Building, Growing, Cooking, Making, Preserving
Building, Growing, Cooking, Making, Preserving
We are two passionate gardeners and makers from Newcastle in NSW on the east coast of Australia. We have a keen interest in subsistence gardening, preserving, handcrafts and making the most of the semi-rural quarter-acre block of land we live on. We are using this post to catch you up on our journey so far.
At the end of 2019, our goal of a Homesteading lifestyle started to take off. Half of our property is covered with well-established Australian Native Rainforest trees, and had a decked area for entertaining which was in rough shape. We decided to remove the deck to make way for our very own market garden. But by this point we had already accumulated many plants and had to make do with the copious amounts of pots littering the area. With the deck eventually removed, we had a firmer idea of how we wanted to use the space and what we had to do to achieve it.
Eventually, our goal is to end up on more land for more variety of gardening and hopefully some livestock. We have committed to learning as many skills as possible to make it a bit easier on a larger homestead, but we know there are always unexpected challenges and we will never know it all!
Impatient to get started and not yet ready to remove the entire deck, we started with one bed and soil from a local supplier (which turned out to be terrible and needed a lot of remediation) and some fruit trees in pots (which we will cover later). This was enough to satiate our excitement while we slowly removed the deck and designed our market garden.
The soil we received had a pH of 8-9, which is very alkaline. Being novice gardeners we didn’t really know how to tackle this, so we hit the local nursery and talked to a really helpful horticulturalist (hot tip for anyone with gardening questions. He recommended treating it with Sulphur and finding another supplier. Luckily for us, the plants we had already put in this bed were herbs which were more tolerant to the bad soil than some of the other plants we had planned in the future.
It took us a few months to get most of the deck removed and made two more beds with much better soil from a different supplier. All of this just in time to get some tomatoes and capsicums in the ground.
By the end of that planting we also had some Rainbow Silverbeet and Fairytale Eggplants into the bed also.
Learning from the many challenges of 2020, we had a list of things to accomplish before moving forward. We needed better soil for our herb bed, a greenhouse for seed raising, and more effective ways of keeping out pests such as possums and cockatoos. After a lot of research we came up with a few different ideas.
We came across a greenhouse for sale at a property close to us, and with the help of some Garden Hero friends we disassembled it and reassembled it in situ next to our soon-to-be enclosed market garden. The greenhouse took the place of the first herb bed, and that was moved into the market garden (soil excluded!).
Following extensive research and some trial-and-error, we added both a misting system and a drip irrigation system to the greenhouse. It currently runs off mains water, but we hope to convert to tank water as soon as it is practical. We put a few small raised beds in the greenhouse for Horseradish, Ginger and Turmeric, and added a shelf for seed raising along the back. On a whim, we bought 6 varieties of seed potatoes, so they will be growing along one side of the greenhouse this year.
The last problem was our beloved pests – possums and cockatoos (and other large birds, did we mention we basically live in a rainforest?). We researched many methods of protecting our garden from these pests, but quite a few would damage the ecosystem and harm beneficial species. So we opted to enclose the garden with a roll of wire-mesh we had lying about.
Right now, it is the middle of winter 2021 and the enclosure is almost finished. We have added a temperature controlled heating system to the greenhouse to combat some seriously low overnight temperatures. We have also bought many new and interesting seeds for the coming season, with a lot more flowers to encourage beneficial insects.
The existing pipe structure of the fence was very sturdy and we decided it was much easier to leave it in place and add to it. We added another steel-mesh wall along the verandah and used a orchard mesh for the roof. This will exclude large birds and other pests while still allowing bees and other beneficial insects to contribute to our garden.
We added a pedestrian gate next to the kitchen of our house and widened the existing gate to make it easier to get our wheelbarrow through and are looking forward to our next crops being more protected from hungry invaders.
The next thing on the agenda after finishing this enclosure is adding chickens to our garden’s ecosystem and we can’t wait to share some thoughts about that too.
We really hope that you have enjoyed catching up on where we are at with our homesteading garden. And we hope you will continue to enjoy the articles that will follow! We have so much to share about the many facets of homesteading we are passionate and learning every day about; cooking, baking, brewing, fermenting, gardening, permaculture, livestock, building, spoon-carving, hand tools, blacksmithing, recycling, upcycling, solar power, automation and technology.