Go Greener, Australia

After showing off our vegie garden in the blog the other week, and making all of our visitors come out to take a look at it, I’ve had a few people ask me why we started growing our own vegetables, and if it was very hard to do. Dave and I had been talking about it for years, but when we read Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, she made it sound so good that we decided to just get stuck into it.

Step 1: Prepare your soil

One Saturday morning Dave pulled out an old, purple-flowered plant that hadn’t been doing well in the corner of our garden. Then he dug in some of our compost - see Greenfoot’s compost instructions too. We decided that was good enough, but we’re pretty lazy. If you aren’t in a hurry you could also put down some weed mats, or add water-retaining crystals to the soil.

Step 2: Choose your plants

We dithered a bit over which fruit and vegies to try, but it’s a no-brainer really: just choose your favourite foods. I’ve loved beetroots ever since I tried a Jamie Oliver recipe. Supermarket tomatoes taste bland, so I thought we could do better (and we did!). Basil seemed like a good bet to go with tomatoes, and apparently they grow well when planted together. Lemon and limes were an easy choice, since we use lots of lemons (lemon linguine, lemon roast chicken, honey and lemon drinks for winter colds), and Dave and I both like to drink Mojitos. Strawberries were Dave’s choice, since they’re his favourite fruit.

Step 3: Put ‘em in the ground

We picked up the plants from Bunnings and popped them into the ground based on the instructions on the little plant tags. Later, we got some stakes to keep the tomato bushes upright. Add some mulch to keep the moisture in the soil where it belongs - we got a bunch of pea straw from Farmer Jack’s and just kinda spread it around. We put the lemon and lime trees in half-wine-barrels from Waldecks.

Step 4: Maintenance

Perth has water restrictions, so the plants get the regulation 2 days of sprinklers a week. In-between, we sometimes hand-water them after work - and by “we”, I mean “Dave”. When he did the watering, he’d check for any bugs or weeds. Once, there were some bugs on the tomatoes, so Dave used an organic pesticide from Bunnings, and they went away.

That’s pretty much it - so far, everything is doing fine apart from the beetroot, which just didn’t seem to grow much. Peter Cundall from Gardening Australia could point out all sorts of flaws with how we’ve done it (I’m sure he’d want us to use more manure), but I think we learn best by actually doing something, even if we take a few tries to get it right.

Why is growing your own food good for the environment?

By growing some of our own fruit and vegies, we make it easy to reduce the eco-impact of our food: of the 6 ways to make your food eco-friendly, growing your own vegies helps with 5 of them. Food from our backyard is about as local as it gets, we know it’s seasonal because we harvest as soon as things ripen, we control the amount (if any) of pesticides and fertilisers used, there’s no packaging involved, and it motivates us to learn how to cook from scratch. So far we’ve learned mostly about cooking tomatoes (bruschetta, pasta sauce, baked with sausages, in salads, etc), but I’m looking forward to trying new things as we go along.

So if you’re not happy with what’s on offer at your supermarket, dig out a plant in your garden that you don’t like, and stick something tasty in there instead. Water it, stick some mulch on it, and see how it goes

We started our compost bin a little less than a year ago, to reduce the waste we were adding to landfill - now we’re getting fresh vegies from our garden!

This is what it looked like to start with. We mostly put in kitchen scraps, garden clippings, and newspapers.

When it was finished cooking, it looked like this:

We added the compost to the soil before planting a few tomato and basil plants, plus some beetroot.

In a few months, it looked like this. The plant starting to crawl across the garden is a pumpkin vine, which seems to have sprung from a stray seed in the compost.

Right now, it looks like this. I’m afraid the vine is going to smother our house if we let it continue. I’d be surprised if we get a good pumpkin from it, as it’s putting all it’s energy into leaves instead of fruit. The beetroot didn’t really work out - they were tiny. I blame the rogue pumpkin for stealing it’s nutrients!

However, the tomatoes are doing fine.

So far, we’ve grown about 3 kilos of tomatoes. I don’t know how long the plants will keep producing - the hot weather has only just begun in Perth. The basil is doing well so far. Next time we’re going to plant some onions and carrots.

It’s almost magical - we took rubbish and leftovers that would usually have gone into a giant stinking landfill, and turned them into fresh food instead. We’re not experts: we just stuck some scraps in a bin and waited, then put the compost in the ground, stuck in some plants, and watered them while we waited some more.

Anyone can give this a go - it’s not hard, and it’s very satisfying to eat a meal from vegies and herbs you grew yourself! If you want to try it, first check out my original post about Beginner’s Composting and then look into some books on growing your own fruit and vegetables. We’ve found the Yates Garden Guide useful, and the website for ABC’s Gardening Australia tv show is full of interesting stuff to try.

