This small backyard in the Dandenong Ranges is a flourishing food zone

At the foothills of the Dandenong Ranges, 100 metres from the forest edge, 24-year-old Rachelle Van Diggele has created a thriving and abundant food zone in the 19-square-metre back yard of the home she shares with her mum, boyfriend and two ducks.

Over the past few months Van Diggele estimates she’s harvested more than 100 kilograms of produce from her veggie patch, including three types of capsicum, 10 different varieties of tomato, three varieties of bean, five types of cucumber, lettuce, eggplant, zucchini, and plenty more.

She keeps her fruit trees and indigenous ingredients — Tasmanian mountain pepper, lemon aspen, lemon myrtle, finger limes and desert limes — at her grandparents’ house down the road, where she’s also released trout into the dam and is growing lotus for lotus roots.

She estimates she had around 45 varieties of vegetables and 10 different fruit trees growing over summer, with some of her favourites being the scarlet runner beans, yellow pear tomatoes and richmond green cucumbers.

Van Diggele’s father came from a family of horticulturalists and her mother has always been passionate about growing food, so you could say that gardening is in her blood.

“Growing up I always used to ask dad to point out plants, and he would name all the plants — he just had the most amazing knowledge. So, I guess that’s where I got my passion,” she says.

But it wasn’t until just over a year ago, when Van Diggele’s father died unexpectedly and Melbourne’s lockdown restrictions came into place, that she found herself driven to create her own magnificent food forest. The apprentice chef left her job at Melbourne farm restaurant O.MY to focus on home and family life, including the garden.

“It was really my source of therapy during that time being locked at home,” she says. “That was how I got through that hard time without my dad there, and that was how I could connect to him.”

As an extension of her labour of love, Van Diggele started an Instagram page (@grownwild_ ) to share knowledge and inspire others to grow more of their own food. She found that people were needing a dose of wholesome simplicity and sense of autonomy.

“I really think that people are craving to reconnect to the simpler things in life,” she says. “Just the way farming is going, and all the news in the world feels like it’s really out of our control. And, I feel like gardening and growing food in our back yard is the one place where we can have control of what we actually put in our bodies.”

Pretty soon Van Diggele started receiving questions from people wanting to know where to begin their own food-growing journey. She says the first thing to do is to give yourself permission to fail, and realise that growing food is largely a process of trial and error.

Next, it’s important to focus on what’s in season (just because you see tomatoes at the supermarket all year round, doesn’t mean it’s wise to plant them at the beginning of winter), and start with simple plants such as herbs and lettuce before moving on to things such as tomatoes or cucumbers. And, although it might sound obvious, Van Diggele advises planting fruit and vegetables you actually like.

She also stresses the importance of enriching your soil.

“When you are growing food the aim is to feed the soil, not the plants. When you’re feeding the soil, you’re going to feed it seaweed, compost, worm juice, manure — really good organic matter,” she says.

As well as encouraging others to grow food, Van Diggele is a big advocate for foraging — that is, finding what’s edible in the environment around you. She recommends “hitting the streets” in your local area, looking up, looking down, and taking note of plants such as fruit trees. Those in coastal areas can forage seaweed for cooking or composting (check local laws first), and even in urban areas you’ll find a range of edible weeds.

“Mother Nature provides food for us everywhere,” says Van Diggele. “All those things we call weeds were once medicine. And, I think we’ve just grown out of touch with the fact that food is the best preventative medicine we have. And, lots of it’s free. Stinging nettle, or mallow, or dandelion — all these things are free, and growing in your back yard.”

Van Diggele is unsure when she’ll return to her life as a chef. For now, she’s working at the family nursery, studying permaculture and focusing on her mission of teaching others the importance of growing more of their own food rather than depending on big supermarkets and the mono-crop farming industry.

“I feel like this is my way of making a difference in the world. I think the way I can help people is helping them grow a garden – that’s the thing I can do,” she says.

“In the future, I want to have a property and try to live pretty much off what I grow, and I want to teach people how to do that, too. I just want to inspire the young generation and make growing food cool; get younger people excited about it.”

This article is part of a series on Green Homes, brought to you by Belong, Australia’s first carbon-neutral telco and winner of Finder’s Green Telco of the Year 2020.