Health, Food and Life, Travel

Lots of Changes, all Good

The only constant in life is… change.

Since the last post, ages ago, Julia and I have gotten into gardening / permaculture. We are trying to transition to a sustainable lifestyle, which means tiny carbon footprint, health promoted by growing your own, re-use, re-purpose, rescue from the landfill and thereby rescuing the landfill and the atmosphere and planet earth, to a tiny degree. Mind you, if more people did this…

Today, I added new timber to our initial grow bed:

Almost complete, just needs filling with hugelkultur material

By the way, those are bags of horse poo – two bucks a pop – leaning up against the grow-beds. In the garden beds with greenery are Julia’s successes with planting strawberries, spring onions, lettuce, snow peas, capsicum and string beans. We’ve gone from killing every plant we touch or which has the misfortune to living with us to this!

Here’s a quick little video on how those grow beds are filled:

These grow beds are sort-of a group-effort thing. Mark from Self-Sufficient Me – my total guru for gardening on YouTube – lives in Southeast Queensland, so his suggestions make a lot of sense to us. Raised garden beds are his thing… and ours, now. Mind you, we have low beds as well, not to mention the start of no-dig garden plots here and there.

This first responsibility of a farmer / gardener / permaculturist is soil building. Soil is the basis for plant life. Thing is: it really isn’t hard to convert dirt, which is just a pile of minerals, no bio-mass, to soil. We have all the ingredients to building brilliant soil with minimal effort, and they all come from our kitchen. I’m talking food scraps.

We’re so excited about what we’re able to accomplish with just taking food scraps and mixing them with leaves and sticks and shredded paper and stuff that we’ve got a permanent pile of soil In-The-Works. As it gets built up, and everything has broken down, we collect it for a while until we have enough, then when the garden bed has enough hugelkultur stuff in it, we crush it down a bit and chuck the new soil on top of this and plant.