N Taylor

Sorry! I meant permaculture zone 1.
We are in a mild coastal subtropical climate...warm winters and mild humid summers. Rainfall is typically light showers every day or two.

Thanks James...although it will be the reverse here as I assume you are talking about in the northern hemisphere

As to the general bed layout....suppose I just put in a series of slightly raised beds on contour....any comments on such an approach? Would it be better to build up square / rectangle shaped beds? What about keyholes?

Can anyone suggest how they might arrange the garden beds in the following space? This is where I plan to grow all our veges (zone 1). It gets plenty of sun and is mostly quite flat, very gently sloping to the northeast (about 10% grade). It is surrounded on most sides by a low hedgerow to reduce the wind. Existing paths are marked in grey. A small home orchard sits immediately south of this area.

I can't figure out whether to use keyholes or rectangular beds /rows and how to lay them out. Anyone with a little experience care to offer some suggestions??

It sounds like even the likes of lettuce and kale will not grow where there is NO sun. A fairly large chunk of this prospective garden won't get even a minute of direct sunlight for a couple of months.

Should I just abandon this as a garden bed altogether? Or could it still be useful for growing something in the subtropics?

We're gardening novices and we're trying to plan our garden layout for our new home. The climate is coastal subtropical - temperature and rainfall are quite consistent throughout the year, so I guess people grow food here all year long.
Near to the house there is a lovely location for a vege garden in terms of access. However, it  is on the southern side of the house (in the southern hemisphere), and for a couple of months in the winter it gets no sun at all. For about 9-10 months of the year it gets plenty of direct sunlight.

Does this lack of sun impact what I can do with it much?

Thanks all - appreciate the feed back!

Our new house site has a grade of around 10% (rise/run = 1/10)

We're intending to grow loads of veges around the house, employing the mandala garden design most likely.

Can we put our vege gardens on a slope like this no problem?....or is growing on level ground much preferred for some reason?

I ask because we are about to get the earth mover machine in and I can see we have the option of creating a series of flat terraces, or retain the original slope of the site. I would kind of prefer to NOT to have the terraces, simply for site simplicity, but i don't know whether putting vege gardens/mandalas on a 10% slope can be problematic or not..?

Help?

Thank you for the suggestions all. Some ideas I had not considered....to investigate further!

Is it possible to buy such a washing machine nowadays? So far as I can tell, all modern washing machines require something resembling mains water pressure to operate, whereas in the good ol' days you could have as little water pressure as you liked - the machine just took a long time to fill. See http://www.whitegoodshelp.co.uk/low-water-pressure-and-washing-machines/ for further details if interested.

In a determined bid to rely only on gravity to supply our new home with water, we are only going to have a couple of metres of head.

Does anyone know if a washing machine can still be purchased anywhere that will run on very low water pressure? Can you think of any other way around this, besides buying some kind of pump?

Brilliant. Thank you Thomas, Erik and Dillon! I'll give all of that some serious thought before we commence the build.