JubJub Homestead

You made your bed, now lay in it. So we're fortunate enough to have a fully fenced backyard. However, it is rather boring and empty. I wanted to fill the entire backyard with raised beds, but Shannon wants a nice lawn. After reminding Shannon of her place in the patriarchal dominance hierarchy, I agreed not to build raised beds everywhere, but was allowed to build them along the fence, which I have agreed to do. So the first one I built was at the back of the kitchen window. There were a couple of pesky shrubs there so I dug them up. Then I built a rock wall and layed cardboard over the weeds. Then Shannon and I filled the bed with some sandy soil that was left in a pile beside the house. I then topped it up with compost and put a few bricks in there till I could get hold of some pavers. There is a tap on the wall so I'm going to screw a bracket into the fence near the footpath to hold a garden hose and hook it up to the tap. The final step was c...

Scuse' my French A belated happy new year to you all. Things have been busy both on the homestead and off, hence the lack of posts. Anyway, lets get into it. One of the problems that was identified by the builder when we bought the house was the lack of drainage under it. The water was coming off the hill and seeping under the foundation. Whilst there is no damage, he told us it was a priority to get a french drain installed as it would eventually become a problem if it wasn't rectified. I asked the builder how much it would cost to get someone to do it and he said about $3000. Having no desire to spend the holiday fund on the moving of dirt, I enrolled in Youtube University. So this is the back of the house. To the left, just out of the picture, is the water tank. The water seeps down under the house from this side. I started digging from where I thought it would be the most difficult at the front of the house. Thankfully there was no rock, but the soil was...

The next small project on the list was the worm bin, or "worm castle" as I have now decided to call it. Worms are extremely efficient at converting food waste into a nutrient rich, plant available soil medium. This worm poo, commonly referred to as worm castings or black gold is literally worth its weight in gold. To buy good quality castings, you're going to pay a lot for it. You don't get rich writing cheques so I decided to build my own worm castle so I can have an endless supply of castings for my garden. The first step was to source an old bathtub. Thankfully, the previous owners had a horse in the paddock and left the tub they were using as a water trough. It's cast iron and weighs a tonne. I hooked a rope through the pug hole and tied it to the tow bar of the ute, then dragged it a good 100 meters through the paddock. Just as I pulled up beside the backyard, the rope snapped, so i re-tied it and hooked it around me like a horse pulling a plough. I ...

Quite a few years ago when I was first learning about homesteading, I watched a film called "Back To Eden". It's about this bloke who uses wood chips to cover his orchard. The wood chips eventually break down leaving a beautiful black soil, full of nutrients, that facilitates excellent plant growth. This "Back To Eden" gardening method is essentially mimicking what happens in a forest. Branches and leaves fall to the ground, eventually break down and turn into soil. This mimicking of the forest is an excellent way to bring poor soil up to scratch in a relatively short time period (12-24 months). It is a fairly common practice within permaculture design as well. We had about 12 trees/shrubs in the front yard that served no purpose other than to threaten our house foundation with expanding roots and provide a small amount of privacy from the road. They had to go. Rather than chop them up and use them for firewood which was my first inkling, I decided...