On the weekend we visited my in-laws, who have a fantastic vegie garden, fruit trees, a few sheep and a lot of chickens. At home we put our kitchen waste in the compost bin, but when we stay with the in-laws, most of it goes into the ‘chook bucket’.

I like feeding the chickens - they’re very soothing company, even if they are a little stupid. When they see you coming with the chook bucket they get so excited, it’s pretty funny. They also provide manure for your garden, and eat a lot of pesky insects. But the fantastic part is the fresh eggs…

Our garden is just a bit too small to keep chickens. However, if we had a standard-size block I’d definitely keep a couple. You can go upmarket with the Eglu, but Josh Byrne from Gardening Australia has free plans you can use to make your own chook pen (pdf), big enough for two chickens (or three if they’re a small breed). Gardening Australia also has plenty of information about keeping backyard chickens.

Linda Cockburn’s Living the Good Life is the diary of a family who decided they wouldn’t spend any money for 6 months. The idea was to be domestically sustainable by generating their own power, growing their own food, harvesting their own rainwater, and not spending money on consumer goods. You can see photos of the house and garden, a list of their restrictions, tables so you can record your own power and water usage, etc at their website.

They weren’t puritans - they made sensible decisions to break their challenge in order to take their son to hospital, to take a break in the middle, and deal with unforeseen events. They bartered their excess fruit, vegies, eggs and home-made cheese for things harder to make themselves, like flour and sugar. But they keep a spirit of adventure, and by the end of the 6 months are healthier and happier.

It’s hard for me not to compare this book to Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which deals with a similar challenge. Kingsolver is a professional writer, and it shows in her lyrical descriptions. Cockburn isn’t quite in the same category, but she has the same infectious enthusiasm and can-do attitude, and the book is an enjoyable read because of it.

Cockburn’s book gives details of their food crops, their chooks and goat, the decisions they make, the funny things her husband and kid say. There are segments explaining Australian facts about water use, plastics, farming and so on. At the end of each chapter, her husband Trevor writes up his impressions of the month.

At the halfway point, Trevor has a rant about how Linda is making the challenge sound easier than he thinks it is. It’s a very honest look at how frustrating it can be to restrict yourself, especially when the people you’re friends with and work with just don’t get it. Trevor chooses to challenge himself because it’s the right thing to do, not because it’s the easy thing to do.

I really enjoyed the honesty with which Linda and Trevor put forward the details of their lives. It was great to read an environment book written for an Aussie audience: the statistics were useful and relevant, it’s easy to understand the weather and culture they deal with, and they’ve got that dry-as-dust Aussie sense of humour which can find a joke in the worst situation.

At the end of the book is an assessment of how their health, finances and environmental footprint have been improved, and how the challenge has changed their perceptions of life.

Recommended?
I’d recommend Living the Good Life to anyone who’s day-dreamed about chucking their job and becoming self-sufficient, anyone who’s a keen gardener, and anyone who enjoyed Kingsolver’s book.

I’m aware that my life could be more sustainable than it is, and books like this give me good ideas about how I can move forward. We started a vegie patch because of Barbara Kingsolver - this book has made me think about getting a rainwater tank. I’m not going to stop spending money for 6 months, but I’ve definitely been planning ways to reduce my consumption, and Linda Cockburn has put plenty of ideas forward for how to do that.

On the weekend I went with a couple of friends to see one of the homes open for Sustainable House Day. The event is in its 6th year, held every year on the second weekend in September across Australia and NZ. It gives you a chance to see how people are making their homes more sustainable. Then we went on to see Josh Byrne’s sustainable garden, which wasn’t far away.

The Painted Fish
This home is actually a group of sustainable dwellings used as a bed-n-breakfast - you can hire them for a weekend getaway. The owners have worked hard to make the entire business sustainable - there are solar panels and water tanks, with vegie gardens and bikes provided for guests to use. I took a few photos, but the website at www.thepaintedfish.com.au shows it better.

The Painted Fish is a work in progress - they’ve achieved so much, but they are still experimenting with ways to make it even better. The cottage uses it’s water feature to cool the rooms down; there are mirrors to get some sunlight onto the vegie garden which was over-shadowed by the neighbours’ 2nd storey extension; and there are two outdoor showers which can have their first run of cold water switched to a hose so you can water the plants around them. I was very impressed with the effort that has gone into making this sustainable holiday accommodation. I also want to steal their idea of labeling their 3 kitchen bins as “compost”, “recycling” and “landfill”, to make it easier for people to know where their waste is going.

Josh Byrne’s Permaculture Garden
I was particularly interested in this garden, because I recently bought Byrne’s book The Green Gardener. It was great to see a garden he’d made that demonstrates the principles he promotes. The event was part of the open-gardens scheme, and outside there were gardening vendors, a coffee van and talks on sustainable gardening.

