Australian Bush Life

So many of Australia’s unique wildlife are killed or injured on our roads each year. A rapid response from the driver/passenger could mean life or death to the animal who has been hit. But who to call when there are 3 Wildlife rescue and rehabilitation groups in Victoria. Choosing from 3 under pressure is difficult.

So luckily RACV has this amazing program where if you just ring their number they will automatically transfer you through to your nearest wildlife carer to the accident location anywhere in Victoria. Link to RACV Wildlife Connect.

Too easy. 1 number to remember. 13 11 11.

Plug this number in to your mobile phone right now so you are ready to respond.

Please pass this message around…

Also keep these items in your car so that you can readily deal with an injured animal:

• old pillow case
• empty box
• blanket/s
• gloves

More information on local wildlife…

More sustainable living tips…

Garden lighting is something we use minimally in our lives. All lighting uses energy so wherever we can avoid lighting the less energy we use and the better for the environment.  For minimal garden lighting we only use when we are in the garden at night (when you obviously need to see) and we only have lighting illuminating particular garden features:

• Our carpark
• Our BBQ
• Our outdoor seating / dining area
• Our front and rear entries

We never have outdoor lighting on when we are inside. This not only saves energy (and money) but even more importantly to us we don’t want to upset our wildlife neighbours.

Garden lighting effects our australian wildlife

A great proportion of australian wildlife are nocturnal, coming out soon after dark to interact with their local habitat, other local wildlife or to find food and water. Being nocturnal native wildlife have adapted to function in low light and particularly their eyes are sensitive to bright lights. Imagine trying to move around in search of food with bright lights shining in your eyes…

Wildlife friendly garden lighting pointing downwards onto driveway.

The rarer types of wildlife species are generally more likely to avoid well lit areas. For instance more common wildlife species such as Ringtail Possums and Common Brushtail Possums have adapted to bright lights and hence can readily be found in our cities. But to encourage less common wildlife to our gardens not only do we have to provide key habitat features such as food (indigenous plants) and homes (tree hollows, ground cover plants & habitat logs and dense shrubs etc) we must reduce lighting.

In addition to really give our rarer wildlife a welcoming garden home working on noise reduction, particularly threatening noises like dogs barking, along with light reduction will make a huge difference for these shy creatures to feel safe and confident.

How to reduce the impact of lighting on wildlife in your garden

• Eliminate all unneccessary garden lighting locations
• Always point garden lighting downwards not upwards into trees
• Never point bright/feature lighting onto large old hollow bearing trees (wildlife homes)
• Don’t shine lights on other areas like lawns where wildlife may graze at night
• Only use outdoor lighting when neccessary
• Reduce the brightness of lighting, softer lighting is more welcoming
• Keep garden lighting close to the home
• Allow some areas of your garden to remain completely dark
• Solar lighting is usually a gentler light and doesn’t use electricity

Added bonus: By reducing garden lighting you get to enjoy clear skies full of brilliant shining stars.

We had thought about home brewing beer as part of our sustainable lifestyle plan for a long time – and have now completed 3 batches of beer. We have always loved a beer at the end of working in the garden all day and found that the beer bottles and beer bottle caps in our recycle bin were something that we could possibly eliminate from the recycling system.

Athough recycling is a good system, obviously better than ending up in landfill, we felt that home brewing our own beer had far greater sustainability benefits than just recycling glass bottles alone such as:

Reduced Water:

• Minimal water is required in cleaning bottles at home – less than 5 litres will clean and sterilise bottles for almost 3 standard slabs (65 x 375ml stubbies or 33 x 750ml longnecks)
• No water is required to make new glass bottles
• No water is required for transportation of the beer (i.e. humans, ships and/or trucks used to lug all these heavy bottles all over the world)
• The remaining water required is purely that used to be turned into beer for drinking

Reduced Energy:

• We only brew our beer in the autumn and spring when room temperature is really suitable for brewing beer – natural room temperature varies around 18-25 degrees celcius so no additional heating or cooling is required
• Minimal fossil fuels used in transportation avoiding purchase of transported (weighty) beers often all over the world saves a lot of energy. We also avoid transporting beer from the shops and then no recycling transport taking bottles away and moving glass around to be made into new bottles.
• Brewing at home during the day also reduces other typical factory energy needs such as lighting and also small scale production allows human labour to take over from energy consuming machinery on the production line.

