P STANDS FOR PERMICULTURE

Jamie Jobb, 

                  permiculture, is an approach to agriculture & human settlement which seeks a

harmonious balance among all forms of life in an ecosystem.

Seek being the operative word here! Living on the city fringe does not make it easy for us purists.

We have water tanks but council regulations & costs make it difficult to become self sufficient in water.

We also have solar panels on our roof. We are not allowed to power our own residence with these panels however, we are forced to sell our generated power into the grid and buy our usage back from the state government.

My own squeamishness & the lack of room prevents me from owning 'food' animals. I am looking to get some chickens but they will be for eggs only.

We do compost a lot of our household waste but water board regulations do not allow us to use a lot of our grey waste and forget about a compost system for human waste.

Is it enough to practice permiculture selectively? I encourage the garden to be harmonious but I do not kid myself that we are at one with the environment.

There is the added distraction of neighbours who spray insecticides and glyphosates with gay abandon, concrete everything that looks like it might be green and chop down anything that is over a meter tall. The lawns up the hill get fertilized with phosphates that leech down towards us and from the state of our local creeks there is probably a fair bit of the stuff hanging around in there as well. No wonder people get sick.
I have come to the conclusion that our garden is a safe haven for invertebrates and vertebrates alike as they can come here and have a drink of clean water and eat a few organic worms or snails and gather their resources – same goes for us too. I'm pretty happy with that.