VEG’s landscaping team has been flat out recently and our pipeline is so full we might have to enlarge the pipe!  Here’s a few piccies of some systems we completed in the last month.

Eaglemont

This project involved the full-scale permaculture makeover of a front and back yard, including a driveway, all paths, a front-yard food and ornamental forest, a pergola, two sheds, a greenhouse, a chook house, a duck house, a duck pond, a large orchard, seven raised VEG beds, a berry patch, a rainwater tank, some lawn, an ornamental pond, and much more.  We visited today and so many of these photos are hot off the press!

The design:

A ‘before’ shot of the backyard (showing the spot where the VEG beds and greenhouse below were to be located):

A sequence of shots showing the main VEG beds (topshelf cypress) going in, with VEG greenhouse in the background:

On September 27 2011:

On November 6 2011 – a lot of growth for just over a month!:

The (VEG custom) chook house:

Chook automatic watering system:

Duckpond (fed by tank overflow and in turn feeds orchard):

Fully enclosed fox, possum & bird-proof orchard – with a green manure crop of oats & vetch going nuts (the chooks arrived yesterday and will soon convert it into eggs and manure):

August 10 2011:

September 7 2011:

November 6 2011:

Pond with fountain and food plants including Lebanese cress and water chestnuts (and yes that’s right a little bit of lawn – apologies to Bill Mollison!):

Tank:

Raspberry and Blueberry Patch:

Front yard with a nice mix of edibles and ornamentals (yes there is room in permaculture for pretty stuff!):

Broadmeadows

First up is some metal raised beds for an early learning centre in Broad Meadows a few weeks back, with young Will from VEG looking on:

Eltham

Next here’s the design and some implementation shots of a partial makeover in Eltham that we finished just yesterday!:

The design:

The chook house:

The strawyard:

The VEG chook tunnel connecting the strawyard to the run:

Where the tunnel meets the run:

Looking from the chook run down toward four roughsawn VEG beds:

The chook run/orchard.  These customers had already planted their fruit trees in what turned out to be the perfect spot!  Note the braced cypress gate – it’s really worth getting your gates right as you use them so much and you spend more time patching up a make-shift gate than you do doing it properly from the start:

A roughsawn VEG bed with a dressed and stained bench seat:

Mt Eliza

And let’s finish up with a shot of a system we put in some time back in Mt Eliza.  Dan drove past a few weeks back and it was good to see happy chooks, ducks and vegies.  In particular to see that our fox-proofing efforts had paid off (there are many foxes at large in this area):