Permaculture on a plate

A stunning kitchen garden on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula is creating a different experience for its guests with a true estate-to-plate experience, writes Montalto’s produce manager, Julie Bennett.

Dotted around an 80-acre property isone of Victoria’s best kitchen gardens that has been designed and run using permaculture principles. But what actually is permaculture? Permaculture is a whole-system-thinking approach to land management that uses observations of natural ecosystems. The word permaculture comes from the words ‘permanent agriculture’, as named by its founder Bill Mollison in 1978 but has more recently been adjusted to mean ‘permanent culture’ to incorporate important social aspects. Based around the three core ethics of earth care, people care and fair share, permaculture has 12 basic design principles.

Permaculture at home

Many of the permaculture practices we use in our gardens at Montalto are easily translated in home gardens. Our gardens are organically farmed using ‘no till’ methods, meaning our soil is never turned over. Instead, it’s built up by adding our own compost to the surface. Spent crops are twisted from the soil or cut off at ground level, the soil is never left bare which reduces weeds and keeps microbial life active. As well as protecting the soil structure, not disturbing soils means we don’t wake dormant weed seeds.



Instead of using sprays, we refer to the permaculture principle ‘observe and interact’ because most pest species will be food for another beneficial species. We leave a few plants such as kale—which is a great sacrificial brassica—as a ‘flag’ for pests such as grey aphids, who then become food and even homes for predatory wasps.

Edible flowers are always incorporated in our gardens to encourage nectar-feeding predators and pollinators and can be safely harvested by our chefs to use as garnishes. These flowers also encourage our bees to help with pollination of our crops and in turn give our chefs honey for our restaurant.

An important practice for us is seed saving and preserving rare and endangered heirloom vegetable varieties. These beautiful older vegetables may have fallen out of favour due to their inability to be transported long distances or grow uniformly, but heirloom varieties were grown first and foremost for their flavour.



So many vegetables we grow at Montalto can be easily grown in pots and it may just take a shift in the varieties grown—think sprouting broccoli instead of a single headed broccoli variety—meaning you will get a continuous harvest over a longer period. Multi-harvested vegetables like silverbeet, celery and lettuce can be interplanted with other quick-growing crops such as radishes or spring onion.

Visit Montalto

Montalto is located in Red Hill South on the Mornington Peninsula. An easy hour’s drive from Melbourne’s CBD. The Piazza restaurant is open daily from 11am where you can sit amongst one of the kitchen gardens to dine, wander the sculpture park or book a private picnic. Go to montalto.com.au for further details.