Sustainability. What's really possible on a suburban 600m block

Hi, I'm Tilly from Tillys Garden, Garden host and vice chair of REGT and this week I shared my lived experiences, gained skills and acquired knowledge with Redlands Organic Growers Inc.

When I share with people that I save and average of $1600 a month because of my garden, people are always shocked by the size of my block, and as they say it's not the size that counts but how you use it. And nothing is more true!

I may be on a small 600m suburban block, but I have crammed in over 60 fruiting trees and have over 120 varieties of food producing plants, plus ducks and chickens and we still had space for a trampoline.

Our savings aren't just from our grocery bill, and it didn't happen overnight though. Since purchasing and moving in back in Nov 2019, I followed on from my previous experiences and worked to set up and establish a productive permaculture garden (permanent agriculture for those who haven't been roped into this great method yet). And with in 2.5 years my financial tracking sheet was showing a savings of just over 16k by June 2021...so of cause I added more plants and infrastructure, and we came out 2k behind by August 2021. Which was also when I had to scale back my plans dramatically because I got to live in the hospital for just under 8 months. Luckly all my previous work and planning meant that my garden was settling in and establishing itself and it grew along nicely. As did our bub, who a quick forced eviction from the lovely cosy home into a very bright hospital room in the April of 2022. And a few months later we were home and I was back in the garden

During the following months as I pottered about the garden more and got back to keeping my tracking spreadsheet up to date adding in more trees and edible plants, more varieties of food and more infrastructure, we still came up a few thousand ahead of where we would had we not had the garden

So how was all this money saved possible? Doesn't it cost more to grow a carrot then to by it at the shops? Well yeah, if you put all the effort, infrastructure and time into just one carrot of cause it would be more expensive than a shop carrot. How do I make a huge saving then? Well I don't just grow one carrot, and I also had the benefits of previous gardening experience and knowledge to help me kick start my garden here. 2020 saw quite a change in our society and interaction with the greater global communities. And this did sharpen my focus to what plants and styles of garden I created on my block. I started planning for sufficiency and sustainability as best as I can in suburbia. Because like most millennials and younger generations, we have very different world to what our parents had. Our income was not enough to get out acreage dream, and even though 6 years on we have great jobs, acreage within an hour of our workplaces will probably be out of our price range for a long time. This then coupled with food prices and every other cost constantly rising while food nutrition keeps decreasing are the driving factors for creating the garden I have. Thus armed with my knowledge I turned my dirt into a thriving garden. We are solely dependent on the grid for our water and electricity (even though our roof is covered in solar panels, we still pay each quarter, no savings there) but we can be independent when it comes to food production. So if everything hit the fan tomorrow, could we weather the crisis and could we support ourselves and help neighbours? in short yeah, it wouldn't be the most luxurious, but we would be getting close to comfort quick enough. Not the comfort we are used to but, a relative comfortability. we wouldn't be hungry at least. How do we do this?

First thing to think about is our personal survival and how to secure that, put your own mask on before helping with others masks. Calories, we as humans need a set amount of calories just to run our basic life functions, then more calories for the amount of activity we are doing, and growing food will take quite a few extra calories that a large portion of people aren't used to doing. Having calorie dense food in the garden is a great start to sufficiency. Though thanks to that one sport teacher we all probably know we understand that empty calories are not great. If we grow our calorie dense food we also want to make sure it will have the most nutrition in it.

Lets start with our calorie dense foods for our climate

Our most calorie dense year-round easy to grow food plant is sweet potato. 2000-4000 calories in a m2 of garden space its one of the most dense per meter. A relatively easy starter plant for most gardeners. I recommend keeping this contained in a large shallow pot or I have found 200lt squat growbags work wonderfully. when you're ready to harvest you can upend the container and ferret out the gold nuggets and then replant the same day, no damage to other root systems, no carefully digging around other plants. Just a nice dump of soil and food. I have a video up on my YouTube that's a few years old now but shows my process of how I start sweet potatoes. Also while we don't eat them ourselves (due to reactions to the sap for me) the leaves and stems are edible, and cook like spinach. We feed them to the chooks and ducks and a couple to the guinea pigs every now and then.

Second crop I love is Taro, I grow 3 types, also in pots. I chose a wicking style pot as this plant is a moisture lover. Naturally found along creeks and seasonal streams in its native habitats. It loves to keep a toe or two in wet soil, though it isn't a fan of much more swimming than that. Taro is a calorie rich corm full of starches and fiber along with magnesium, potassium, A, B6 and E vitamins, its got the nutrients to help your body recover from a long day in the garden. By growing this crop in a wicking pot, we can keep its little toes happy while reducing the water wasted via evaporation. only the leaves of some varieties are edible cooked, and some taros can be irritating to bare skin prior to cooking. Taro should always be cooked prior to consuming because it contains oxalic acids which have been know to cause kidney stones. cooking in water releases these making it safe to consume in good quantities.

