2 hours a week

I skite that I grow nearly all the fruit, veggies, flowers, eggs, herbs we eat for less than two hours work a week, with almost no bought inputs, and that this stares down the meme about home grown tomatoes being $100 a kilo.

(The flowers are included here not just for the ones we eat, but just because I like having a bunch of cut flowers in the house, or to take as a gift, and I reckon it counts as a garden product along with food). 

But this morning in the shower I started wondering if I was gilding the lily, if it was really, literally true.  So many tiny, almost incidental inputs of energy. I wonder how they add up?

So, this post is about accounting. How much time and work does it really take to grow enough food to eat well on a suburban block? This doesn’t include setting it up – it does take a lot more in both work and infrastructure for a new garden, but this is my accounting for keeping it rolling after five years in this retrosuburbia  permaculture challenge.

I’ll do this in parts, because there’s a lot of little elements need to come together.

Chooks and compost

This is the heart of it.  Enough high quality compost and everything else just works. I use at least a couple of 20 litre buckets full a week. But the chooks make it for me, for almost no effort, and I get eggs (and the occasional adolescent rooster for meat) as a by-product. There’s a post about it here.

We have a dozen chooks in a deep litter chook run in the back yard. It has a gate to the laneway that runs down the south side of our block.  Six neighbours throw their kitchen waste, lawn clippings and garden prunings over the gate. Three of those households have kids. Anyone with kids will appreciate the deluxe diet of half-eaten sandwiches, lovingly baked muffins and apples with one bite taken out of them that my chooks get. This costs no time or money. When I have excess eggs in spring, the neighbours get eggs and there’s always excess bananas or herbs or something else to give away.

Chooks also get a couple of big boxes of market waste from the Farmer’s Market every Sunday.  We go anyway to buy the few things I don’t grow enough of – onions, garlic, avocados, mangoes in season mainly – and to browse the handmade stalls, so this is nil cost too.

Each day when I empty our kitchen compost bucket, I also throw in a big bucket of wood chip, wood shavings, coffee grounds or in winter the ash from our fireplace (which the chooks love dust bathing in). This buries what hasn’t been eaten, stops it all going manky and keeps the carbon/nitrogen ratio good.

The wood chip gets delivered by a local arborist.  He was chipping some trees a few doors down one day and noticed our garden, we got chatting, he now drops off a load every so often when it’s not worth a trip back to his depot to get rid of it.  The wood shavings come from a joinery business a few blocks away, and the coffee grounds from a café near it.  Both these are waste products for them, they are pleased to get rid of it, it comes ready bagged up, and it’s usually not even out of our way to collect. The main task is thinking of it. But lets say 10 minutes every fortnight. 

The chooks scratch through all this, eating what they want and moving the rest slowly down the very slight slope towards the bottom end of the run.  Whenever I am planting seeds or seedlings I collect a couple of buckets of beautiful compost from the bottom end of the run. At the same time I fork through the middle area a bit to expose worms and larvae for the chooks to feast on. I have a small bucket of grain at the gate and I might scatter a handful to encourage scratching, but so little I can’t remember when we last bought a bag of grain – it would be years ago.  Say ten minutes for this task.

Then there’s the daily task of collecting eggs and checking the water – the kids do it mostly as an adventure not a chore, but let’s say 15 minutes a week. And there’s the annual task of dealing with clucky chooks and the biennial one of raising chicks, say averaging 3 hours a year. 

All in all, compost making and chook tending accounting is around 33 minutes a week.

Seeds and seedlings

This is the other heart of it.

Most weeks I spend about an hour planting seeds, transplanting and planting out seedlings.

The process goes like this:  Collect a couple of buckets full of compost from the chook run. Mix it with a couple of double handfuls of biochar and a couple of handfuls of crusher dust.  The compost is already sandy because the original soil of the chook run is sand. We make the biochar every winter. The amount I use in my potting mix would be worth maybe $75 a year at retail price.

I germinate seeds and raise all the annual garden plants to advanced seedlings in pots full of this mix – there’s a whole post about why here.  So in these planting sessions, I plant a few pots of seeds, transplant seedlings at the two leaf stage into individual pots (or recycled coffee cups for giveaways) and plant out seedlings that are at the point of outgrowing their pots.  Most times I spend more than an hour doing it but that’s cos it’s recreational for me. If I was being paid wages and worked efficiently, I could easily knock it over in an hour. 