The garden itself was beautiful - full of fruits, herbs, vegetables and ornamental plants. There was also a fish/frog pond, and chickens in a portable coop. As well as all of this in a small-ish backyard, there were outdoor living areas: a mini-kitchen and mini-laundry, and an office/guestroom with an outdoor bathroom. To me it seemed pleasantly and sensibly arranged, rather than crowded or over-done. I reckon it’d be very relaxing to come home from work, step out into your backyard to pick a few salad leaves or collect eggs before making a quick meal that you can eat on your deck as the sun goes down. You can see the plan for the garden (pdf), or if you’re a fan of Byrne’s work for Gardening Australia or Organic Gardener magazine, there seem to be some new forums there (very quiet right now, but hopefully they’ll pick up soon).

I really recommend going to see a few demonstrations of sustainable homes and gardens - it’s very inspiring and gives you a good idea of the possibilities for making your own home more eco-friendly.

Some interesting vendors discovered during the day (all WA):
Nexus Car Share - car sharing in Fremantle
Your Patch - installation and maintenance of organic edible gardens in Perth and Bunbury
Gardener’s Direct - eco-friendly garden supply specialists

Last year my husband and I started a compost bin: we wanted to improve the soil in our garden, which is sandy like most of Perth, and stop adding food scraps to landfill.

We bought a standard compost bin from Bunnings. Our local council sells them at a discount, but they have to be picked up during office hours on a weekday and we both work full-time. There are fancier ones available, but ours is just a black tub, no bottom, with a lid. You could easily make your own, or you could try a worm farm, or a Bokashi composter… there’s something to suit everyone.

Our food scraps go in a little covered kitchen bin, which is then emptied into the compost bin every so often. As well as our food scraps, we put in the local newspaper, lawn clippings, and prunings from the garden. We don’t put meat or fat in there, since that attracts vermin. Mostly it smells fine, in an earthy sort of way, and if it doesn’t then we give it a good stir to air it out then chuck in more newspaper.

Composting can get technical if you want to maintain the correct carbon-to-nitrogen ratios and produce lots of compost as fast as possible. If you have a big family or a big garden, you’ll want to look into “hot process composting”. We’ve gone with the lazier method, known as “cold process” (also known as the “chuck it all in and cross your fingers” method) and it seems to be working fine for us.

At any rate, we should soon have some nice compost to dig into the garden, which we can use to try growing some organic vegies. Between the compost bin and the council recycling tubs, our wheelie bin is only half-full each week on bin day, so we’ve definitely reduced the amount of waste we send to landfill. And we’ve managed to re-use (or is it recycle?) our food scraps into useful compost.

More information:
Sustainable Gardening Australia has an article on The Science of Composting. If you want to get technical, Wikipedia has a full explanation of how composting works.

I read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: Our Year of Seasonal Eating last weekend. Barbara Kingsolver writes about how her family spent one year eating only local food: they had to either grow it themselves, find a local provider, or do without it. Her family made the change for environmental reasons, and found social and health benefits too.

By eating locally and seasonally, less food needs to be transported from around the country or even overseas. Kingsolver tells how she planted a vegetable garden, bought chickens and turkeys, and found produce from local farmers. They made their way through birthday parties, Thanksgiving dinners, and the lean winter months with some creativity and planning. She discusses the food they eat when on holidays, sharing the different perspectives she finds as they travel. Her husband writes extra sidebars about the legal issues facing farmers and consumers, while her eldest daughter adds their favourite recipes (which you can see at AnimalVegetableMiracle.com).

Their efforts to get rid of zucchini made me laugh, and I was in suspense over the turkeys: would they ever figure out where babies come from? There’s plenty of useful info about growing vegetables too. The discussion about industrial agriculture was interesting, and I think it’s relevant in a lot of ways to the Australian farming situation.

Sometimes Kingsolver gets starry-eyed over farm life, making it sound magical and amazing. But she isn’t encouraging everyone to abandon their jobs to take up full-time farming. She simply insists that since we all have to eat, we all need to learn more about our food: how it grows, where it comes from, its effect on our social lives, and how our agricultural system contributes to our culture and economy. Her joyful passion for food and gardening is inspiring. I’m going to start a vegie patch this month, to see if I can grow a few winter vegetables.

Anyone who enjoys good food will enjoy this book - reading it made my mouth water! Gardeners will find that they have a lot in common with Kingsolver’s triumphs and disappointments, while people looking for alternatives to industrial agriculture will find useful information. I’d also recommend it to anyone who enjoyed Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, because it relates to the small, local farming he discusses in the 3rd section of that book.