Shea Bee

Hello fellow Australasians

I'm in SE Queensland, Lockyer Valley. Working towards the life-style i want with the skills I have. I've an acre and 1/2 that my partner and our pets call home. I have a fascination with plants and am a carpenter by trade.

Interested in talking about native coppicing, solar, and honestly most anything permaculture wise.

Pleased to meet you

Aaron Yarbrough wrote:Looks great! Thanks for posting an update. There are so many projects I find here on Permies that I wonder how they turned out.

Thanks! It's been so cool to watch it develop, i was holding off on posting earlier haha. I was going to start a YouTube channel or a blog to keep track of my projects but I'm glad I stumbled across permies.com :)

Anne Miller wrote:I thought this method sounded familiar so I looked  and yes, Michael had started a similar topic:

https://permies.com/t/162586/Planting-trees-hole-outcomes

I would love to find out how this works out so please keep the forum updated.

I just checked out the link you posted. Once I start to observe how they grow together I'll comment with my findings. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!

I'll post some progress photos down the line

Joylynn Hardesty wrote:I hope you update this as your trees grow.

It sounds like you are not finished with mulching yet. In case you didn't know, at least in my climate, leaving cardboard exposed to the air, causes it to wick moisture from the ground, evaporating and stealing it from the plants. So I would cover the cardboard edges completely.

I will definitely update!

No, going to finish it off today. It's the same here! Thanks for the heads up,  unfortunately learnt this the hard way a few summers ago. I'm going to drown the lot in woodchip so it should be sweet

Hello fellow Permies,

I have been holding onto some young pecan trees with the intention of trying a method I saw online somewhere. A fellow had planted three trees about 1m from each other in what he called a one hole planting. The theory was that in such close proximity the pecans would dwarf each other in their competition for nutrients. I know this one hole planting isn't a new concept and given that pecans benefit from cross pollination for the most part I was keen to try it out.

I loosened up about a 1.2m round area and amended with mushroom compost which I've been aging under a tarp. I dug up some clods of earth bound together with grass and flipped them upside down on the low side of the planting in an effort to hopefully slow and retain run off. These I covered with some layers of moist cardboard and tomorrow I'll cover the lot in a thick layer of woodchips after a good soak.  

Honestly not sure how it's going to go but that's part of the fun, right?


I'm looking forward to sharing how it fares here over our (southern hemisphere) autumn and winter before hopefully leaping into action come spring

Many thanks!

Shea

Hello again Permies,

Thought I would post an update on my banana circle, it's been about a year since I planted my little trees and they're kicking along really well.

In particular the tree down hill has done the best (getting the most hydration, thanks gravity) but all are doing very well. Currently got a sweet potato as a ground cover (extremely vigorous, I mow it back when it creeps out and throw the clippings back on top of the central mulch pile) got clover trying to grow around the outside. Looking to put some decorative ginger in soonish, and am trialling lemongrass downhill.

Not planning to eat anything but the bananas at this stage, don't have much info regarding how the other plants uptake nutrients from the grey water so playing it safe.

It's provided a lot of habitat. I've seen frogs, collected snake skin after cutting back some sweet potato vine, the sweet potato leaves are plagued by grasshoppers after some recent rain but just keep coming back for more. The birds like to land in the bananas and I imagine I'm going to have to be quick to net them when they fruit. Really pleased with how it's essentially become it's own little ecosystem.

If anyone has been considering using this method I'd recommend it purely for the fecundity that springs forth!

Thank you for the heads up, the PEP stuff looks like it will keep me busy for the foreseeable future.

I decided to post about my Banana circle in the Greywater forum, here's a link if you want to have a look: https://permies.com/t/231712/Banana-Circle-Gray-Water-Disposal#2027233

Thanks for the advice and the warm welcome

Shea

Good afternoon Permies,

Just thought I would share my latest project, which utilises my grey water to keep a stand of Banana trees watered. I saw the idea online in several different infographics. It appears to have originated in Brazil as a way to process Gray water with a return for houses not connected to mains plumbing.

I took screen shots of my preferred infographic and put it through google translate to get an English translation of the Portuguese. It reads like a research paper, and points out that Banana trees don't take up the excess nutrients into their cell walls like most other plants would. The smell of the Gray water is also mitigated by running it underground into a mulch pile.

It seems to be working quite well! Where I live is really dry at the moment so it's quite gratifying to see a bit of green.

As a final step I'll be layering everything in chip bark and planting large leaf ground covers like sweet potato and nasturtiums to help reduce evaporation.

Thanks for reading

Just pinning a profile picture

Afternoon fellow permies,

Hope this finds you well!

I have been looking up your website for a couple of years now while I've been doing research on how I want to go about designing my own permaculture project.

I've finally started, my first project has been a Banana circle and it's doing quite well. I'm hoping to have a go at Swale building and other rainwater capturing techniques because it gets mighty dry out here.

I'm a carpenter by trade and I'm hoping to learn a whole bunch of other skills along the journey to self sufficiency and cooperation with nature.

Pleasure to meet you all, hope to get to know you well in the future.

Thanks!  

Shea