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Category: Retrosuburbia

After nearly 40 years living off-grid, we moved to a 1950’s fibro cottage, on a small suburban block, in regional city. How much of what we have learned about permaculture and homesteading and small footprint living, will work in a suburban setting?

Quails

Aren’t they the cutest little things? They’re day old quail chicks, and we’re finding they’re nicely suited to raising in suburbia. Besides being prolific egg layers, there’s some good science that quail eggs are very effective against hayfever, and possibly, probably other allergies too.

Part of a world map, centred on Australia and extending west to Iran, north to Japan, and east to New Zealand. I has hundreds, a thousand or more green arrows moving across all the oceans. They are so concentrated around the shores of China that they make one green area.

When the ships stop, what then?

Isn’t it stunning? This is the current position of all the cargo vessels in the world. Just cargo vessels – I’ve set the filter to remove the passenger ships, the tankers, the fishing vessels, all the other types of sea traffic. How do we prepare for when those ships stop, or, if we are smarter than I think we collectively are, when they start using fuel that is clean and…

Gearing up for heat waves – Part 3 – Plan

The Bureau of Meteorology says that it’s likely that this will be an El Niño year, drier and warmer. That is, it says, on top of the drier and warmer conditions that climate change predicts anyhow for much of Australia, especially the south east. It brings with it an increased risk of extreme heat. And my ‘470’ research came to the same conclusion as this week’s article in The Conversation – Australia’s…

In the centre of the image is a large wooden carved fruit bowl filled with ripe Ladyfinger and Cavendish bananas, orange-red tamarillos, lime green guavas and yellow passionfruit. In the foreground and background are more tamarillos.

Autumn Fruit Bowl

I continue to be astonished at the quantity of food we can produce on our little suburban block. We harvested over 20kg of tamarillos today, and this is the third pick of the season, with another to go. here’s a huge bunch of Cavendish bananas ripening on the back deck, and a smaller bunch of Ladyfingers. The lemon tree in the verge planting has its first real crop just starting…