Calen House Food Forest

A garden of my own to develop

Calen became my principal home base, and the place I kept learning through direct work with plants, soil and a garden that was actually mine to shape rather than someone else's to advise on. That distinction matters more than it sounds: you learn different things from a garden you have to live with through a whole wet season.

After a few weeks working at a strawberry farm in the region, I planted turmeric (Curcuma longa) here on 27 September 2022.

Through most of 2023 the work was establishing, planting, maintaining and extending the food forest. The earthworks were cut by hand: pegged out along the contour, then dug with a mattock. This first stewardship ran until 2 February 2024.

The work, and what came of it

Four hours, and nothing left bare

Five photographs of the same annual bed, taken between half past eight and twenty to one on a single winter morning.

Ground opened, shaped into rows, banana pseudostems laid down the furrows, banana leaves sheeted over the top, then grass mulch over the lot. By lunchtime there was no exposed soil left on it.

It is the clearest single illustration I have of how these beds get built. Almost all of it is material that was already on the property, and the bed finishes covered rather than bare — which in the subtropics is the difference between soil that holds together through the wet and soil that does not.

The same bed, 08:31 to 12:40

Three days making char

A pit fire burned down after dark on the 22nd, then was quenched and left to cool overnight. The next day the char came out of the pit and into buckets. On the 24th it went into a drum to be inoculated.

That last step is the one people skip. Fresh char straight into the ground does the opposite of what you want in its first season: it is enormously porous and it will adsorb whatever nutrient is already in the soil until it is full. Soaking it first fills those pores with water and nutrient before it ever reaches a root, so it arrives loaded rather than hungry.

Burn, collect, inoculate

Turmeric, planting to powder

Turmeric (Curcuma longa) went into this garden at twenty-five past three on the afternoon of 27 September 2022. These photographs are the rest of that story.

Seed rhizomes saved and sorted, laid into furrows cut along the slope, then covered over and mulched. After that there is nothing to look at for a year, which is most of what growing turmeric actually involves.

I lifted the clump on 4 October 2023, a year and a week after it went in. Washed at the tank tap, picked clean of the spent parent roots, sorted into a pot, and two days later sliced thin and laid out to dry.

The last two are from the following June: dried chips out in the sun, and a jar of milled powder standing on a fresh lift. One season's crop turned into something that keeps on a shelf, with the next season's already out of the ground.

Planted, lifted, dried, milled

One cutting, and then a forest

A Panama berry (Muntingia calabura) grown from a small cutting, photographed here while it still looked manageable.

It did not stay that way. It took over and ended up a forest unto itself. That is the trade with this species: it is a superb pioneer, it grows fast, it fruits young and almost continuously, and birds and chickens work it over daily. Plant it for quick shade and biomass by all means, but plant it somewhere you are happy for it to win.

Still looking manageable

A herb spiral, in three stages

Stone, soil, mulch, then plants. A herb spiral puts a lot of growing edge into very little ground and gives you a dry top and a damp base in the same structure, which means Mediterranean herbs and thirsty ones can sit a metre apart and both be happy.

The stones came off the property. The mound went up, the spiral was laid out, mulch went over the lot, and then it was planted and left to fill in.

Twenty pounds of biochar went into the spiral as stable carbon.

Stone, mulch, then plants

Letting it go

I came back to the Mackay region on 1 May 2024 and picked the garden up again for a second stretch.

Through this period my involvement with the organic banana farm built gradually. From June I was doing the Saturday run to the Airlie Beach market and learning from the farmer who was passing the market role on to me.

I moved onto the banana farm on 28 July and kept tending Calen until 9 August.

The garden kept producing hard right to the end. This is a single picking of pumpkins (Cucurbita spp.) from 13 June, laid out on the grass. They went to market, and a good number of them ended up in a big pot of soup at the Mackay community garden — which is about the best place a pumpkin can finish up.

There was no handover. Calen was a rental, and when we moved out I let the garden go completely — the soil building, the turmeric beds, the swales cut by hand, all of it, with no say in what happened to any of it afterwards.

That is part of this work as well, and worth putting on the record rather than leaving out. You do not always get to find out what becomes of a garden you built.

Still producing