Into suburbia
In 2019, just about the time that the horror bushfire season started, we moved into suburbia. You couldn’t get much more suburbia – a 500m2 block in a neighbourhood of low rent units and post-war houses, one block back from a major arterial road, an easy walk to a big shopping centre in one direction and a pub in the other. After nearly 40 years living off-grid, in a homebuilt house on a 1000 acre rural community property, with a platypus inhabited creek, a mountain, a patch of remnant rainforest, and three creek crossings on a dirt road just to get to the bitumin, it was a shock.
There were many reasons. One of the big ones was to see how much of what we had learned living off-grid could be transferred to a suburban setting, to see whether our very lovely low carbon footprint lifestyle was actually a solution to climate catastrophe, or whether it was just nah, nah, nah nah nah.
I can’t say that was the only reason, or even the main one. Our granddaughter was born and we had an opportunity to do grandparent day care, (and I firmly believe grandparent child care is a very good thing). I wanted to find out if the way I imagined climate change playing out in my novel held true in the wider world. And life is short, it was time for an adventure.
So here it is, the story of the experiment.
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In year three …
It is year three of this retrosuburbia challenge, and most days now we are eating substantially what can be produced from this little, 500m2 suburban block. No food miles, no packaging, no energy loss through processing or storage. With important gaps – cooking oil, dairy products, flour – but also with some surplus shared with…
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Potting mix
Someone asked me in a comment about my seed raising mix, so it’s a good opportunity to do a whole post about it. My recipe has changed with the availability of ingredients. But the concepts remain the same. Permaculture is like that – not a recipe but a system to be applied differently to every…
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Gearing up for heat waves – Part 1 – heat extractor
Much of the retrosuburbia writing about energy use and energy conservation that I see is about heating, but heating isn’t the issue here. Here, it is cooling, not heating that is the main challenge, even now let alone in the future.
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Bees
We just split the first of our native bee hives. Late spring is the time, when they are warmed up and living their best life, and when there is still plenty of time for them to regroup before winter. There are over 1700 species of bees in Australia but only 11 of them build hives…
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Tardissing the Space Part 7 – Verge gardening
A key insight of permaculture thinking is that there is no such thing as “side effects”. Everything has multiple effects. Everything exists in a networked ecology of interdependencies, ripples, cascades and risk insurance redundancies. So verge gardening has to be looked at as a sector analysis that takes account of all the “wild energies” of…
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Growing fruit salad for breakfast
Breakfast this morning. It’s a bit astounding, and very exciting, that just three years into this retrosuburbia challenge, I can eat a breakfast of yoghurt and fresh fruit salad most mornings if I want to – apple and plumcot and mulberries last month, passionfruit and blueberries and dragonfruit next month, citrus by winter, and next…
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Zombocalypse resilience Part 2: roadside seedling giveaways
I love the chair. It saves me the angst of murdering perfectly healthy seedlings, or worse, being tempted to plant them and use up all my precious garden space on more basil or zucchinis than any household can stand. The chair brings me into lovely conversations with passers by who garden, even just pots on…
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Gearing up for heat waves – Part 2 – the west wall
We’ve done relatively little “renovation” in the conventional sense in retrosuburbia-ing this 1950’s cottage. In most cases, the embedded energy, and money, is more than would be saved by changing an old thing for a new one. This west wall is one of the few bits of real demolishing and rebuilding we’ve done.
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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…
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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’…
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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…
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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.