Reduced Materials:

• We committed to buying flip top bottled beer on and off for a year to build up a stash of easy to refill bottles. They were more expensive but don’t even require adding bottle caps so are fully re-used as well as reduce risk of breakage as we don’t have to hammer on the bottle caps.
• We were lucky enough to find our beer brewing kit on the hard waste (what a find). Couldn’t believe our luck as it was brand new still in the box and we saved it going to landfill and gained the inspiration we needed to start brewing beer and we haven’t looked back.

Home brewing beer - cleaning and sterilising bottles.

We are not going to go into recipes as there are so many home beer brewing bloggers out there. Our main aim is to inspire others to give beer brewing a go if you have been thinking about it as not only does it save money it is so easy, takes far less time than you think and it will make a big difference to the environment.

Summary of dollars and time required to home brew beer.

Beer brewing ingredients cost between $20 – $40 depending on quality and overall flavour chosen etc. This produces almost 3 standard slabs (65 x 375ml stubbies or 33 x 750ml longnecks). Time needed: 30 minutes x 2 people to get the brew going, leave it brewing for 1 – 2 weeks and then about 1.5 hours x 2 people to bottle the beers. Within 2 weeks you can start enjoying the rewards.

Home brewing beer - bottling and sealing.

Also the kit we luckily found would have cost less than $100 to buy new so after just a few home brews you will have made all your money back on outlay for the equipment.

More sustainable living tips…

This is the best sustainable lifestyle tip we have seen in years and we are constantly looking for ways that we can reduce our impact on the earth. It is so easy to cancel delivery of bulky Yellow Pages and White Pages to your home. It is quite amazing to think of how much paper goes into making these bulky books and as if that isn’t enough the environmental cost to transport them all the way to individual homes is huge….. all that petrol!!

Well done to Cool Melbourne for marketing this tip out through it’s e-mail networks. We have both personally passed this tip on to friends and relatives and have received so many responses from people that have cancelled their delivery of the Yellow Pages and White Pages. Think of the impact this can have on the environment if we all cancelled. We can’t even remember the last time that we used them anyway as we search for everything we need online and these bulky books have just been in the way.

Here is the the link to the cancellation page at Cool Melbourne – it really does only take about 30 seconds:

http://www.coolmelbourne.org/articles/2010/11/save-a-tree—cancel-your-yellow-and-white-pages-delivery/

The only problem was that I couldn’t find the other links for different states as Cool Australia also has websites for Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide.

Here are more sustainable living tips…

Compost Bay - making a new pile of soil. Back pile is soil at 4 weeks of age.

We have built a larger composting bay to manage all our green waste. It was really quick and easy and we used recycled corrugated iron and metal star pickets that we found on the hard waste.

We chose a flat area with a reasonable sized flat landing area in front of the bay to allow for manouvering wheelbarrows and also enough mowing space to finely chop our greens on location. We also chose an area where we can easily move the soil by wheelbarrow to all our different vegetable growing beds using a wheelbarrow. This was difficult for us a we are on a steep block, but we have managed to create ramps and avoid stairs as moving soil and soil making is heavy work!

All we did was build 3 walls to keep the compost in. We found that it was most important to get the length of the bay quite long, ours is about 3.5 metres long x 1 metre wide. This allowed us to have 3 different stages of composting piles on the go at once and we can easily shuffle piles along or mix them together if we need.

To make the soil we generally mix 3 different types of composting materials:

• Green waste; such as vegetable/garden scraps, green non-woody weeds or grass
• Manure; this is the nitrogen component for soil – we generally use horse, but sometimes chicken or cow
• Dry organic waste; this is the carbon component of soil – we generally use straw, dry leaves (not from our indigenous plants though, we usually use from Oak or Plane trees in local parks) or paper (newspaper or cardboard boxes – nothing with glossy print)

Finely chopped green waste using a lawn mower.

We mix these in at roughly the same ratios 1:1:1. Mixing them together well as this adds oxygen which is important and also water to ensure that it is all well moistened. We cover our pile with plastic to keep moist (and avoid getting too soggy if raining), and try to re-mix every week. Depending on the seasonal temperature and how warm the compost gets the breaking down and turing into soil can take about 4 – 8 weeks before it is ready to add back to our vegie gardens.

