Gardening Trial: 'The Wilderness Garden', creating a garden to suit Australian Conditions.

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Written by Admin | 10 July 2011

I’m very excited! Today I received my ‘The Wilderness Garden’ book, written by the well known garden writer Jackie French. This is the first of Jackie French’s books I’ll be reading as it sounded so ‘me’! If this book appeals, and does what it says it does, I’ll definitely be reading more of her books, as the idea described on the back of this book is just what I need. This book claims it will help me establish a garden which is suited to the Australian conditions. Therefore it will not need watering, digging, or weeding......does this get any better?

‘Wilderness Garden’ describes my gardens alright! Although our plant nursery usually looks pristine & tidy (fingers crossed), somehow the vegie garden (and some of the motherstock gardens) are chaos. Especially during the wet season (around December/January), weeds grow faster than you can pick them, and the bugs have a party on all things edible. The photo on the left is not my garden, it's the road to the plant nursery, it's so beautiful and bushy around here I had to show you :)

While I’m reading this book, and hopefully while I’m implementing the ideas described, I’ll be sharing my experiences with you. Running a plant nursery means I don’t have a lot of time for tending to my own garden, and Jackie claims she gets most of her vegies from her ‘wilderness’ garden, with only 1 hour of work a week! This sounds like heaven.

Also, running a plant nursery doesn’t mean I’m automatically an expert in growing ALL plants. All our plants are propagated & grown by us, so this means we know from experience how to grow the plants, what conditions they need, and how to package them properly. However, I’ve never had a lot of success with my own vegies. Of course, this isn’t due to my gardening ability...... rather all the ‘outside factors’ such as birds possums, kangaroos, grasshoppers, caterpillars and the likes. I live on a 47 acre bush property which comes with wildlife in my backyard, which I love! I need a way to live with them, enjoy them, AND grow my own vegetables.

Jackie mentions a way to use ‘decoy’ plants to attract the birds to, so they don’t eat your tomatoes – I love the sound of this. The back of the book reads:

‘You don’t need to water your garden! Or weed, prune, spray or dig it.... at least, not if you throw out the old European ideas of gardening, and design a growing system that suits Australian conditions.’

Well, with soil resembling our gravel road, and a pronounced dry season of around 4-5 months, this sounds like me. Traditionally in our plant nursery, when building gardens for motherstock plants, we bring in a trailer load of our home-made compost, dump it on top of the rock layer, and plant straight in the compost. We use whatever we can in our compost pile, which is a huge affair of around 3m high and 5 meters wide. We need a big loader to turn it!

All plant material from the nursery goes in this pile, plus the old soil from pot plants which are being re-potted or have died. We like to put the old soil in it as well, as it not only replenishes it with nutrients, it also kills seeds, weeds, diseases and spores due to the piles getting very hot. The compost process heats it up so you can see steam come of it!

My ride-on collections (leaves and grass, sometimes bits of rock....) go straight on top of the garden as mulch, but any sticks or fronds I come across on the way go in the compost pile, and of course all the vegie scraps. This makes a beautiful, rich compost and plants love it. However, it is a mission, and plants do still need a lot of water (a lot of them being tropical plants and edibles) so I’m always up for suggestions as to how to make it easier for ourselves.

I have also not been very successful in growing fruit trees and vegies so I’m hoping this book will help me do that, and turn this property into the paradise I’ve envisaged for it. Not that it isn’t already good, it’s a dream, but you can always have more food, more fruit, more wildlife & birds, and more plants! I’m looking forward to growing some of the rarer fruits & bush tucker trees, like Jaboticaba’s, Chocolate Pudding Fruit (Black Sapote), Mangosteen (already successfully growing 5 Mangosteen trees, but hoping to have them grow even better), Tamarillo’s, Galangal Ginger etc.

Thanks for going on this journey with me, I hope you’ll enjoy it and I hope I’ll learn some things that I can share with you.