The Retrofit - Introduction
To my dismay, I delayed writing this post for a while. However, I am determined to continue to be a voice for what I am passionate about and so I have returned to the blog! I am going to try my very best to post regularly from now on.
As someone who is very interested in sustainability and still lives at home, I often dream about having a property of my own that I can turn into an amazing abundance of veggie gardens, chicken runs, solar panels and the like. My mum's property has allowed me to practice a lot of what I have learnt over the years, like starting a veggie garden, composting our food scraps, collecting shower and kitchen 'waste' water for the garden and riding my bike to work (since I live so close), just to name a few. Recently though, I have started dating Alex who lives alone in a typical Australian suburban brick home on what was a standard size block before subdividing and building units became the unfortunate norm (yuk! I will post about this more in the future).
The End of Suburbia is a must see documentary about peak oil, arguing that it spells a hard crash for the suburban dream. David Holmgren, the co-originator of Permaculture offers a different vision for our impending future - a vision of a radically retrofitted, food producing suburbia. Watch the documentary here (this gives you access to the RetroSuburbia website too). David Holmgren's latest book, RetroSuburbia, is my bible on everything around retrofitting this property. It explains reasons for modifying existing homes instead of starting fresh and why suburbia can be and maybe should be the location of your homesteading dream instead of out in the country. All of this I will talk to in following posts. For now, I'll just lay the ground work for our project...
We decided together, that we would bring the garden back into full production. For a while I would sit at the window, imagining everything that the space could be until finally I asked for a piece of paper and a pen, and I began to draw up the floor plan of the garden. I won't go into too much detail, but this involved considering the 'flow' of the site - eg, having the herbs and salad greens close to the house for easy access, the outdoor cooking/prep space in the dead spot of the garden, the slope of the site and how water would move across it etc. I will talk more on this in developing posts.
Over the last few months we also began to work on making the house more sustainable - introducing a compost bucket, shower bucket, compostable kitchen cloths and using vinegar and bicarb soda for cleaning instead of the harmful chemicals that used to live under the sinks. I am very lucky that Alex has supported every suggestion I have made, even though I have been like a tornado sweeping through his life!
Fast forward to now and the garden is in full overhaul mode! We dug two of the veggie beds by hand and realised that it was going to be quite hard to do the whole garden. We decided to use Glenys' rotary hoe to do the rest of the work. Glenys, who is Alex's mum, is a landscaper and all round handy woman who amazingly seems to have every tool we have needed so far.
About a month ago we ordered a chicken coop online and had the flat pack delivered. I'm lucky enough to have best friends who are as enthusiastic about the chickens as we are and who came over to help put it all together. Our motto with our retrofit seems to be "just jump in the deep end" so our progress doesn't stall and we don't let fear come into the equation of all my big ideas!
The chicken run came together quickly. Again, we were blessed with Glenys's resourcefulness as she had been scrounging together old fencing from her various workplaces that we were able to salvage and utilise. I watched last week as she and Al put the fencing up (I was on breakfast duty). It felt like within two seconds the fences were up, gate posts in and everything screwed and secure, yay!
Unfortunately, the realities of having to work and fulfil the other duties of a busy life mean that I must finish this post here. Not to mention that we all have such short attention spans these days primarily due to the influence of social media. If you've read this far, I thank you for committing to reading more than a 50 word post! In a few days I'll write up about getting the chickens and ducks and how settling them into their new home goes. I hope this has enthralled you, and more importantly made you consider what unused space you have around your home that you too could turn into something amazing that gives you more than a lawn gives you. If it has, I'd love to hear what thoughts you might have as this is my passion and there's always more to be learnt. Whether you believe you're an isolated individual or not, the reality is we all live in this society together, and we're all impacted by climate change together. Any part we each play, big or small is one step closer towards a future we can all enjoy together.
Love,
Liza
As someone who is very interested in sustainability and still lives at home, I often dream about having a property of my own that I can turn into an amazing abundance of veggie gardens, chicken runs, solar panels and the like. My mum's property has allowed me to practice a lot of what I have learnt over the years, like starting a veggie garden, composting our food scraps, collecting shower and kitchen 'waste' water for the garden and riding my bike to work (since I live so close), just to name a few. Recently though, I have started dating Alex who lives alone in a typical Australian suburban brick home on what was a standard size block before subdividing and building units became the unfortunate norm (yuk! I will post about this more in the future).
The End of Suburbia is a must see documentary about peak oil, arguing that it spells a hard crash for the suburban dream. David Holmgren, the co-originator of Permaculture offers a different vision for our impending future - a vision of a radically retrofitted, food producing suburbia. Watch the documentary here (this gives you access to the RetroSuburbia website too). David Holmgren's latest book, RetroSuburbia, is my bible on everything around retrofitting this property. It explains reasons for modifying existing homes instead of starting fresh and why suburbia can be and maybe should be the location of your homesteading dream instead of out in the country. All of this I will talk to in following posts. For now, I'll just lay the ground work for our project...
