From where I sit gazing out our French doors, the world is one of abundance created by 13 months of applied permaculture design. The view includes our solar-powered clothes dryer, wood-fired pizza oven, one of many veggie gardens and a glimpse of a food forest out the back.

Apples grow and ripen as muscovies patrol for snails and slugs around fig trees, peaches and tagasastes.

While it will take a few more years for this perennial foodscape to mature, the annual gardens are already cranking away. This cauliflower thinks it is a tree with a sizable trunk…

… and canopy.

The cat is included for scale, but I think the sink offers a better perspective.

Note: This was not the biggest cauliflower of the season. That award went three weeks ago to her cousin.

And while the cauliflowers are destined for human bellies, the leaves feed the chooks in our four dimensional ecological design system. The leaves then become eggs and fertilizer.

As potatoes and garlic are harvested at the end of their growth…

… our first courgette forms.

And a host of other green things actively convert sunlight into nutrition.

But not to be outdone, Uncle B. steals the show.

Not Billy T. James, the cat, but what she is standing on.

Definitely the biggest I’ve ever grown or ever seen.

After filling the skillet, it was still too big for the cutting board. (George Bush, be afraid, be very afraid.) The moral of the story: compost, early and often.

Wishing you peace and abundance in your lives, Estwing