Just a heads up to those that have started to follow me. I have set myself a goal of one post per day this month so don’t be surprised if stuff hits your inbox each day in March but it will probably taper off in April at least a little bit.

But onto the post…

We terraced our backyard 6 months ago. With such a steep block we were losing all the water to run off and felt like we had little usable space. In the rush of work, family, life and the universe the back yard has been kind of let go to the point where you couldn’t tell the start of one terrace and the end of another.

I have been promising A. that I will put up some retaining walls and we had decided on second hand bluestone for upper edge of the bottom paved area and hardwood sleepers for the top section. I cleaned up the backyard and mowed it yesterday so today I decided to procrastinate a little less and go and start sourcing some items.

In our area we have a number of second hand dealers usually run by slightly questionable Italian gentlemen and the trick is to learn to bargain. So I went to the usual place I go as they have this massive mound of blue stone blocks 4 meters high in all shapes and sizes. Spoke to the gentleman and we came to a price of $3.50 per block. To some this may seem a bit expensive but these can be pretty big blocks (I struggle to lift some of the blocks and I easily lift 40kg bags of feed) and a retaining wall made of these is never going to need to be replaced in my lifetime. It occurred to me that at this price it would be cheaper if a bit harder to not use a hardwood wall on the second tier and I would not need to replace it in 20 years time.

Add to that it is second hand and all of the embodied energy has already been used to make it up and I don’t have to have guilt complex over using hardwood it seems like done deal. Straw that breaks the wood retaining walls back is A. likes this better. So there I am, looks like I am hauling stones for a while.

Purchased two sets of 10 today which is about all the old Suzuki which is my work horse will handle at once, even over a short distance.

In between I went to Bunnings which is a large hardware store chain with my daughter as I need to grab a few things. I notice that they are now selling second hand house bricks and notice that they are cheaper than at the second hand yard. Even more disturbing I noticed that the new bricks where 30% cheaper than recycled bricks…

So what gives here? How can it possibly be cheaper to buy new bricks with all of the energy involved in making them, and that is a lot of energy then shipping them a minimum of 200km which is the closest brick works, and they cost less than a brick where all of the embodied energy was paid out 50 years ago. And all you need to do is get them from houses being demolished in our area and clean them up…

Seems ludicrous and it is. We value things poorly in this society because damaging the environment either though bad practice or just the miss use of fossil fuels doesn’t get properly valued. It costs more if you look at the big picture but it costs less in the notes we hand over so most people will follow the notes and I can’t say I blame them. But even that doesn’t follow in some ways. When I worked out the area of an average block of bluestone it would take 7 -12 plus bricks to have a similar area. So I can have old bricks which are nice in their own way but cost two to four times the value, or have beautifully cut blocks of old stone that look fantastic. That makes no rational value argument. What it does show however is that often on top of bad environmental practice green washing and marketing of items distorts their real value.

I am going to continue to wander through the second hand yards as in time the energy to make these new items and ship them is going to get more and more expensive so for the rest of the people grab the new shiny stuff  now while you can or be like me and wander though the second hand yards.

And you like me could feel better getting wood and materials that are second hand with the  embodied energy already in the system and using what we have already created with so much effort over time.

I will be honest at least half the fun in it is searching out stuff and the bargaining, but don’t tell my wife that. So go and find the nearest second hand yard and enjoy.

‘Oooooh look at that timber … shiny, bright, shiny I could do something with that …’

Yesterday I got a package from Daley’s Fruit a company I can highly recommend having got a number of unusual and heritage trees and plants from them over time.

http://www.daleysfruit.com.au/

I have been looking for a particular type of black mulberry that I had red about called the

Red Shahtoot. Even though I propagate a heritage black mulberry myself that we planted a number of years ago and only have a small backyard I quite like collecting unusual types of trees and plants particularly edibles that we will use.  The Red Shahto ot has fruit that is up to 10cm long… what you can say about that other than yum. It is also dwarf root stock and will be planted in the area I cover to protect from birds and possums during the gowning season.

As I am apt to do I had ‘a bit of look’ just to see if there was anything we had to have’ or as my wife put it more stuff for the backyard.

While looking I notice that there was small coffee bean variety called the Catui available suitable for NSW so I thought hey why not. I am fond of my java in the morning and recently planted a green tree to try to grown some tea. Why not my own coffee? Hey it may not work out but it is worth a try. And will provide enjoyment just growing it even if I never get a bean off it.

Apart from the fact I just love to have them I honestly believe that everyone should be collecting unusual plant varieties if they can.  The more that we preserve old, rare and odd plants and trees the better.

 It was not so long ago (1970’s) that a leaf fungus was stopped by genes from old variety of wild Mexican corn. That fungus reduced the national crop by 15%. We have roughly 80,000 plus food plants in use in the world and yet less than 20 species are used for 90% of our food. In the early 20^th century there where over 450 varieties of lettuce advertised for sale in the US today there are around 30.

Old plants provide a buffer against our own stupidity as backyard growers we are in a good position to keep alive something that otherwise might never be again. Add to that the taste and nutritional value, longer growing season, ability to save seeds I am sure you can see you are doing the world a favour.

And it is very cool and fun and maybe, just maybe you might get your own favourite bean out of it all.

The devil came to Georgia… Well actually he came to dinner. His horns are golden and a little upside down.