Making our own compost is great for conditioning soil. It adds life such as microbes (important bacteria and life we can’t see) as well as other invertebrates/insects like worms and composting bugs etc, which help structure the soil. Compost is also great for improving the ability of soil to hold water.

How to finely chop up and mange green waste…

We also compost our kitchen scraps in a worm farm…

Lawn mowing green waste to finely chop it.

We have a worm farm which composts all our kitchen scraps, but as we also grow a lot of our own food we have to manage much larger amounts of green material. Of course this green garden waste is actually a big resource when we we turn it into organic and nutrient rich soil, which we then return to our fruit & vegetable garden beds. By composting we manage all our green waste on site closing this recyling loop, this minimises transport costs (and fuel) and also avoids spreading weeds to another area to be managed.

The green material mostly includes all of our plant waste from vegetable growing, such as plants of corn, tomatoes, brassicas like cauliflower and broccoli etc after harvesting the food compontents. Green material also includes lots of grass both weedy and indigenous are fine and also any soft (non woody) weeds.

We don’t add any of our indigenous plants for composting, particularly woody parts as they are harder to break down into soil and also woody material can often deplete soil of nutrients – where we are wanting to create nutrient rich soils. All our garden waste from indigenous plants, such as lopped branches etc we return to the bush areas of our block as this provides great ground cover as a natural mulch and also great habitat for smaller wildlife particularly insects. It is most important to ensure that no seeds from non-indigenous plants get thrown out in the bush though – we are very strict about this to keep our bush habitat healthy.

Compost bins for green waste collection - plant pots.

We have found that the best way to manage all our green waste for processing into soil is to collect it in bins around our block. We found that large old plant pots are great as they have holes in the bottom and let out the rain and any juices from green material if it starts rotting etc. We have these bins near to every area where we grow fruit and vegetables, so that it is really easy and tidy mainting all our green garden waste. About once / month we round up all our greens and then chop them as finely as we can so that they can break down quickly in our composting bay.

We have seen many people use mulchers to help them chop up their green material, but we just use a neighbours lawn mower and mow over the top of the greens on a flat area. It all provides the same result of finely chopped greens ready for composting.

More information on how we compost in our compost bay…

Christmas crackers - home made for sustainability.

With all the waste that Christmas can generate  here is a great idea to reduce waste by making your own sustainable Christmas crackers.

About 10 years ago our family became really sick of the crackers with pretty useless gifts etc inside. Particularly we felt sick at just throwing some stupid, piece of junk, plastic toy in the bin straight after the cracker was opened. Hence we have been making our own Christmas crackers every year since.

Items needed to make your own Christmas crackers:

• Cardboard roll (toilet roll size are good). Cover them with pretty Christmas type paper to make them fancy.
• Cellophane or some sort of plastic wrap that doesn’t tear easily so can be re-used. Cut rectangles to a size big enough to wrap around you cardboard rolls and bon-bon tie at the ends.
• Jokes & trivia questions – you can make your own or re-use some of the better ones from other crackers. Melbourne’s “The Age” newspaper has “Odd Spots” on the front page which are short and interesting things that have happened somewhere in the world and are great for a bit of a laugh or discussion!

Optional items or ones that can be purchased to fill out the Christmas crackers:

• Christmas paper crowns or home made party hats that fold and fit into the cardboard rolls.
• Cracker poppers (the pieces of paper that make the noise when you pull the ends). These can be purchsed from Reject or $2 shops.
• Yummy chocolates or lollies – we choose the Lindt brand of chocloates as the preferred more sustainable upmarket chocolate brand.
• We put in some scratchies as if someone wins you know instantly once scratched. Of course only if you don’t mind a little gamble.

Have you ever made home made crackers – if so what are some other sustainable items that could go inside?

For more sustainable living tips click here…

Growing garlic. At about 4 months of age.

We were really upset a couple of years ago when we were forced to buy chinese garlic from a mainstream supermarket chain as there was no australian garlic (or organic) available. It wasn’t organic and we didn’t really trust the product and what it might have been grown in but we love garlic so much and add it to every meal so what to do? We decided at that moment that we should grow our own garlic in our vegetable garden. Then we can store it well enough to have our own healthy organic garlic year around.

Being easy to grow, using low water whilst growing and storage after harvest is really simple requiring minimal processing organic backyard garlic is a very sustainable food to grow if you are like us and eat it with every meal.

