Mandala Gardens

Posted by Phillip Richards May 10, 2007

The first garden that we established on our far was a mandala garden. We established this next to the house on a patch of roughly cleared land.The garden was a no-dig and twelve metres square in each side.

We were unpacking the house and as the house was set - in true Queensland style - high on posts we threw the empty cardboard boxes out the window as we unpacked. We flattened all of these and covered the area to suppress weeds. We bought in hay from the feed store and filter-ash from the local sugar mill. This garden became our most productive basic vegetable garden and supplied most of our food as well as often feeding the poultry and pigs.

A mandala garden is round so in the corners of the square we planted fruit trees - paw-paw and Malabar chestnut.

In the centre was a pit into which we threw household food scraps. Around the pit were paw paws (papaya). The pit never filled the land or the paw paws just swallowed the scraps.

Circling this was a path with paths radiating to the middle of each side. There were also paths that went from the central ring towards the four corners. These stopped about half way and had a large circle at the end.

In the middle of each of the four arms main arms and on both sides we built "keyholes". A keyhole is a short path into the bed with a circle at the end - like a turning circle on a closed road. The effect of this was that most parts of the garden we could reach most parts of the garden easily.

The mandala looked wonderful from an upstairs window from where we could admire the circular patters with radiating spokes and the incursions of the keyholes.

Within the garden, we had zones; fast growing greens ran in straights and arcs following the basic shape of the beds. Then there were the bigger vegetables that we went to less and beyond them longer term planting such as potatoes.

At first, we could reach into the garden from the outside of the original square but gradually this became built-in or grown-in with trellises for vine crops over walkways and plantings of lemon grass to make weed barriers.

We had a lot of lemon grass tea.