{"id":150927,"date":"2018-09-10T18:01:44","date_gmt":"2018-09-10T10:01:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.fairharvest.com.au\/?p=150927"},"modified":"2018-09-12T08:47:24","modified_gmt":"2018-09-12T00:47:24","slug":"mature-eucalypyus-and-acacia-in-a-permaculture-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fairharvest.com.au\/mature-eucalypyus-and-acacia-in-a-permaculture-system\/","title":{"rendered":"Mature Eucalyptus and Acacia in a Permaculture system"},"content":{"rendered":"
The land had been cleared for pasture, the big trees were gone, the wind howled across the paddocks and we were young and full of enthusiasm. Fast growing Eastern States Acacia were all the rage and depending on the zone these were interplanted with either Eucalyptus Species or the slower growing oaks, carobs, olives and other Mediterranean food forest trees.<\/p>\n
Buying seedlings and getting together with friends and family for tree planting days is a joy, and we were lucky enough to keep the enthusiasm going through those early years when the weeds grew higher than the newly planted trees and we had to crawl around on our hands and knees to find the babies we’d planted. We protected them from stock, protected them from wind and protected them from wildlife.We watched them grow and celebrated the new life we had brought to the old paddocks.<\/p>\n
And then they grew a little more, stretching their limbs over fences that seemed way out of reach when we planted them, dropping branches over access ways, creating large areas of fuel (and in an area of extreme bush fire danger this is not only a concern for us but attracts attention and penalties from the local shire), expanding their root systems into irrigated areas and shading out\u00a0 gardens.<\/p>\n
Yes the trees were becoming a problem and a few big lessons needed to be learnt (especially pertaining to trees near fences ) but as the eternal optimist, and knowing that “the problem is the solution” we started looking at the trees as one of our greatest assets. Our mature trees are now a huge part of our integrated permaculture system.<\/p>\n
Here’s a few ways we use our tree resource;<\/p>\n
Timber<\/strong>…..with an ever growing number of projects at Fair Harvest, we are using more and more timber from the farm including the poles for our tipi, posts for buildings and more recently cladding for our new camp kitchen.<\/p>\n