Syntropic addition to the Permaculture Farm
Over the past couple of months we have been preparing beds and paths between the beds to trial the Syntropic System (a type of AgroForestry) on the Kendall Permaculture Farm. The area we have been preparing used to be grazing land for the cows, so a lot of hard work has gone into digging out the grass and making the area suitable for planting.
Yesterday we planted around 1,000 seedlings in the first 5 beds we have ready. It is very exciting and we hope the system is going to work for us. We would like to implement this system for our market gardens, and hope to produce a regular amount of vegetables so that we can supply people, shops and co-ops in our area.
I will not go into detail here about the Syntropic System as there are plenty of other websites which can illuminate you on the system. You can find the course to do if you are interested in Syntropic farming here, the course is in Northern NSW at the Krishna Village and is taught by Thiago Barbosa, who learned from Ernst Gotsch (the founder of the Syntropic System) in Brazil. The Syntropic system seems to easily slot into our Permaculture Systems here on the farm.
We would like to thank all our volunteers for the amazing work they have done so far in preparing this area (no, we have not yet finished…), I have posted some photos below to show the progress. We hope to regularly update this website and our Instagram and Facebook pages with more photos as it evolves. This area will function as a case study (click here for the case study) where we will report on the amount of produce coming from this area and have noted down species planted and other specifics.
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- Making the Syntropic garden beds
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- Adding and raking in compost
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- Removing rocks and clumps of grass / grassroots
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- Raking and smoothing out the mound
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- Planting one of the 3 centre rows
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- Tree row (left) and centre rows
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- More planting
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- Our supervisor sleeping on the sideline…
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- Close up of a centre row
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- Centre row and right tree row
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- Left centre row, plenty of diversity! Around 350 seedlings per 10 metre row
Author: Zaia Kendall
Zaia grew up in a family of musicians in Holland, and has a background in top sport (snow skiing) and web development and design. She co-founded the PRI Luganville and PRI Sunshine Coast Inc (now PermEco Inc.) with Tom, and runs the “invisible structures”, like finances, business administration, website design and maintenance, writes articles and records and edits videos. She assists Tom in running the Kendall Permaculture Farm and supervising other volunteers. She is an active member of several musical projects and bands, involved in community music and runs percussion and marimba workshops, is the percussion leader for the Woodford Folk Festival People’s Orchestra and composes as well as plays music. She is passionate about community music and loves seeing people discover that they can play!
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