A footpath view of what so many Australian's call home - a typical suburban brick home with a lawn - and in this case, Alex's! Our vision for this lawn is a native garden with a rock river bed and frog bog so that we are giving back to the native wildlife that so desperately still need their own space in our rapidly expanding selfish takeover of land.
When Alex told me early on that his backyard was large and overrun with grass and weeds my head started to spin with the possibilities of what it could be turned into. I asked for photos and I was shown something far greater than I imagined. Alex's garden, whilst overrun with grass and weeds, had the brick edging and concrete path foundation that indicates there was once, in the not too distant past, a HUGE veggie garden! I remember when I first stood in this backyard, I whispered in excitement "do you realise what you have here?"We decided together, that we would bring the garden back into full production. For a while I would sit at the window, imagining everything that the space could be until finally I asked for a piece of paper and a pen, and I began to draw up the floor plan of the garden. I won't go into too much detail, but this involved considering the 'flow' of the site - eg, having the herbs and salad greens close to the house for easy access, the outdoor cooking/prep space in the dead spot of the garden, the slope of the site and how water would move across it etc. I will talk more on this in developing posts.
Over the last few months we also began to work on making the house more sustainable - introducing a compost bucket, shower bucket, compostable kitchen cloths and using vinegar and bicarb soda for cleaning instead of the harmful chemicals that used to live under the sinks. I am very lucky that Alex has supported every suggestion I have made, even though I have been like a tornado sweeping through his life!
The original veggie bed experiment - most of Alex's work, not my own. He started by just digging up one bed and seeing how it went before committing to the whole garden. You can see the overrun of grass around it with the foundations of the old plots just visible.
Fast forward to now and the garden is in full overhaul mode! We dug two of the veggie beds by hand and realised that it was going to be quite hard to do the whole garden. We decided to use Glenys' rotary hoe to do the rest of the work. Glenys, who is Alex's mum, is a landscaper and all round handy woman who amazingly seems to have every tool we have needed so far.
Before using the rotary hoe we mowed and then covered the grass with scraps of cardboard to kill off the grass and weeds. This meant that rotary hoeing was easier and that the grass wouldn't grow back once dug into the soil.
You can start to gauge how large the backyard is from how much old cardboard we have had to use! The large tree in the middle of the picture is a fig tree. So far the figs have been dry and somehow growing out of season (?!). We decided that this has come down to lack of love (nutrients and food) and the current drought. We have started to drip water it to see if this will make a difference to the fruit. I'll keep you updated.
Post rotary hoeing - amazing dark, soft soil underneath all the cardboard! You can see the original experiment plot thriving and the next area to be dug under cardboard behind.
Fluffy soil with the mulched weeds and grass dug in which will act as a compost/soil conditioner that adds body to the soil. As a side note, I want to get this soil tested for contaminants such as lead from paint or arsenic before we start planting, just in case. This service is free and can be found here.
We got a load of free horse manure from 5 minutes down the road - how lucky are we?! And we will continue to do this for the whole garden since the supply is so plentiful. We hand dug this bed a few weeks ago and planted it out over the weekend with an array of late summer experiments - borlotti beans, sunflowers, spinach, beets, lettuce, spring onions, just to name a few. None of these really should be planted now but what the heck, we've done it anyway!
About a month ago we ordered a chicken coop online and had the flat pack delivered. I'm lucky enough to have best friends who are as enthusiastic about the chickens as we are and who came over to help put it all together. Our motto with our retrofit seems to be "just jump in the deep end" so our progress doesn't stall and we don't let fear come into the equation of all my big ideas!
Piecing together our puzzle with the always ambiguous, flat pack instructions!
We got there in the end!
The coop in its new spot! Secure and ready to be fox proofed.
Fox proofing day - Al and I cut chicken wire, cut our hands, fiddled around with the bulky wire cutters, had different ideas about how best to fox proof the coop and were getting rather agitated and sweaty trying to get it all together under the heat of the midday sun. Alex was amazing with his strength coming in more handy than my own... also, its too small for both of us to be in there at once!
The dedicated duck/chicken run. Due to the abundance of space, we have decided to work on a rotation system which allows access to half the run, whilst the over half is closed off and given time to regenerate away from scratching claws and pecking beaks. Otherwise, the birds will turn to the whole space to dirt and mud!
Unfortunately, the realities of having to work and fulfil the other duties of a busy life mean that I must finish this post here. Not to mention that we all have such short attention spans these days primarily due to the influence of social media. If you've read this far, I thank you for committing to reading more than a 50 word post! In a few days I'll write up about getting the chickens and ducks and how settling them into their new home goes. I hope this has enthralled you, and more importantly made you consider what unused space you have around your home that you too could turn into something amazing that gives you more than a lawn gives you. If it has, I'd love to hear what thoughts you might have as this is my passion and there's always more to be learnt. Whether you believe you're an isolated individual or not, the reality is we all live in this society together, and we're all impacted by climate change together. Any part we each play, big or small is one step closer towards a future we can all enjoy together.
Love,
Liza
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