Australian Bush Life

Having read this book it amazes me that it was first published so long ago in 1962. Rachel Carson was the first person to get into the media and highlight the negative impacts of chemical use on biological systems. She challenged the big corporate companies who were churning out all these nasty fertilisers, herbicides, fungicides and pesticides using real science based evidence.

This would have been a huge challenge for her as a woman being harassed by these big and powerful players but she held her ground and got her views out there. She lead the way in the environment movement and this book was a key starting point.

Now in 2010 I can’t believe how many people still use some these nasty fertilisers, herbicides, fungicides and pesticides, from farmers managing vast landscapes to the small backyard gardener it goes on. In our day and age it is changing, albeit slowly but there are so many alternative organic (non-chemical) techniques out there. Tecniques such as biodynamics and permaculture they are well research and documented and the benefits to our environment proven.

An interesting read with clearly written true stories about the impacts of chemicals on wildlife and environmental systems in north america.

Autumn pumpkin harvest.

Now the weather has cooled we have noticed that our pumpkin plants are really dying back, for us this was time to consider harvesting our pumpkins. The leaves on the pumpkin vine are shrivelling and drying up so the pumpkins now don’t recieve much in the way of  nutrients from the vine. So we harvested over half of the pumpkins where the stem of the pumpkin (just where it joins the vine) has dried up. When they snap away from the vine you know they have dried up well. We kept a bit of this stem (about 3-5cm) on the pumpkin as this will continue to dry and might fall off by itself while in storage. We’ll check again over the next month to harvest any remaining pumpkins as the stem dries away from the vine.

A couple of pumpkin vines from the pumpkin patch needed to be pulled out for space but still had reasonably green leaves so we kept quite a bit of the vine attached to let it dry out and put all the nutrients from the leaves into the pumpkin as it dies.

Cleaning and drying pumpkins ready for storage.

To store them we just ensured each pumpkin was clean and dry and then placed them in a room with the least variation in temperature range. Heating and cooling foods causes the greatest chance of rot, so where ever the temperature range is reasonably stable is best. The room doesn’t neccessarily need to be dark, but avoid direct sunlight or at least keep them in low light for best results. To make them last the whole winter we use any that might look like the are rotting in any way first and leave the best ones until last. Can’t wait for all the pumpkin soup to come.

More on sustainble pumpkins, pumpkin seeds for eating, space for your pumpkin patch and hanging pumpkins on fences or trellis’.

Echidna a biodiversity distraction from hanging out the laundry.

Since we have lived on our bush block we rarely spend time inside. There are just so many interesting things to do and find in the garden. Even some of the normally boring chores like doing the washing and hanging out the laundry can be more interesting when you have a good range of biodiversity on your block as you just never know what you might come across.

The down side is that we always get distracted by the garden and often take twice as long to do chores because we have to stop and take photos of our wildlife or a new indigenous plant. We try really hard to just go with the flow if we get distracted and are having fun who cares about the time! Life these days is just so busy that mostly people don’t let themselves have the time to look for the little things and notice the small changes. We find it all part of getting familiar with our bush and it’s biodiversity.

Weeping Grass lawn. Microlaena stipoides.

We have a lawn area on our bush block that is using an indigenous grass called Weeping Grass – Microlaena stipoides. It is an extremely beautiful and soft grass that is lovely to sit on. We don’t mow it, but I have seen some neighbours who do and it can make quite a nice clipped lawn. We prefer to leave it long and let it be eaten down by the local wildlife like the Black Wallabies and Common Wombats.

All you have to do to get a thick ground covering of Weeping Grass – Microlaena stipoides is to either spread some local seed or if you already have some of this grass species then weed out any weedy competitors and it will thicken up naturally as it seeds prolifically. If you want to mow it just ensure that some of the seed matures (browns and starts falling off) before mowing to ensure that it reproduces. People often mow and cut all the unripened seed which is not sustainable for the species and will allow weeds to get back in. It also works well (and improves biodiversity) mixed in with other indigenous grasses particularly the wallaby grass species.

