Designing new buildings for passive solar is a no-brainer – possibly the the easiest, most efficient way to reduce energy costs and make a place so much more liveable. It stuns me that so many houses in suburbia are built with no thought to where the sun is. But if you are doing a retrosuburban refit, you have to work with what you have, and in our case, that meant…
The more gardens there are in my neighbourhood, the less likely mine will get raided. So I’m all in for encouraging, supporting, and contributing to that. And a very easy way to do it is to share seeds. Locally adapted saved seed, fresh and in season, in small quantities, bred from heirloom gardeners’ varieties rather than commercial varieties – it’s a treasure as a gift to anyone starting a food…
This was our north side fence when we moved in, and it was a really attractive house feature. – it wasn’t one of those colourbond monstrosities that catch heat, block sunlight, have only one purpose, and make over the fence conversations impossible, and it needed to be replaced. The new fence going in is now a trellis for Madagascar beans, cherry tomatoes, passionfruit and raspberries. While it can be climbed,…
So how to make 30m2 grow enough vegetables for us, plus snow peas and carrots for the grandkids lunch boxes and the occasional excess for giveaways? Economically? I think the answer is to treat it like a jigsaw, or an art piece that has lots of elements that need to fit together.
My invoice from Daley’s fruit tree nursery says that on 28 October 2019, not long after we started our retrosuburbia journey, in the midst of a drought and just about to be thrown into the worst bushfire season ever, I bought a whole batch of fruit trees for a verge planting. Patience has never been my strongest virtue.
I have 30 square metres of raised vegie garden beds. It’s not enough! I could make good use of double that without running into soil building or harvest distribution problems, but it’s all the space I can really spare for annuals on this little 500m2 suburban block. But by halving the amount of time a plant spends in the garden, I effectively double the garden space.
It all just boils down to sun, soil and water, and on a small, urban site, sun is the limiting factor.