Explore Fire Mountain Farm

Established in 2017, Fire Mountain Farm is a permaculture demonstration garden and nursery, nestled into lush temperate rainforest at 400m elevation, overlooking Nowra and the rest of the south coast. Just on the other side of Cambewarra Mountain is the lovely Kangaroo Valley, and all it has to offer.

22ha in size, the farm showcases different ways of producing food, with a particular focus on trees and bees. Explore the different “garden rooms”, each with its own features and evolution.

Walled Garden

Enclosed by 1.8m high gabion walls on three sides, the walled garden uses this as a sun trap and thermal mass, to create a more subtropical microclimate.

Loosely following “syntropic agroforestry” approaches, the dense initial vegetation builds up organic matter and soil biology as the climax trees are growing. Packing a lot in a small space, the walled garden includes many different species, including: Avocado, Mango, Banana, Black Sapote, Jaboticaba, Persimmon, Lychee and Tamarillo.

Bee Garden

We practice “natural beekeeping”, with a mix of Warre and Kenyan Top Bar hives, and we sell our “Fire Mountain honey” at the local market when we have some to spare.

Following the permaculture principle of “start by improving the worst land”, the Bee Garden was established in an area that had been heavily damaged by the previous owner’s horses. Most of our hives are located in this garden, surrounded by an increasingly rich food forest of citrus trees and many flowering plants.

Orchard

This garden primarily consists of citrus trees, laid out according to the principles of the “edible forest garden” by Dave Jacke and Eric Toensmeier. Many nitrogen-fixing support plants help the citrus along, and dense inter-planting keeps the kikuyu grass at bay.

Netted Cathedral

The centrepiece of Fire Mountain Farm is the enclosed orchard, 13m x 30m in size and over 4m high. This is laid out as a conventional orchard, with lines of trees including apples, peaches, nectarines, plums, nashi, cherries, quince, dwarf mulberries and persimmon.

Even in this conventional layout, there is continuous plant cover of the ground and interplanted support trees and bushes. The chicken run can also be opened out to the orchard to keep the undergrowth and pests under control.

Nursery

We run a small nursery on site, producing around a thousand plants per year, from seeds or cuttings. We grow a mix of “food forest” plants and flowering natives, some of which are sold at the local market and many of which get planted out on the property.

Native plantings

We are strong believers in “plants as problem solvers”, and instead of trying to fight the weeds, we’ve heavily planted many areas of the property.

Planted at a density of 3 plants per square metre, these informal hedges comprise of many types of native plants, which is great for the local wildlife, as food or shelter.

We’re as passionate about native plants as we are about food-producing ones!