Built on a rehabilitated cow paddock, the Naturaliste Harvest Garden is 3 hectares of walled kitchen garden with over 40 raised garden beds; edible tree allées; berry walks; nut groves and fruit orchards underplanted with native butterfly and bee friendly wildflowers.
While the garden is less formal than a classic parterre, we use vegetables, pleached trees, herbs and berries to fantastic effect. Raised garden beds in the English parterre tradition gives structure and form to the Garden while using most of the microclimate advantages that come from vegetables grown in geometric patterns.
Most importantly, when entering through the garden’s latticed portiques, you encounter a secret garden of deliciousness, seclusion and privacy grown under completely natural conditions.
| Walled garden Berry walk Edible allées Butterfly garden Glasshouse |
Rose arbour Cherry tree walk Wildflower meadow Habitat Corridor |
| See what’s growing in the garden. |
Although the Naturaliste Harvest Garden serves many functions, its primary purpose is to provide heirloom variety, nutrient dense fruit, berries, nuts and vegetables for the community to graze at Harvest Day events.
The Garden is food-focused in its design and comprises a walled market garden, berry walk, greenhouse and nursery, butterfly drifts, pleached citrus and stone fruit allées, a nut park and composting stations, as well as ornamental areas.
Organic
The Garden is tended using organic principles, without the use of synthetic fertilisers, pesticides or herbicides. Overall, our growing philosophy prioritises soil and plant health, using long forgotten heirloom and old-fashioned varieties.
The growing system is focused on the flourishing of soil and insect life, building soil fertility, improving heirloom cultivar quality and with a no-till approach to soil management.
Evidence-led
The garden bed design draws inspiration from numerous fields including science-led regenerative farming, efficient human-scale market gardening, as well as permaculture and naturalistic design.
These were considered whilst balancing a practical, pragmatic systems approach: If the plant is healthy, we see less pest and disease pressure, less pesticide use and a higher nutrient density in the harvestable crop.
Growing cycle
Our vegetable growing cycle begins in the Harvest Garden greenhouse, where we plant heirloom varieties. Using our own tailored potting mixes we grow all our seedlings for use across the entire Naturaliste Estate.
We’re more concerned with hardiness, taste and nutrition than aesthetics, so we save seed from our best tasting and most productive plants. By growing the best year-on-year, we gradually improve cultivars and varieties to enhance flavour, resilience and goodness which then preserve heirloom varieties.
Composting stations
Always too much manure. Never enough compost.
Over 300 wheelbarrows of DunsBros horse manure and 50 barrels of cow pats from our cattle herds are used every year in the Garden.
Using well-rotted, biologically rich compost, happily provided by the Dunsbros and their friends, and loads of plant matter, we provide most of the nutrition our crops need.
We supplement these inputs using tonics made from comfrey grown on the Estate.
All the ladies in the chicken coop do a fantastic job of creating compost. We use enclosed, roofed chook composting stations which appeal to their natural tendency to scratch and forage. They turn and mix the soil and breakdown manure, food scraps and shredded plant matter all while aerating and re-structuring the compost.
A series of chook composting stations means we have compost in various stages of decay, always ready for the next planting drive.
Water saving
Rainwater is collected to minimise the use of scheme water. Systems have been installed to keep everything irrigated.
We use wicking beds to water plants from below rather than above.
Moisture is drawn up through the soil via a process called capillary action or wicking. This allows moisture to be more evenly distributed through the soil, creating better growing conditions for the plants and saves us more than 70 per cent in water consumption over in-ground beds.
Trees, such as fruit and nut trees, are watered by root pipes using wicking principles.
There’s also a reed bed sewage system to capture and clean pasture run off, so that all ground water is processed naturally and the cleansed water fed back into the garden.
No dig soil
In sharp contrast to traditional methods of gardening, which promote tilling, double digging, turning the soil, or “working” compost into the soil, we simply layer organic materials on top of a solid base and let the soil food-web break them down and do the job of aerating the soil.
The plant debris is colonised by bacteria and fungi in the soil. Beneficial microbes begin to convert the plant debris into compost. More soil-dwelling organisms then carry the humus deeper into the soil where the nutrients can be absorbed by plant roots.
So much easier on the back and no blisters!
Most gardens contain a far greater number of good bugs and beneficial insects than pest insects. We use these good pests as natural predators to control bad bugs and insects, weeds and rodent pests that feed on and destroy our lovely fruits and vegetables.
As it turns out, good bugs and insects (“beneficials”) are the natural enemies of the bad pests.
We encourage these natural enemies by avoiding pesticides that kill them and by choosing plants that provide the good bugs and insects with pollen, nectar and shelter.