Qld Arrowroot, another starchy high calorie crop, 24% carbs, and also grows well in pots. Bonus, the leaves make a great chop and drop crop. Pick when young and half the size for eating fresh. It can be eaten raw, or cooked most ways a potato is cooked. You can also grind and separate the starches for Arrowroot flour, for use in thickening stews, custards, and as a part wheat substitute in biscuits. Keep a few tubers to replant and you will have an all year supply.

Peanuts are also a fantastic crop to grow, also in a pot but will happily survive in a garden (but hard to get rid of once there) Peanuts have the added bonus of being really high in an extractable oil. This oil has a high smoke point and is perfect for cooking. If we had to stop global trade and could no longer truck products around the country, I think most people would be stuck with what to oil their pans with. peanuts grow all year in the Redlands (some seasons are better for harvesting though) and a pestle and mortar and a cloth is all that's needed for oil extraction, and really not so much the cloth. just grind the nuts (roasted or raw is up to personal preference on flavour) into a fine paste and let sit, the oil will separate as the solids sink. just like when your peanut butter is left in the cupboard for a long time. the oil can be cooked with and the solids can be turned into multiple yummy high calorie high protein, fiber rich foods, also did you know peanuts are a legume/bean? They make nitrogen available to all other plants without the need for fertalisers.

All of these high calorie crops are self-propagating and will happily spread over most of the garden if you let them, producing more and more food for you. But left face it, it would get pretty boring if that was all you ate. Having a variety of plants that have different and spread-out harvest windows is essential to avoid a sudden glut, followed by no harvests, Fruit trees are of cause an exception as each tree will have a peak harvest time, and you get a glut of fruit. By choosing a variety of fruit though you can have fruit available all year, apples & mangos across summer, lemons and elderberries in autumn, orange and mandarin in winter and strawberries and blueberries in spring.

How I make sure my other food producing plants have the most bang for their buck. When we are looking at nutrient dense food we can judge it from multiple angles. Lets go into a little dive full of quick but helpful tangents

Supermarket food is grown not for nutrient density, but for how it be grow for easy mechanical low human involvement growth and harvest, for the transportability and also the profitability per acre/ton. A food that wont last in transport over the world, is not viable for supermarkets. The most amazing gift out home-grown produce has is, hand harvestable, zero food miles, zero need to store in a shipping container, and zero need to look good on a shelf for a week. We can walk out our door, pick a plant ripened fruit and eat it in the garden or later for dinner. We can pick our food plants then for high flavour and high nutrition varieties. This is where the human body is fantastic, our taste buds have evolved to taste the nutrient density of a crop. The more flavor we detect means the more flavonoids in the crop, and that is directly in relation to how much nutrition is in that crop for us. (and also plant sugars, which we need those calories to fuel our bodies) How do I make sure my plants are going to make heaps of these flavonoids? Well this leads into the Soil Food Web rabbit hole, and Dr Elaine Inghams life work. Simplified, means if I focus on creating good soil for the plants, the plants will take care of the nutrition. If your food has access to the best nutrients and is creating the healthiest plant it can, you will have access to the best as well.

We also look at enzymes, the food we eat (most of it) has a vast array of enzymes, the ones we are after those is the ones that will help out body break down the nutrients in our food in the most efficient way. This will vary crop to crop, but most of our food loses more than half of those helpful enzymes in the first few hours of harvest. When we can pick and eat out food close together, we are securing the easiest way for our bodies to process the maximum nutrition. Lettuce can lose up to 80% in the first 30mins of being harvested. Seed crops and roots hold onto the enzymes a lot longer and can be stored for longer periods and maintain nutrition.

There are two helpful groups of life in the soil that feed our plants. We have fungi and bacteria.

Different plants prefer different ratios of these two helpers. Annuals and fast growers prefer a bacteria dominated soil 2:1 or sometimes even 4:1 and our trees and long-lived crops love a fungal dominated soil 1:2. I go into more detail about the soil ratios plants love here.

Our plants go through a day cycle, starting just before sunrise they begin to draw up bacteria and fungal helpers which are holding onto various minerals and nutrients along with sugars in the soil. The roots then transfer these minerals and sugars though out the plant, with most of the sugars heading to the leaves to aid in photosynthesis, this peaks for a few hours wither side of midday. Then as the sun begins to set, the plant returns some of the sugars back down to the soil and pushes back out the helpers. With the new evenings worth of sugars the helpers come in close to the roots, multiply and absorb any soil nutrients around...then come morning it all starts again. Without these helpers our plants can't reach the nutrients, and without a root system to feed them soil helpers are reliant on soil sugars only. We also know the healthier a plant is the more sugars it will produce, and thus the more nutrition it can suck up, and then it can produce even more sugars.