We plant our own cloves on the shortest day of the year (or there-abouts). We choose the healthiest looking cloves to plant that have come from big healthy garlic bulbs. We only plant the largest outer cloves to ensure we get the best results, and eat our way through the inner smaller cloves. Just plant the cloves flat end down or sprouting end up if they have already started to sprout and about a thumbs depth.

They grow over the winter and into spring and usually there is enough water for them just from rainfall. They only tend to need a bit of watering later in spring / summer and closer to the harvest when the weather is getting warmer and the bulbs are fattening up.

We harvest them around Christmas time (garlic plaits make great Christmas presents). When we start to see some leaves browning off or leaves falling over we pull out one garlic to sample it for taste and bulb size. We keep doing this until we are satisfied they are ready and then we pull out the lot.

We braid the garlics into chains and store them in a place that is dark, has minimal temperature fluctuation (stable daily temperature) and has airflow to avoid moulding / rotting. We keep one garlic braid in our kitchen at all times ready for use.

We have found that after the shortest day of the year stored garlics can still tend to shoot even if stored well. This is just them letting us know they want to be planted. Any cloves that are not chosen for planting are still fine for eating even if they have sprouted but they can start to loose a bit of their freshness and / or dry out a bit.

Dried Garlic (LHS) and garlic in olive oil (RHS).

This year in late October we decided to process the last of our garlic cloves to ensure we had a fresh supply for eating to take us through the year before our next christmas harvest and fresh bulbs.

Click here to find out how we dried and preserved our garlics in olive oil…

We recently have had a bit of an influx of vinegar flies in our worm farm. Sometimes our worm composting system becomes a bit too acidic. Mostly this is triggered by an inbalance in nutrient/nitrogen levels versus carbon levels. Mostly fruit and vegetable scraps are high in nutrient and also high in water adding to the moist environment. The damp and nutrient rich compost especially when the weather starts warming up in spring are likely to trigger a breeding frenzy in these small black flies.

Worm farm compost covered with newspaper to reduce vinegar flies.

The small black vinegar flies are nothing to worry about as they don’t eat fresh fruit. They like a rotting environment and are more than happy to live in compost and help to break it down. In fact they are a healthy part of the system. Generally we don’t worry about them as our compost is away from doors leading to our house and near our natural bushland and the flies become food for wildlife like frogs and birds.

Additionally adding other materials like grass clippings or dried leaves from the garden thickly over the top surface of compost can help blanket out the vinegar flies.

Amazingly one of our indigenous plants which is carnivorous actually love to feed on these small flies. We regularly see them trapped in the sticky lamina (modified leaves) of one of the hundreds, or thousands of “sundews” that we have on our bush block. Amazing how even the small creatures play such a vibrant role in our amazing biodiversity!

Lemon Tree before the bushfire.

Having a lemon tree in the backyard is a really valuable tree for any sustainable garden. Lemons are such a useful fruit. There are a myriad of uses for lemons:

• Food recipes particularly Asian, South American / Mexican, Indian etc
• Drink recipes, cut slices in mixed drinks or added to water. Or made into lemonade or cordial.
• Cleaning, lemon being acidic can sterilise or be used as a bleach.
• Cleaning with lemons also is a great air freshener!

Lemon trees are an easy tree to grow and don’t require much water. Most trees will have fruit most of the year around so there really isn’t much need for preserving lemons for later use. But if keen any excess fruit can be frozen into lemon ice blocks and stored in the freezer. They are also a great give-away item to friends and neighbours if you have too many.

Lemon tree resprouting after bushfire.

Our lemon tree was burnt in the bushfire in February 2009. It had little epicormic shoots coming out from one side (where it was facing the house not the bush) where the bark didn’t get quite as burnt. The epicormic shoots regularly sprouted from about May to December during 2009, the first year after the bushfire. The epicormic shoots would grow for a few weeks and then once they reached about 10cm they just died off.

We weren’t sure our lemon tree would survive as there wasn’t much bark alive allowing the epicormic shoots to grow properly. But now 18 months on our lemon tree has rebounded from a single epicormic growth and has formed a 1 metre shrub with a hard stem. Although it hasn’t developed any flower buds yet we feel hopeful that this will happen within the next year.

A great recipe for lemons is a home made lemon butter.