Yes we had Maccas for dinner! The shock the horror… the tasty burgers and fries.

In my defence A. was off to her fortnight quilting group and I was running late at work and picked up the kids a bit late. With A. just back at work and us not being as organised as we could be I knew that the two and half year old would at least eat the quick and easy option so I could get her to bed on time.

The point of my post is to show that we are all human and do things that others may perceive as not the best practice or even ethical. Hell more importantly ‘we’ may perceive them as not the being ethical. I am aware of the evils that the corporation with the clown has done to the earth and its people. Ranging from the stupidity of 100% Australain beef to the way famers near where I grew up are driven to break the earth they live on to make a buck.  So I am far from an uneducated consumer. I am not sure if this makes me better or worse but really it just makes me cringe at myself more often.

The debate about fast food is much like the debate about most things in our society very black and white, junk food is bad organic handmade food is good . The truth as with most things sits in between.

Is a little junk food bad as part of balanced diet? No.

Is feeding the family five types of fast food for the week bad? Well yes

We all try to  do what we can. I believe that I am pretty green yet I eat fast food, shop at Coles and Woollies, sometimes drink coke  and don’t always do the right thing. We also grow our own food, shop for organic where we can, shop at farmers markets and buy local. In short we do what we can when we can. We have the luxury to purchase green power but the people unable to buy it, but reducing their power bill do as much or more as part of the green culture as we do.

Less food miles is good, even if it takes up to eight times the amount of green house gases to produce it?

Permaculture is the great saviour, monoculture the great ruiner? Really some crops in some areas have worked well as mono crops for 5000 years?  Some of ‘the permaculture’ gardens I have seen require more input than they get out…  

Vaccines are bad. But is watching your child die of whooping cough good?

Nothing is black and white. The best thing you can do is to not judge. Do what you can, be as informed as you can, purchase what you can afford to purchase, decrease where you can and if like me you fall off the wagon and buy some fast food cook up some vegan food to put in the freezer for those quick meals rather than the inviting the devil in. If nothing else it may salve your conscience.

Can’t say I am terribly happy with Monday this week. Even the sunflowers seemed to have turned their backs on us it appears.

 On the way in to work I heard the easy beats song ‘Friday on Mind’ and it stuck in my head by 10am I had come up with the chorus below.

 Gonna have fun in the city,
My permaculture garden she’s so pretty,
She looks fine tonight,
The garden beds are out of sight to me,
Tonight….I will bake sourdough bread,
Tonight…I harvest cabbage heads,
Tonight…I got to get tonight
Monday I have Friday on my mind.

 Cheered myself up for the day by organising for an extra long weekend by having Friday off as well Monday as a public holiday. Plans are afoot already on what I can do in the garden with Friday to Monday to play with … hmmm plans …

So the weekend had ended. after the busy day that was yesterday today felt flat. With kids in crèche it is not unusual for us to get a bug a fortnight through the house so us all being off colour today only exacerbated it.

In the end though we still had a pretty nice day surrounded by the kids just chilling out even had a nanna nap (siesta) in the afternoon and felt better. Had a couple of beers with the neighbour next door where we solved the world’s problems as we often do over a beer. Dinner of my wife’s brilliant fresh warm sourdough and chicken and salad so I should feel good about life and I do… but…

I am lucky I have decent well paid job with a reasonably flexible times if a bit to much work at times but at the end of the weekend I just get this feeling that I have so much more I could/would/should do. Yes we get the house ready for the week, iron clothes wash the dishes and generally get ready for the work week ahead but I mean what about all the projects I could/would/should do rather than go to work tomorrow.

There is the foundations for the shed move so my wife can do her kitchen garden the setup of the hot house so I can get the aquaponics system working, more garden beds to build, chicken run to update, duck ponics pond to build, trees to be pruned and so many more … All things that could reduce my load on the world on my budget. On me. They could make me feel more free and yet off to work I go as a slave to the system just like most people. What to do that is the question. At the end of the day all you can do is slog on and do the best you can.

And as my wife says look at the sunflowers they are happy flowers.

There is a ‘saying backyard chickens are good for eggs, for the garden for the environment.’

But the real reason I keep them is they are good for the kids. We get a good number of eggs and some serious amounts of manure and compost from them but if I look at the cost of feed we are probably only just slightly in front on all this.

The level of self sufficiency is great and the eggs do taste better but nothing beats my two and half year old asking me ‘can we get the eggs’ and then helping me to lock up the girls.

Being a bit of a permi (permaculture wanna be) I have tried to build the chickens into my backyard structure. I have put my chickens right up in the back corner out of the way. Some of the advocates of permaculture would argue this is in the wrong zone but with such a small back yard (1/8 of acre) I only have two zones to play with (three if you count the fact I am espaliering all the fences with tree’s and putting some more on the front nature strip) so I have put it right up in the back corner.

I did this as chicken runs can smell and are a bit messy especially in the wet times and my wife is a city girl and prefers it to be out of the way. On the upside I have structured my back yard so that when anyone lets out the chickens, lock them up at night or collect the eggs they have to all through the main garden area’s so you often end up coming back with cucumbers, tomatoes, figs or berries of one type or another along with a couple of eggs.

I will go over how I built the run and how I feed and keep the chickens in another post along with a couple of easy suggestions for people to keep them in their back yard and how not to let the most destructive creature to a garden know to man loose on your private world.