About half the seeds I plant are saved and about half bought, but I do seed sorting before I plant (there’s a post about it here) and plant very small amounts each time.  My total annual spend on seeds is around $70

So all in all, the seeds and seedlings accounting is an hour’s work and about $3 bought ingredients a week.

Weeding and watering

I don’t weed, or hardly at all. It’s one of the big advantages of advanced seedlings is that I don’t create open areas or seed beds in the garden for weeds to germinate and occupy. 

I also hardly water.  The seedling raising bench and hanging baskets have an automatic watering system installed, and an advantage of advanced seedlings, biochar and lots of compost is soil with good water holding capacity that can mostly get by on rain. So most weeks it’s none. In the heat of summer, if it hasn’t rained for a while, it might be 10 minutes a day setting up sprinklers to water early in the morning.  But of the 365 days a year, that would be maybe 30 of them.  So an average of say 5 minutes a week.  The water cost would be so low as to be pretty well negligible, but let’s say $100 a year or $2 a week.

For the fruit trees and perennials, there’s a soaker hose laid out in a loop around the main areas. We have a small rainwater tank and in very hot dry weather, I let the whole tank full of water go through the soaker hose over a couple of days. We’re in the process of installing a greywater filtering system to augment that, and in the market for more tanks if they come up at an affordable price. There’s infrastructure cost in that but no ongoing cost, and the time to turn on the soaker hose is negligible.

Fruit tree maintenance      

We have something like 60 fruit trees and vines on our little suburban block. When I say “on”, that generously includes the verge and laneway and pretty much every little space I can find. I am a bit obsessive about harvesting every drop of sunlight and turning it into photosynthesised biomass, (or at least into radiant heat to make warm sitting places in winter, or via solar panels into electricity). 

A major strategy for fitting them all in is stacking – there’s a post about that here. But even so, to fit that many trees, they need a bit of maintenance.  There’s very little weeding – dense planting creates a canopy and under the fruit trees is all occupied by ground covers like sweet potato vines and pumpkins, but there is the task of running through with a weedeater a couple of times a year to keep the groundcovers under control.  That takes about an hour each time, say an average of 2 minutes a week. 

We have quails too, and their cage gets cleaned out and fresh sugar cane mulch laid in it every three weeks or so.  The straw with quail poo is used to mulch a deserving tree.   That task takes about 15 minutes, say an average of 5 minutes a week.  The straw costs $13 a bale and we go through about four bales a year, so that’s another $1 a week.

Pruning is a fairly big task.  We’d spend a couple of hours, a couple of times a year, with two of us, pruning all the trees to keep them at suburban size.  That averages out to around 9 minutes a week, but in fairness, the perennials – bananas, citrus, passionfruit, papaya, coffee, Madagascar beans – are the highest yielding part of the whole system in terms of calories and value.   

  

We also give each tree a half bucket of diluted seaweed brew every few months.  Collecting the seaweed is a non-task – it’s an incidental part of going for a beach walk regularly. But delivering it to the trees takes two of us an hour or so each time, which works out to another 7 minutes a week on average. 

Totals:

Compost making and chook tending – 33 minutes a week and let’s say $1 a week for grain.

Seeds and seedlings – an hour’s work and about $3 bought ingredients a week.

Weeding and watering – 5 minutes work and $2 town water a week.

Fruit tree maintenance – 9 minutes a week pruning, 7 minutes mulching and ground cover maintenance, and 7 minutes a week distributing seaweed brew. $1 a week for quail bedding.

Making the grand total in time just one minute over two hours a week, on average, and the grand total in money no more than about $7 a week. 

Of course that is on average – planting seeds and seedlings happens most weeks but everything else happens only every few weeks or months. We go away a few times a year and up to Brisbane to visit our son’s family for a few days most months.  Some years are wetter and some hotter, some years we don’t raise chicks. I haven’t counted the time to repair and replace infrastructure.

And I dawdle at many of these tasks, just because life is too short to avoid stopping appreciate the colours of a dragonfly’s wings, or the chooks enjoying the all Michelin Stars in a freshly forked over patch of compost, or standing holding a hose, letting thoughts roam, rather than using the automatic watering system. But overall, I really do think I can literally pretty near crack the two hours a week budget for garden work. And for that, we eat in a way that hits all three of the Witches Kitchen definitions of “good”.