Month: August 2010

Sustainable House Day not far off!

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We are opening our house as part of this year’s Sustainable House Day, which is on Sunday September 12. If you’ve been following this blog, you have an idea of what to expect, and this is your chance to drop by to see it in person.

I’ve posted some details on Shmeco, to whet your appetite…

This entry was posted in Local issues, Saving the environment and tagged , .

Compost tea brewer

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Our new compost tea brewer in action

A week ago I ordered a BioActive Micro Compost Tea Brewer, a baby 50L brewer. The moment it arrived, I had it assembled and running, as shown in the picture above.

The concept behind a compost tea brewer is as follows: You add a small amount of mature compost, held in a giant teabag. Nutrient is added to water, and the air pump blows a huge amount of air through the water for 24 hours. The resultant “tea” is diluted, and added to the garden.

This isn’t about adding nutrient to the garden. Instead, it’s about breeding good bacteria. The compost added to the brewer is packed with bacteria, and these multiply into the millions over the 24  hours the brewer runs. When added to the soil, these bacteria create a richer ecosystem that helps the plants make use of the nutrients in the soil. (Plant roots are completely reliant on a symbiotic relationship with soil bacteria and fungi to draw up nutrients.)

I’ll be doing this every three months or so, until the soil is as rich as it can get. I’ll then probably loan the brewer out to community gardens for their use, so drop me a line if you’re interested…

This entry was posted in Growing our own food and tagged , .

Understanding the sun

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The path of the summer sun past our solar panels

There are many situations when it’s useful to know the movements of the sun, which is why I was pleased to come across suncalc.net. Built on top of Google Maps, you type in an address and a date, and it shows you the track of the sun, from sunrise to sunset.

For example, the screenshot above shows the sun’s path in summer, in relation to our solar panels on the roof. (The yellow line is sunrise, the orange line sunset.)

This type of information can be used in many ways:

  • Understanding the likely efficiency of any solar panels (providing a much better idea than the installers themselves are able to work out, in my experience).
  • Determining where to place gardens.
  • Impact of tall trees.
  • Planning house modifications and extensions.

It’s a simple tool, but a useful one.

This entry was posted in Saving the environment, Useful resources and tagged , .

Sustainable House Day (12 September 2010)

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Just a quick note to say that our house will be included in this year’s Sustainable House Day, to be held on September 12. While ours is not a radical example of what can be done, it does show what can be retrofitted to a house without requiring major renovations. We’re also quite proud of our gardening.

More details to come, but put the date in your diary now…

This entry was posted in Saving the environment and tagged , .

More community garden resources

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This week’s session of the Milkwood part-time permaculture course is on community gardens. Run by Russ Grayson, a veteran of permaculture and community gardens, he pointed us to a pile of useful resources:

My takeaway is that there is an awful lot of information already known, but is not well shared. This definitely feels like the tip of the iceberg…

This entry was posted in Growing our own food, Local issues and tagged , .

Creating our own food forest

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The triangle of land behind our houses

Next door to us is a convent, complete with a pair of very friendly nuns. Due to the oddities of land subdivision, the convent has a triangle of land that runs behind our strip of houses and the railway line.

I have been eying off this land for a while as a possible food forest. In permaculture terms, this would be a mix of food-producing trees, with supporting plants and animals (such as chickens and bees).

To date, this has been just a scrubby bit of unused land. Privet was running rampant along the railway line, creating a dense weedy mess. A local roofer is using another part of the land as long-term storage for roof tiles and slates.

The goal is to create a rich and fertile space that is shared by the convent and the strip of houses that runs alongside. A mini community space, this will produce fruit and other goodies for local residents,the church, and their their youth groups.

Starting to bring order to the chaos

I’ve now spent over a day, hacking out the privet, so the space is now free of major weeds. (Still plenty more work to be done yet though, including mulching all the privet.)

I’ve ordered nine apple trees as the core of the food forest:

  • Jonathon
  • Fuji
  • Cox’s Orange Pippin
  • Golden Delcious
  • Granny Smith
  • Maiden’s Blush
  • Sommerset Red Streak
  • Kingston Black
  • Sugar Loaf Pippin

The apple trees are definitely an experiment. Half the books I’ve read say “if you don’t have heavy frost, you can’t have apple trees”. Other people point to the local Sydney varieties of apples, and the local nursery certainly thinks they’re worth selling. I guess we’ll wait and see. In 4 years, we’ll either have a pile of apples for eating and cooking, or decorative trees with nice spring blossoms…

This entry was posted in Growing our own food and tagged , , .