In Year Four …

How long does it take? The short answer – if you know what you are doing and don’t have too many false starts, not long at all really. Surprisingly fast. We’ve just gone four years in this retrosuburban adventure. The aim was a “proof of concept”, that living within planetary boundaries could be done without any hair shirt sacrifices. With the opposite of self-sacrifice. A healthy, connected, creative life full of juiciness and resilience. It was my solution to climate anxiety – to feel powerful, to feel like I could do something both personally and politically.

We’re not there yet. There’s still heaps to do – there always is and I suspect always will be. But the outlines are visible.

We get so much deliciousness off this tiny 500m2 suburban block, and I don’t think we would starve if it was all we had. We are growing pretty well all our vegetables, herbs, eggs, and the vast majority of our fruit, with enough to give some away every week. The standouts in fruit are the real sub-tropicals – bananas, papaya, tamarillos, passionfruit. We would have harvested hundreds of kilos of each of them – not surprising, and a lesson in going with nature and planting to the climate. But we’ve also had good harvests off another dozen fruit trees, and there’s another dozen or more after that coming on.

(If you’re subtropical and interested in which, click the little arrow for the list.)

Besides the bananas (Cavendish and Ladyfinger), papaya, tamarillos, and passionfruit (yellow and purple), we’ve had good harvests of dragonfruit, ooray (Gudjin, Davidson’s plums), strawberries, mulberries, Isabella grapes, Tropical Anna apples, guavas, lemons, avocadoes, and coffee. We’ve had the first harvests of gramichama, blueberries, figs, mandarins and plumcot, and the first (one) lychee, (one) custard apple and (four) macadamias. We had Panama berries too, but we didn’t net the tree in time and the birds got them. The oranges, limes, kumquat, olives, carambola, mangoes, pomegranate, japoticaba, feijoa, and nashi pears are all doing well and looking like they’re close to bearing, and we’re planting some different varieties of bananas too in case of the TR4 variety of Panama disease getting a hold in Australia. The seedling peaches need grafting onto, and the low chill cherry tree was a bit of a long shot – my partner loves stone fruit but in the subtropics?

This is the list of vegetables we have been harvesting over the last few months, starting with the ones we have in such quantity we’re giving them away. It’s the start of winter here, and winter is a better growing season than summer.

Eggplants, tromboncino, green beans, butter beans, snake beans, black-eyed peas, cucumbers, Madagascar beans, button squash, sweet potatoes, taro, cassava, cherry tomatoes, basil, lemon basil, Thai basil, sweet corn, chillies, capsicums, ginger, turmeric, kale, mint, parsley, lettuce, rocket, carrots, parsnips, beets, spring onions, walking onions, chives, leeks, molokhia, leaf amaranth, perpetual spinach, kang kong, pak choi, luffas, coriander, sorrel, melissa, oregano, thyme, lemon thyme, lemon grass, rosemary, calendula, chamomile, strawberries, Vietnamese mint, and I know I’ve forgotten some. 

We’re just starting to harvest Hong Kong broccolini and silver beet, and in a couple of weeks there will be Galilee spinach, and a few weeks after that the Green Sprouting Broccolini. Cabbages and cauliflowers are in the garden, and another round in pots and a third round just germinating. Red onions are in, and a second round are in pots. I’ve given garlic a miss this year – it’s been so wet. Coles dwarf broad beans are in but it is such a warm winter so far, I don’t have very high hopes. The My peas and snow peas have had a very slow start – mice or birds got the seeds before they germinated twice over. Normally we would be harvesting the first of them by now too.

The chooks are happy, providing eggs year round and enough in the spring excess season for giveaways and to make pasta for storing. And banana bread for the grandkids’ school lunches. More importantly, they’re our main soil making factory. They’re fed (and make compost from) almost entirely urban waste – kitchen scraps from multiple households, market waste, coffee grounds, cut grass clippings from the park – along with garden greens. We’ve recently added quails for meat and eggs, and we’re thinking pigeons too.

The honey bees do really well in an urban environment, surprisingly well. People plant a lot of flowers in their gardens, and council likes flowering street trees. We dodged varroa mite so far, but it means a large increase in the amount of work involved in keeping them. The native bee hives take a lot less effort (but produce a lot less honey).

Power and water bills are low, offset with solar power and tanks, and we’re ok in outages. Battery technology, I read, is just at the tipping point to being really worthwhile at a household level, so we’re connected to grid but we have a little, emergency off-grid system as well. We have some but not enough water tank storage yet but we’re adding tanks as we find them secondhand, and the roof is capable of collecting a lot more. We went for heat pump hot water system, running on solar power, in preference to a rooftop solar water heater in this salty coastal climate. A greywater filter system is next on the projects list.

We haven’t been too uncomfortable in heat waves – the western verandah and the roof cavity heat extractor make a huge difference. The eastern side is shaded with a grape trellis now too. There are fans in the living room and bedrooms but no air conditioning, and I haven’t felt any lack of it. When I have been out and open the front door, it’s stepping into coolness. In our subtropical climate, heating in winter is hardly (if at all) an issue. I thought about a very efficient, clean burning wood stove when we first moved here but I’m glad it dropped down the priority list long enough to drop right off it. We light an open fireplace fire, fuelled with pine pallets (urban waste) only a couple of dozen times a year – the embedded cost isn’t worth the changeover.

We’ve done a very minor kitchen renovation with second-hand double sink and cupboards, and one day, when the current stove dies we’ll replace it with an induction top, but for now, the embedded cost of that changeover isn’t worth it either.

And we’ve added a high quality electric bike with a trailer, to go with our (second hand) hybrid EV. It was a fairly major expense but it lets us move around independent of each other. It should have a long life, and it’s so much better than using public transport during covid waves. 

We’re involved with two community gardens, a great resource for knowledge sharing as well as all the practical stuff, and we’re lucky to live in a resourceful, friendly, multicultural neighbourhood. This year’s projects also include getting more involved in outgoing – the Permaculture Teacher Training course coming up in August is a big one.

And this post has been in drafts way too long. I keep putting it aside as unfinished. But it never will be.