So how can we easily check if our food is the most nutrient dense and if our soil life is working, without expensive labs and microscopes to check the soil? With a refractometer! What we are looking for is the sugar content of the leaf sap, known as the Brix. read more about Brix in our helpful guide

Brix levels in leaves give us a very close to precise measurement of how healthy our plant is and how nutrient dense the food will be. It also will tell us how pest and disease resistant the plant is. As insects don't have a pancreas, and they can't process complex sugars. So as our plant has more sugars going around, the less likely a bug wants to eat it. the same way we do not want to eat super salty food that could make us sick, a bug will choose less sugary food to eat. Dr Tom Dykstra's work into insects and leaf brix is worth a dive into. This following table shows leave brix and at what point what bugs want to bail off a plant.

This also means that you don't actually need a refractometer to get a general gist of your brix. just see which bugs are eating it. if you have caterpillars (chewers) but no aphids (sap suckers) then your leaf brix should be higher than 8 when you measure it. Same if you are only seeing grasshoppers but nothing else, your Brix will be higher then a 12.

Dr Tom also likens Brix measurements to a plants need for life support and what inputs we need to add in. If your plant is 1-3 Brix, your plant needs to be in the ICU on full life support. It won't have enough sugars to excrete at night into the soil to gain any soil helpers. You will need to be actively feeding the soil to feed the life in it. At a 10-12 Brix, a plant is just out of hospital and in recovery. Also it helps to think of insects as natures clean up crew, they are just helping a plant break down to feed the soil as its no longer healthy enough to support itself.

The soil food web, directly link into plant health and can be measured by Brix. By having this system working for you, you save money on pesticides (which aren't selective, they harm the good bugs too.) and you get healthier because you are eating more nutritious food.

In my garden I have made all this happen with managing a compost and worm system and incorporating animals (for the little packages they leave behind) like chickens, duck and guinea pigs. As well as moving away from the row style garden into more of a mixed food forest. This works in to create a almost self managed soil feeding system. I also follow a succession sowing Calander I made myself, so I always have something new going in as I'm harvesting other crops. I check my leaf brix monthly and keep track of each plant in a spreadsheet helping me to gain a overview of my gardens health and to monitor if any of my inputs (compost and worm castings) are needed. Our money saved comes from savings in fertiliser (as we have the compost, and animals)

We don't buy mulch, because we grow and make our own though the chop and drop method.

We save on gyms fees, as most of our weekends spent in the garden is a significant work out.

We save in fresh food bills, as we grow 85% of our fresh food.

We save in other areas as we cook our own sauces, pickles, jams, bread, cakes, cereal, from our garden produce and we buy our grains to mill it into flour, direct from farmers.

We haven't brought eggs in 6 years.

We save in chook and duck food by growing roaches, larvae and worms in the worm farms.

We save in animal food by sharing our produce with them.

And we save in seeds and cutting by attending garden shares and by saving our own seeds from varieties that we enjoy eating.

Our savings come from all aspect of our lifestyle, not just the food we eat straight out of the garden. but in how we use that food. We are still purchaseing grains, meat, dairy, salt, sugar and bicarb, also the standard household items and toiletries, and what fruit and veg we want to eat out of season. Such as apples as my husband needs his apple a day, also our child loves broccoli and cauliflower so we are buying that fresh weach week most of the year.

To know how much I have saved, just by having my garden I pop all my harvests into a spreadsheet and then check what price that would be at the shops, I take an average of the market price. I also an in any inputs like my time and any purchased products. This tally's up over 12 months and I assess where we are at each year, and what my spending budget can be. This year we purchased 5 large raised beds and fencing for our duck area. plus all extra soil to go into the raised beds.

I know, its a lot to take in, sufficiency is a multilayered lifestyle. But all of this is possible to get started on a super tiny budget (sometimes even free) with some extra knowledge of how to replicate this on a 600m block, I have friends who are also managing to do this on a 500m block, thought they do average slightly less harvests at around 70-80% of their food needs. On my YouTube channel and other socials I focus on small block sustainability and a holistic gardening system. I create how to, grow along and also just a bunch of garden update videos. I don't like to edit and polish them to much, as I'm not trying to be some big garden influencer, I just want to share my cost saving, food growing experience for everyone to benefit from.