hardier, and they grow much better. We find all these types of plants, like French sorrel, and perennial spinach, things that are high-yielding and good tasting. And then we propagate them, and distribute them out through the local community, so everyone gets hold of these plants. The more we share them, the more we have of them.”

You can see here the outlines of a vision for a community-based resilient food future, which I’ll flesh out more in a later column. But what about his yields? Angelo has documented approximately 200kgs per year, with a roughly 60-5- 35 split between the trees, the berries and the vegies. All his trees are a few years away from maturity, – a third are not yet producing at all – so he thinks 500kg a year is quite feasible.

Even his current yield equates to 14 tonnes per acres. Average dryland wheat yields in Australia are in the 2 tonne per acre range, even after many many millions of dollars have been spent on research and genetics. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

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advocate, Backyard Gardening, Fruit growing, Self-sufficiency, Urban agriculture

Food Forests – food for the future?

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A food forest in Preston

A version of this article appeared in the Coffs Coast Advocate on Saturday, 5.5.12

Recently I’ve been travelling to Melbourne a fair bit, as part of a team working on a research project funded by the Federal Government’s National Climate Change A­daptation Research Facility. NCCARF, as it’s known, is funding dozens of research projects over a wide range of social, environmental and economic fields, many of which will be discussed at its annual ‘Adaptation in Action’ Conference to be held in Melbourne from 26-28 June this year.

NCCARF is currently funding three food security projects, examining, respectively, the impacts of climate change for risk management and the preparedness of food industry leaders; creating a climate for food security in terms of business, people and landscapes in food production; and urban food security, urban resilience and climate change.

It’s the last one I’ve been involved with, and in a nutshell the aim is to better understand how urban and peri-urban agriculture can help meet the challenges of climate change and food security, and build more resilient towns and cities in Australia. Two case study areas have been chosen for this research, Melbourne and the Gold Coast, hence my recent travels.

I’ve met and interviewed  over 30 people from different walks of life, from local government planners, to health and nutrition professionals, community gardeners, market gardeners, backyard gardeners and food security advocates. I’ve been left with lots of impressions, not the least of which is that there’s an extraordinary  amount of activity and enthusiasm for urban agriculture and local food in Melbourne.

I’ve also been struck by the disconnect between this level of activity and enthusiasm, and the low value that the State government (both the current Victorian government and the previous one) has placed on prime agricultural land close to the city. According to the Planning Institute of Australia, on current trends regarding the constant expansion of Melbourne’s Urban Growth Boundary, 25,000 hectares of quality farmland will be lost to residential development by 2020. Doesn’t seem to matter whether it’s coal-seam gas or new McMansions, it seems pretty clear that food growing rates way down the list of priorities of State government planners and political leaders.

Many people, myself included, are firmly of the opinion that we – and most certainly our children – will rue these choices to chase the short-term buck over long-term sustainability and resilience.

The Melbourne urban food and agriculture movement, which seems to be geographically concentrated in an arc of suburbs heading north and north-west of the city, such as Fitzroy, Clifton Hill, Brunswick, Northcote, Thornbury, Coburg and Preston, is full of people and groups who see some sort of breakdown in the ‘Big Food’ system as likely. Here, and over the next few weeks, I’m going to introduce you to one of them: Angelo Eliades.

Angelo is a life-long resident of Preston, and has been a keen organic gardener since 2002. A few years ago Angelo taught himself the principles of permaculture – he subsequently did his PDC with Bill Mollison – and decided to put them into practice by taking three months off work and transforming his small suburban backyard into a permaculture food forest.

Angelo Eliades in his garden in Preston, Melbourne
Angelo Eliades in his garden in Preston, Melbourne

He was motivated to do this, he said, by the ‘scepticism towards permaculture’ he saw amongst horticulturalists. ‘There was just too much doubt, too much dissenting opinion, about whether it can really work’, he told me. ‘So I said, enough’s enough, it’s time to call their bluff, and build something that shows it really does work.’

And that’s what Angelo did with his backyard food forest. But Angelo is no starry-eyed idealist, he’s a working scientist. Which is what makes him, and his project, so unique. He set out quite explicitly to use his backyard as an experiment, to rigourously document everything he did, and all his yields, in order to establish that bio-intensive gardening of this sort can indeed be highly productive.

‘I have no time or space for wild speculation’, he said. ‘For me, my food forest was really to prove that the concept worked. As a scientist, if something’s scientific, that means it’s repeatable.’

In the next few columns, we’ll look at how he did it, what he’s achieved, and what his plans are for the future.

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