This is my story

My story will give you some idea how do I know what I am talking about. In fact, I am just a "Simple Country Dirtdoctor" who has spent years walking about paddocks, helping farmers with all sorts of problems.

My name is Peter Brown and I have been working in agriculture and horticulture for more than 35 years. I have a Diploma of Horticultural Science, a Bachelor of Science and Diplomas in Dairy management and Small Business Management.

Back in the late 1960s my story began when I began my studies at Horticultural College and one of the first things I did was to set up a vegetable garden at home.

It was a bit of a disaster actually. The soil was heavy and hard, the weeds were ferocious and production was somewhat less than optimal. Still, I was encouraged by the rapturous responses I got from my family whenever I was able to bring some food from the garden (although I think they were rather less than impressed by my efforts with mushrooms under the stairs).

That part of my story continues today, I still have a vegetable garden in my backyard, but vegetables are no longer the only food from the garden at my place. I have extended my journey to explore various other possibilities with free-range egg production, beekeeping, silk production (not food, I know, but the Mulberries aren't bad!) and aquaponics. I have even learned how to tame the hard and heavy soil that I struggled with so many years ago.

Many of the discoveries I made along the way have taken me by surprise, as they often seemed to disprove the conventional wisdom I learned at College.

Although it wasn't what I set out to do, I have come to specialize in things like Organics and alternative crops that few others could be bothered with.

I have also learned that many of the ways in which we produce food from the garden (or the farm) is done only because that is the way it has always been done (or more often just because we have been told to do things that way). As old as horticulture may be, not everything handed down from our forebears actually works. Separating the good practices from the not-so-good has also led to discoveries about modern research that is too often overlooked because it goes against traditional thinking.

So, over the years, I have become something of a walking library about old practices that work (that may have been forgotten) and new research that you would otherwise may never hear about – and even some relatively modern research that has become lost in the avalanche of information that floods the World these days.

In fact, my story continues today with some research projects of my own. You can read about my progress with these projects here.

So my aim is to preserve what I have learned and share it with anyone who is interested to come and read about growing food from the garden.

This position is certainly not what you might have expected if you had met me 20 or 30 years ago. When I moved on to study at University I was focused on Botany and Genetics, with a view to developing a career in Plant Breeding.

Back then, I would have thought developing GMOs would be the coolest thing in the World. I even worked briefly on developing a synchronous chromosome transfer method. Now, I'm rather glad that never became part of my story! If you would like to know what I think now, here is my view on the subject of GMOs.

I have and many different jobs ranging from environmental consulting to journalism and I also had the chance to work with kelp and humic acid products to show what they really do. Later I also had the chance to contrast these products with conventional fertilizers to get a better idea of how they actually worked.

I also looked at a variety of alternative systems like Albrecht, Reams, biodynamics, permaculture, keyline. I found common threads running through them all as much as there were differences.

The ultimate commonality of course is soil management. It was clear that a whole-system approach was essential and that the soil is actually a living system, rather than a simple mechanism that could be managed according to various rules-of-thumb.

The problem seemed to be that no one could properly describe this system. Each of the alternatives above could be shown to produce good results in one place or at one time, but indifferent results elsewhere. As with most things, it turned out that all were looking at the same thing from different points of view and that the answer lay in what bound them all together - not what made them different.

I then had the privilege of working for (and learning from) the person who finally cracked the problem and who has helped to add some of the most important facets of my story - Ted Mikhail - a soil scientist whose interest was in soil physics, in contrast to the simple 'nutrient-centric' view of most others. This is why the Mikhail System he developed is a big feature of the soil section on this site.

So how do you put all this information and experience together in a way that people can easily use? Ultimately, this is where my story has led me and this website is a part of the solution to this problem and it forms the center of a home-based business I am developing.

If you are also interested in having your own home-based business you may find it helpful to read my story of how I have developed things so far, and where I plan to go from here. It is still a 'work-in-progress' however, so like most other things on this website, you will see changes as they happen and read as my story continues, with both successes and failures. I really hope you find all this of value in your own adventures with food gardening, but please let me know if you think of anything more I can do.