Hello everyone,
I just found this forum a few days ago and haven't even scratched the surface of all the posts yet. I first heard of permaculture years ago when Bill Mollinson did a TV show called In Grave Danger of Falling Food (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrtJbk8_GY8). Since then I've read about permaculture and tried to implement some of the ideas in a mish-mash sort of way, but have never really done it. I think partly it's because I know nothing about gardening and most of my efforts seem to be in controlling weeds. I also always seem to have either too much work leaving me too little time, or plenty of time but no money. I have put in a number of fruit trees and perennials like tree tomato and globe artichokes, and grow some vegetables, and I've had chickens for years, but I've never really got the 'hang' of permaculture in the sense of designing a system. I now want to do that, and I'm determined to learn as much as I can, but as always I just don't really know where to start or how to design something when I know so little about gardening.
I live in South Australia in an outer metropolitan area on a suburban block about 680 sq metres, It's a Mediterranean climate with cool wet winters and hot dry summers. The soil is clay and there's limestone around 30cm below the surface, which means trees take a long time to break through and get properly established. I've just started experimenting with raised beds, but now have learned they're probably a bad idea in this climate.
Linda
