Trish Allen – Living a permaculture lifestyle

Inside, sitting at an enormous kauri table around which thousands of people have eaten at Rainbow Valley Farm (RVF), permaculture legend Trish Allen shows no sign of slowing down. Her beautiful house at Matakana based on permaculture principles, incorporates many pieces of RVF where she lived for 25 years with her partner, the late Joe Palaischer. It is testament to the benefits of recycling, working with nature wherever possible, and producing zero waste.

The land at her new place is clay so Trish grabbed anything she could to build up the soil, including the neighbour’s lawn clippings which she mixed with wood chip, leaves scavenged from roadsides by the ute-load, silage from a local buffalo farm, and anything else handy. Today her section is a fertile edible landscape.

Permaculture Beginnings

In 1985 a friend gave Trish’s partner, Joe a book, Permaculture One: A Perennial Agriculture for Human Settlements by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren.  Joe was hooked.

In 1988 Bill Mollison published Permaculture: A Designers Manual, which became the permaculture bible and is still well read.  The Designers Manual brought together the various strands of ecological wisdom, many of which Trish and Joe had been working with in organic gardening, looking after the soil, and making compost. It introduced water management components, animals and their function in the ecosystem, energy efficiency, creating zero waste, and critically, social permaculture, the sharing of resources.

Permaculture philosophy, wholly compatible with organics, includes a wider range of elements. Essentially, permaculture is based on four tenets:  Care for the earth, care for the people, share the resources, limit consumption.

Rainbow Valley Farm

At the time, Joe and Trish ran a half acre block on Waiheke Island but wanted to do more. Two years of searching finally led them to a 21 hectare block with its own spring water on extremely poor farmland near Matakana. Looking like hippies, they arrived in a house truck, and over 25 years developed a meticulously planned permaculture paradise on the blank canvas they’d bought. The project became Rainbow Valley Farm and was considered one of the best permaculture sites in the world. In Japan it was considered No.1.

Joe died suddenly in 2008. Trish continued to run Rainbow Valley Farm with the help of friends and interns but struggled to keep the large orchards and gardens, animals and birds, bees, a rice paddy, and mushrooms, operating smoothly. When she fell and broke her ankle, she saw it as a prompt from the universe to move on. In 2010, she sold the farm and bought a quarter-acre clay plot on the flat in the heart of Matakana and proceeded to build a house and B&B.

A warm wooden house

“I wanted an energy-efficient house that was sunny, warm and dry,” said Trish. At RVF they’d built an earth house but it had taken years to complete and she needed a quick build. Creating the original design for a wooden home herself, she took it to architect Malcolm Halley, who improved it.

“I was fortunate to find a wonderful builder in Simon Duffy, so construction was stress-free and the house was up in five months.  I moved in late 2011.”

The two-bedroom, 155m² (including garage) house is built from sustainably grown local macrocarpa. Except for framing which has been treated with the least toxic treatment option, boron, all timbers are untreated. Sarking is constructed from the leftovers of a project on RVF.  Huge recycled kauri beams, complete with previous fixing points cut into them, support the roof. They came from a wool store in Parnell which burned down in 1958, and had lain under corrugated iron at Rainbow Valley Farm for 25 years. Spot evidence of the fire is still visible on the beams and has been incorporated as historical mementos.

Energy Efficiency

Diagonal, locally made, clay Morris & James floor-tiling seconds are leftovers from RVF’s earth house. They too had sat for 25 years and were green and black from weathering, but Trish cleaned each one. Strategically laid, they now provide passive heat storage in cold winter months. The rest of the flooring is locally grown and milled eucalyptus saligna from Ahuroa. The bedrooms are wool carpeted.

The wood-burner’s brick surround is recycled from a demolition project in Dargaville. In line with the Clean Air Act, the wood-burner has no damping capacity but has a wetback to supplement winter water heating. A cap has been installed on the chimney to reduce moisture, block down-drafts, keep animals out, and prevent sparks and embers. Trish stores firewood two years in advance so the fuel is thoroughly dry. When the wood burner is in use, she cooks on it.