Microlaena stipoides - Weeping Grass seed heads with beautiful weeping appearance.

Probably not best for really high traffic lawn areas, but Weeping Grass – Microlaena stipoides is pretty tough and a much more sustainable lawn alternative. If used in it’s natural environment it won’t leave you with any of the weedy grass issues. Issues including completely taking over every bit of your garden! Non-native grasses that are commonly used for lawns such as Kikuyu are dreadful to remove if you change your mind (and you will likely change your mind), as the underground runners are almost impossible to eradicate.

We also had weedy grass problems with Quaking Grass – Briza maxima, Panic Veldgrass – Erharta erecta, Winter Grass – Poa annua and Sweet Vernal Grass – Anthoxanthum odoratum. But have almost eradicated these now through hand weeding and covering (suppression) and just enjoy our local indigenous and very beautiful grasses which have all returned in abundance since the bushfire.

Lawn free entertaining area with leaf litter ground cover.

We like a little grassy area to sit on around our home but have decided that having large areas of lawn is unsustainable.

Firstly maintaining a lawn is energy intensive, it uses lots of water and many people use a lot of fertilisers and other products to keep them soft and green. Lawns are typically a monoculture, 1 grass species and this is not a biodiverse habitat.  Then there is all the other energy needed to maintain it such as mowing, what a waste of time and energy mowing is! We have better things to do like growing vegetables than run around with some noisy machine which chews through fuel annoying us and that doesn’t even account for the impact of fuel on climate change.

Weed free bush track with indigenous grasses.

To avoid lawns we ensure that we have maintained the quality of indigenous bush plants on our bush block. Once the weeds are gone and the indigenous ground cover plants in place the bush looks after itself, minimal further energy required and the local wildlife love it. We maintain small trails through the bush purely by walking on them, the trampling effect maintains the trails. Leaf litter also helps cover the ground and keep the weeds away. We have set areas aside amongst our bush for human enjoyment, growing our vegetables and then we have partially paved areas and a small area of lawn (about 10m2) just next to our home.

We spend weekends through spring and summer watching and unfortunately listening to the noise of our neighbours mowing and whipper snippering away to keep their lawns beautiful while we are busy planting and harvesting our vegetables. We feel we get a much better value for our time and energy as we prepare our meals with organic vegetables from our own garden.

On our bush block we use indigenous grasses for lawns to minimise weed impacts on the indigenous bush plants and maintain paved areas around our home to minimise bushfire risk…

This Easter with a few friends and family over for an Easter chocolate hunt we discussed the two main upmarket chocolates that are commonly found in supermarkets as these were purchased for special occasions like Easter. We all agreed that we thought that Lindt was a nicer tasting chocolate than Ferrero Rocher so it stood out on the eating front.

What was most surpring to us Bush Dudes was that once the friends and family had left and we were cleaning up the mess of chocolate packaging we found:

• That Ferrero Rocher plastic inner fills and outer packaging were not only substantial (overpackaged) but no parts were even recyclable. It all is destined for landfill!
• Whilst on the other hand Lindt suprised us that not only was their outer packaging cardboard and recyclable but the inner plastic trays are made from corn starch and compostable. This left only the individual chocolate wrappers which were actually part aluminium foil (and part plastic). Although in their current state the mixed plastic/aluminium foil chocolate wrappers are unrecyclable, hopefully Lindt can change to full aluminium foil chocolate wrapper and then they would have a completely recyclable product.

Composting Lindt chocolate corn starch tray in worm farm.

As we don’t buy these fancy overpackaged types of chocolate often. We were really surprised to see the Lindt brand had jumped so far in terms of sustainability. We logged onto the websites of both brands and Lindt stood out even further in terms of sustainability from Ferrero Rocher. Lindts level of detail they supplied on their website, outlining real data about sourcing and production of their products was far clearer than that provided by Ferrero Rocher with waffle type statements about their companies environmental commitments.

