On Sunday we had a wonderful sunny visit to Adam and Tink's place in Peka Peka. It's a magical place overlooking Kāpiti Island, with border collies every where and permaculture gardens and a Syntropic food forest surrounding the house. 

We started with a circle where we were invited to share a bit about who we are, where we came from and why we were here. There were many familiar faces from previous Toru Trail events and many people talked about the sense of community that is growing from the regular rhythm of meeting face to face. As someone noted, these events are not just about finding "like minded people but heart minded people".

After the circle we wandered around the gardens admiring the abundant avocado trees, tamarillo, papaya and more. Adam's discovered permaculture in 2011 while travelling in Sout East Asia and has lived on permaculture farms in Thailand, Australia and New Zealand. He's been fascinated by Syntropic Agroforestry since 2017 and has established a small, experimental Syntropic food forest. 

Adam's approach is to try make things easy and low stress. Examples include composting food waste directly on the veggie beds and cleverly placed avocado trees in the corner of each bed, to act like stakes protecting the veggies in the middle when lugging the hose around. 

We enjoyed a delicious lunch of home cooked and grown goodies preparated by Tink and delicious home baking brought by attendees. 

After lunch we sat around the table in the sunshine for a deeper dive into Syntropic Agroforestry. If you are keen to learn more about its inspiring origins and priniciples  Adam recommended watching this 15 minute video - Life in Syntropy.

Adam focussed on the principle of arranging your species according to strata - which is not about the height of the plant but about their shade tolerance. In Syntropy the strata are divided into 4 categories: 

  • low - plants that want a lot of shade
  • medium - e.g. citrus - ideally wants 40-50% shade. Full sunshine might create high productivity but also creates stressed plants, impacting the fruit size, quality and taste
  • high - plants that tolerate shade when they are young but like a lot of sun when they have developed
  • emergent - plants that want full sunshine e.g. corn

Adam's top tips were: 

  1. Put enough diversity in your garden, by planting plants from all 4 strata together, and let them figure it out between them the natural succession. 
  2. Use pruning as fertility - dropping the vegetation on your beds. Keep trees from maturing as once mature they slow the growth of other species
  3. Plant low fertility support species and chop them before they flower, then plant seeds for the next level of fertility. By doing so you can create soil fertility in a series of years that might otherwise take decades. 
  4. Syntrophy is 90% management 10% planting. There is a lot of labour involved in pruning  - but if you don't go too big its manageable.

Tink also shared their story of trying to establish co-housing in their paddocks. They encountered many challenges with the council ove the years and sadly the high costs of consenting meant that it was not viable financially. There was much discussion about the challenges and opportunites in this space.

To finish up the day there was the regular crop swap table - this time filled with Taewa, Kumara, beans and Dahlia's. Everyone left with a full tum, new connections, inspiration and pockets full of bulbs, seeds and potatoes!

Thank you for the wonderful day of learning Adam and Tink

Fiona Naismith

 

 

 

 

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