About me
Back in the late ‘70s I packed up my new bride and set off for the wilds of…………….. Western Sydney! Well it was a little bit wild back then. The estate had no shops and no public transport but the housing and the loans were cheap and so we found ourselves on a 600 m2 block with an east-west facing, brick veneer, 3 bedroom house.
After many threats to head bush we are still here, concentrating on living as self sufficiently and sustainably as we can in the suburban environment. Here are some of the things we are up to –
We grow as much of our own veggies as we can organically, using open pollinated seed, our own where we can. We make seed rasing mix using worm castings, sand and cocopeat, once the seedlings are up we pot them on into cardboard tubes and then plant them out when they are ready. I have developed a spreadsheet that follows a two weekly sow/pot on/plant out rotation. We have a small greenhouse that we use to raise seedlings and grow a bit of out of season stuff during winter. During summer we have a shade “cupboard” that we use to raise the seedlings in.
I get in grass hay from a local supplier and let it get worked over by the chooks and then use it as mulch. We have 13 beds, each about 1m x 2 metres. We fertilise using a chook tractor which is designed to sit directly over a veggie bed. The chook tractor spends two weeks on each bed twice a year. The chook tractor has 4 chooks in it and we can get up to 4 eggs a day but we also have the “Retirement Village”, a shed where the non-productive chooks still do meaningful work by digging over the hay and turning it into mulch.
We also have fruit trees – a mandarin; lemon, lemonade and orange tree, half a dozen bananas in a banana circle, a mulberry tree, native plum, olive, feijoa and two lime trees (one Tahitian, one Kaffir) and more recently a couple of apples, a nectarine and macadamia nut. We had a carob tree for many years and it flowered for the first time a couple of years ago, but it turned out to be male, so no carob pods for us although it did keep us warm last winter as firewood.
We have two recycled steel bathtubs, one which we use as a fishpond but also grows water chestnuts and an similar plant called Arrow with decorative arrow shaped leaves. The other houses our worm farm which helps us process our veggie waste and provides castings to make the seed rasing mix with.
We have a grid connected 1 kW photovoltaic system that has been in since the start of 2009, but we have had a stand alone system in place for over 25 years. The system was originally based on a SolarexX44 BG photovoltaic panel, about 17 years ago I added a BP Solar Panel to the system which gives a peak output of about 2.5 amps and added a third solar panel, a Photowatt International PW 750 which on a good day can pump out 4 amps which about doubled my generation capacity. It cost a bit at $600 but was the best cost per watt unit that I could afford. All of these units continue to pump electricity into my batteries whenever there is light shining on them, they require little maintenance, don’t annoy the neighbours and have no on-going costs associated with them. The latest addition has been 4 x 80 watt Solarex panels, donated by my brother a few years ago and I could charge up to 25 amps, but due to some degrading of the system I will be replacing the current system with 4 brand new panels giving me a maximum charge of 30 amps.
The 12VDC is stored in two battery banks of 4 x 220 amp hour 6 volt batteries, wired to give 440 amphours of storage in each bank. One bank powers the house lights and the other powers a 12 volt fridge which provides our main refrigeration in the house. Unfortunately the fridge does consume more than I thought so we bought a couple of 130 watt Sharp panels to power the fridge and allow more power back into the house system. The stand alone and the 1k watt back-to-the-grid system have reduced our electricity bill to almost nothing.
We also have a number of solar cookers including a solar oven which we can use to cook bread the year ‘round(it just takes a bit longer in winter.). Another type of cooker uses flat mirrors on a frame like a slice out of a parabolic dish to focus the sunlight on the bottom of a black painted stainless steel pot (good for frying and steaming). Due to the way we plant now we don’t produce a lot of excess veggies but we have a solar drier to process any excess we do get.
I have put together a rocket stove, which is used to cook with a wok and burns small twigs efficiently to produce plenty of heat for cooking. Small twigs are available for the taking in our area, they literally fall off the native trees in the parks and roadsides.
We have a total of about 10,000 litres of water storage – 2 x 2500 litre galvanised steel water tanks on the back of the garage and a newer plastic 5500 litre tank at the side of the house and a newer 500 litre water butt off one of the sheds. The larger tank is connected to a 12volt pump which provides water to a tap at the back of the house over a new twin tub washing machine (although mostly we use the front loader) and another tap down near the greenhouse for “gardening activities”.
It is really an attitude more than anything else, looking at the reduce part of the trio of “Reduce, Reuse and Recycle” and have added "refuse" to the trio - refuse packaging and other stuff we don't need. We keep asking, “How can we do this ourselves, with what we have on hand?". It is a journey really and we are still working on how we can become more self reliant and sustainable and while we have some things planned for the future but I’ve just about done as much as I can while working full time. After almost a year off following being retrenched I am back working full time so the project work has slowed down but i am hoping to go part time (3 days per week) early in 2012. We'll see!
We open every year for sustainable house day and permaculture day and try and get the word out that more sustainable living in the city is not only possible, it’s fun!
Nev & Linda
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