Integrated Pest Management Principles
Everything in the Harvest Garden is grown organically. Part of the organic ethos is to control insects and pests using Integrated Pest Management (IPM) and its biological, cultural and chemical practices:
Birdhouses
You might have noticed the birdhouses around the perimeter of the Harvest Garden. They look cute (maybe a bit twee), but they also serve an important purpose.
We love it when birds feed on pests in the Harvest Garden. We use specially constructed houses to provide a habitat for the birds which feed on the most problematic insects and bugs.
Birds are choosy where they nest so our houses:
Important to encouraging birds to the garden is birdhouse placement. As some bird species are territorial and will not allow other birds to nest too close, we space our birdhouses 10 metres apart.
Also important is the height of the birdhouse: Cats, squirrels and even rodents can climb poles and attack nesting birds. It took us a few goes to figure out the perfect pole height for each defender species!
Air dancer scarecrows
Large birds of prey such as the Little Billed and the Long Billed Corella can inflict vast amounts of damage. We deter them with solar-powered air scarecrows. The ones you see outside of car yards and Persian carpet sellers? Yep, those.
Placed strategically around the outside of the Harvest Garden, a good distance from Garden birdhouses, they are excellent deterrents for fruit and vege munching birds with big ambitions.
Ours look like ghosts, just so the predator birds know we mean it.
Paddock rehabilitation
All the Naturaliste Estate pastures have been rehabilitated with a highly productive, water hardy, multi-species pasture which produces palatable grazing for horses throughout the year.
We rested the paddocks by excluding livestock for a year, allowing sheep to graze in certain parts of the meadow in autumn to tread native seeds back into the drifts and rotated pigs, which ate invasive weed species, while stimulating growth of grasses and grazing forages through their rooting.
We supplemented with well-rotted cow slurry as a nitrogen source and a planted a variety of perennial grasses and legumes like lucerne, cocksfoot and annual medics to aid rehabilitation.
This resulting pasture is perfect for Friesian horses and has done a lot to rectify a century of overgrazing and soil compaction, but it may not suit our native insects.
Wildflower meadow
Throughout the Estate’s paddocks, we’ve added large, circular wildflower drifts of native perennials and grasses, all of which create a dense and diverse meadow planting ideal for bees, butterflies, ladybugs and more.
Wildflower meadows are extremely valuable habitat, providing floral resources, nesting sites and a protected environment for hundreds of native bees, moths, butterflies and other insects. Many birds, bats, small mammals and some amphibians also thrive on the food and shelter that a meadow ecosystem provides.
Meadows provide many important ecosystem services including infiltration and filtration of stormwater, carbon storage, nutrient recycling, soil building and provisioning of food and shelter for biodiverse communities of flora and fauna.
Butterfly drifts
Butterfly drifts within Estate paddocks are a place where bees, butterflies, ladybirds and, possibly even, fairies can come and go safely with little disturbance from grazing animals or exposure to pesticides.
The drifts are hedged with Australian native shrubs such as Illawarra Plum (Podocarpus elatus), Tucker Bush Cherry (Syzygium austral), Midyim Berry (Austromyrtus dulcis) and the Sandpaper Fig (Ficus coronate).
Our commitment to common sense environmentalism involves a proactive and sustained dedication to protecting and improving the natural world.
We invest in sustainably focused projects and operations which result in gardens which are run on environmentally responsible practices.
Our gardens are run on solar panels and feature energy-saving bulbs and solar lights for visual effects; composting system through which all kitchen and stable waste passes; a sewage bed system to filter waste from the stable complex and the house to water the garden; and a ground-source heating system which collects water from low levels in the ground to circulate in the greenhouse’s hot water pipes to assist growing during winter.
The Naturaliste Harvest Garden represents one very small attempt to heal the appallingly short-sighted damage done to the soil, the landscape, the flora and fauna and to our own souls.
Volunteering is essential to the ongoing operation and success of the Naturaliste Group and to successfully achieving our aims of horse rescue, welfare and advocacy.
Our volunteers play a critical role in delivering the Naturaliste Group’s charitable objectives. They volunteer in the Garden, the Habitat Corridor, at the Ethology Program, in the Naturaliste Shed, on Harvest Days and, most importantly, helping horses in the Sanctuary.
The Margaret River area abounds with community-minded individuals with a plethora of skills and we encourage them to contribute through on-going effort, one-off engagements and large-scale initiatives.
Our commitment to volunteers means our programs are rewarding, outcome-focussed, organised and well-run.
Please join us!
Worried about a horse? If you’re concerned about a horse’s welfare, you can report this to us online. We’ll get back to you immediately.
