Our progress

Oct 24 2011: at the moment we’re….

Growing lots of herbs and veggies for cooking.

For Italian style cooking I’m growing lots of parlsey, basil, rosemary and thyme and tomatoes galore.

For my Asian cooking I’m growing vietnamese mint, hot chilli, coriander, lemon grass, galangal, ginger, garlic chives, basil, kaffir lime, eggplant, bok choi and water chestnuts.

For Greek I’m growing dill, oregano, parsley, mint, coriander for it’s seeds. Tomatoes, capsicum, zucchini and eggplant.

For teas I’m growing chocolate mint, lemon balm and lemon grass.

For salads we’re growing a range of lettuce and tomatoes, rocket, snow peas,  shallots, sunflowers, nasturtiums, cucumber, bush beans and climbers.

There’s lots of other veggies for our vegetarian meal options and side dishes such as silverbeet and spinach, carrots, kale, beetroot, kipfler and sebago potatoes, broccoli, rhubarb and cassava.

Our garden wouldn’t be complete without a range of fruit that produce crops at various times of the year and we’re growing about 30 different varieties. These include strawberries, several lemons and limes, mandarins, oranges, blackberry, a range of grapes, several passionfruit, apples, peach, nectarine, pomegranate, blueberries, cherry, blackcurrent, cumquat and lots and lots of bananas.

We’ve also completed a lot of work so far in our drive to reduce our ecological footprint and in the first year of developing our permaculture garden.  These are some of the things we’ve done;  we’ve terraced most of our unworkable backyard, filled it with rich soil and planted all of the above; we’ve built a chook nook, have two adorable chooks and fresh eggs every day; we’ve increased our tank water harvesting to around 13,000L; we’ve cooked every day for the last month using at least one ingredient from our garden; we haven’t put out a green waste bin since May and we’ve made our own compost and fed the worms using all the scraps from our kitchen; we’ve made our own mulch from the leaves and twigs that have fallen on our block;  we’ve increased the number of vegetarian meals we cook; we’ve grown most of our own seedlings and we’ve done all of this re-using a signifiant amount of pre-loved or on-site materials.

Our journey has only begun but we’re well on our way in reducing our footprint, creating a healthier, more simple lifestyle and we’ve enjoyed every minute of it.

Stay tuned for more updates soon.