Farming soil with Home Soil

We sat down with Rachael from Home Soil to chat about their gardening ethos, growing in the Canberra region, and what’s happening in the garden to get ready for the season ahead.

Want to learn more? Grab a spot in our upcoming Home Soil tours in October: morning tour and afternoon tour

Let’s dive in…..

What got you interested in growing food?

What makes a person end up somewhere?...

Damian’s family have been wheat, beef and sheep farmers for generations, but he had no interest in becoming a farmer and he never wanted to follow the standard pathways of his hometown.

My mum has always loved her garden, but as a child I saw gardening as a boring chore. My dad, meanwhile, was an adventurous and passionate cook, and both my parents have always loved eating out at all sorts of interesting and well regarded restaurants. Growing up good was cherished.

Home soil market garden

My school holidays were spent running barefoot through the bush at a coastal shack, and during the term I was lucky enough to attend a progressive school where finding your own path was encouraged, and where there were bountiful opportunities for outdoor education.

Both of these backgrounds probably influenced our path.

When we first moved to the property, we hoped to live ’better’, and as part of this it was a given that we would grow our own food. We wanted to live more sustainably, but also to teach our kids about alternatives to junk food. What we never expected was that it would grow to become such a central, defining part of our lives.

What’s the home soil ethos/approach?

We aim to grow tasty, interesting vegetables with positive outcomes.

Our techniques draw heavily from Charles Dowding’s No Dig method, but we also take inspiration from Permaculture, Masanobu Fukuoka’s Natural Farming, Dr Elaine Ingham’s Soil Food Web School, and more recently Dan Kittredge’s Bionutrient Food Association. It is my understanding that the thinking within many of these techniques trace back to First Nations knowledge.

We’re always learning and open to incorporating new things if they feel right, and our techniques evolve in line with this.

What’s your composting and soil cultivating must-dos?

Look to natural systems for parallels and always think things through: Are there unintended impacts? Are they positive? What would nature do?

What do you see as the role/power of growing food in sustainability (a big question but feel free to take a macro or micro approach!)

The straightforward answer: Food production directly shapes soil, water and biodiversity - both locally and globally.

As I understand it, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, synthetic fertilisers and intensive tillage harm/kill soil life, pollute ecosystems, and release carbon into the atmosphere. These practices, along with the monocultures common in such systems, reduce resilience and leave crops highly vulnerable to pests and diseases, creating ever increasing cycles of dependency on these inputs as resistance builds and soils/ecosystems degrade.

By contrast, growing with nature builds biodiversity, which creates resilience. Saving seed or self seeding allows plants to adapt to local and changing conditions. Composting diverts food waste from landfill. And eating food you’ve grown - or buying it locally - cuts down/removes the impacts of packaging and transport. I could go on and on...

The gardener’s favourite view

The more interesting answer: Growing food well can reconnect us with our place in the ecosystem. It nurtures and rekindles our intrinsic relationship with the natural world. What could be more sustainable than that?

What are you up to in the garden at the moment to get ready for the spring/summer season?

One of the first things I learnt and ignored about market gardening is that it's a good idea to have a consistent size to your beds.

It's taken many years to work out what works best for us but prompted by wanting to line things up with some new fences, we have spent the winter moving around and reshaping all the beds in the main veggie patch, and they are now mostly consistent. I’m hopeful we have settled on a size that will work well for us into the future, and we can now let the soil life reestablish nicely.

Do you have any top tips for Canberra region gardeners, those getting started and even a long won tip for the seasoned gardeners out there?

Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can! Don’t let perfection get in the way of better but then build on what you have learnt/created and keep moving forward.

Your favourite view in the garden

See pic to the left.

And a few ‘finish-this-sentence’ questions to round things out:

The garden tool I couldn’t do without….

The internet.

My favourite thing to grow in the garden….

Everything has its own joy. Old favourites we anticipate from a returning season are lovely, (tomatoes are definitely on that list) and something new and interesting is always exciting - but there’s a special joy in growing anything from our own seed.

My biggest challenge to grow in the garden…

Onions... I’m not great at germinating onions.

Tidy rows, messy chaos or somewhere in the middle?

By winter everything is pretty messy, but in spring and summer there are both extremes across the garden. The market garden sections can be very tidy - the rest, not so much.

Anything else you’d like to share….

In today’s world, growing food can be a powerful and even revolutionary act. Done well, it offers countless positives for people, place and planet and this is a responsibility I don’t take lightly - but it’s also important to remember, growing food can be an immense joy.