Four small solar panels provide hot water most of the year. A 3kW twelve-panel photovoltaic system ensures sufficient electricity to run a complete household including freezers and the extra demands of the B&B. In summer Trish supplies the grid, and in winter when there is less sun, she draws from it. Her power bills average $30 per month.

The walls are insulated with wool, and the roof with Greenstuf, of which 45%  is made from recycled plastic bottles. The roof is recyclable corrugated iron.  “I always wanted a red roof,” said Trish, “but the architect strongly advised white because it reflects rather than absorbs heat.”

The house design includes a clerestory to project sun and light into all corners of her home in winter. In summer the sun is excluded by angled slats built over the verandah. An exterior roll-down blind, installed on the large summer-sun-facing window, blocks heat before it reaches the window itself.

Water and waste

Matakana building permits require all homes in the village to be hooked up to the sewage system and with no way to get around it, Trish installed two flush toilets. Outside, a simple vermicast composting toilet with a urine separator is in welcome use for making worm compost in plastic lidded drums. With two drums on the go, once the waste has broken down, the resultant compost is used around her fruit trees and then topped with mulch, The bananas love it.

Nearby, an outdoor shower facility provides extra convenience. All waste water generated on the property is discharged into the sewage system

Trish catches all her own water from the roof and stores it in two 25,000-litre tanks which are partially buried for coolness. She’s working on hiding them behind lush foliage. A large felt filtering bag collects dirt as water enters the tanks. A second filter at the drawing point cleans water leaving the tanks. Inside, because she runs a B&B, an ultraviolet steriliser is installed for drinking water. Trish composts or recycles virtually everything, rarely putting a bag out for rubbish collection.

Lush diverse garden

She learned gardening from her father. He taught her how to prepare a garden bed and how to plant. She says, “His gardens were always neat and tidy. Today the wisdom is to mulch a lot more than in Dad’s day.”

Two worm farms have proved invaluable in providing vermicast and worm tea to feed her fertile plot. She plants comfrey around fruit trees to take advantage of the nutrients it draws up through deep tap roots. It dies back in winter, but four times a year during the late spring to autumn she chops the leaves to lie around the trees as fertile mulch.

With left over construction materials Trish made boxes so she could build up good soil in which to plant her fruit saplings and allow them to establish before they were obliged to tap into the clay beneath. It seems to have worked since fifty trees are lushly fruiting all over the property, including: bananas, apples, pears, plums, peaches, figs, olives, feijoas, lemons, mandarins, limes, cherimoya, casimiroa, guavas, grapes, and Kei apples (super high in vitamin C). Garden beds include pumpkins, broad beans, garlic, zucchini, beans, silverbeet, and more in season. Kikuya is kept out of garden beds with cardboard and wood chips.

Two large boxes have been built along the verandahs to accommodate herbs, salad vegetables, kale, and asparagus. Shiitake mushrooms grow on oak logs.

“I don’t grow corn,” says Trish, “because it takes too much space and a lot of fertility, but every Friday in Matakana we have a ‘green swap’ from 9-9:30am. We exchange surplus produce including eggs. It’s short and sharp – we’re all gone by 9:30am.”

Permaculture in the community

Her latest project, Mahurangi Wastebusters a charitable Trust that aims to establish two local community recycling centres at Snell’s Beach and Wellsford, based on the extraordinarily successful Helensville Recycling Centre model.

Still engaged in running permaculture workshops around the country and overseas, Trish often teams up with Daniel Tohill from Otamatea Eco-village to deliver courses. If she could teach only one thing, it would be soil care.

“It’s teeming with life, while so much conventional soil is dead. That little bit of topsoil that feeds the world has been exploited and poisoned. Look after it. It’s precious.”

Copyright Theresa Sjoquist

First published in Organic NZ magazine – March/April 2018 – www.organicnz.org.nz