How we recycle small pieces of aluminium foil like chocolate foil wrappers…

Worm farm - kitchen organics composting system.

We love our worm farm it is just so easy to collect organic scraps from your kitchen and place them into the top of a worm farm. We have a small compost bin in the kitchen to collect our fruit and vegetable scraps which we generally only empty into the main worm farm about once per week. Then just let the worms and other micro-organisms do all the hard work turning your food scraps back into healthy organic soil which you can use to grow your vegetables. The worms and worm farm even survived the heat radiation from the bushfire which came within metres of their location along our house wall!

Worms are clean and tidy pets and no trouble at all. To ensure our worm farm keeps working well we maintain by:

• Keeping them in a shady place as too much sun on a hot day can kill them.
• Ensure that they have enough organic waste to keep them going – if you stop feeding them they will eventually die out.
• We don’t put in loads of citrus peels as this can make it a bit acidic. Small amounts okay.
• We generally don’t put in bones although the odd one may get in there and the worms can break it down.
• We add plenty of paper for carbon, newspaper or brown paper bags (nothing with nasty dyes).
• We empty the worm juice from the bottom compartment about every 6 – 8 weeks and dilute 1 part with 10 parts water for great organic fertiliser which we spread over all our growing fruit and vegetables.
• We generally use a 3 or 4 tray rotation and once the top tray is full (about every 3-4 months) the bottom tray has been composted completely. We mix the finished bottom tray compost into our vegie garden to improve the soil nutrients and then return the empty tray to the top of the worm farm for refilling with organic kitchen scraps.
• We remove as many worms as we can from the soil we are about to put into our vegie patch as the worms in the worm farm are a different species to garden worms and won’t survive outside the worm farm. We put them back into the worm farm so they can  keep doing their recycling job.

Worm farms can also be used to break down biodegradable corn starch plastics…

More information on how to store liquid fertiliser from worm farm compost systems for growing vegetables…

More information on managing green waste in compost bays…

Aluminium is an extremely energy intensive and environmentally degrading product to make by processing ore from the earth. It is also easily recyclable and reusable once recycled. Therefore we need to recycle as much aluminium as we can to close the aluminium sustainability loop.

Recycling small pieces of aluminium foil by making a large aluminium ball.

After visiting our local recycle centre we realised that small pieces of aluminium foil may easily get lost in the recycling process so we decided to make the small aluminium foil pieces larger and more likely to get recycled by clumping them together and making aluminium balls.

To do this we collect all small pieces of aluminium foil in a container such as chocolate wrappers and lids/coverings off dips and yoghurts etc. We also keep any larger pieces of aluminium foil from say chocolate blocks and then wrap all the small pieces of foil inside the larger piece to make one large aluminium ball which goes straight into our recycle bin.

We also collect steel bottle tops in steel cans for recycling too…

We love the view from the windows of our home because they provide us with views of the bush we have chosen to live in and enjoy. We have also put a birdbath amongst indigenous shrubs immediately outside our kitchen and living room as it immerses us in the bush experience. Hence birds regularly come to visit close to our home to drink and bathe so that we can observe and enjoy them.

In the first couple of years we had a few birds strike the windows whilst coming to the birdbath. The larger birds like parrots just bounced off but unfortunately one small Striated Pardalote – Pardalotus striatus didn’t make it and died in my hands. This was a fairly traumatic experience for us as we had placed the birdbath close to our home to enjoy birds and yet this directly lead to the death of such a beautiful bird.

Echidna leadlight ornament hanging in middle of window can reduce bird collision.

Since this event we have made a few changes and so far have not had any bird strikes. The first tip is easy we don’t clean our windows anymore, and are loving it – I mean who likes cleaning windows! They are not particularly dirty, but the reduction in shine definately helps. We have objects in the larger window areas to break up the large open glass view. Such as some hippy type – yin and yang stickers and also a hanging leadlight echidna decoration that we purchased whilst travelling.

If you are thinking of designing your home from scratch or renovating it is worthwhile considering some of the ideas that are discussed in the report: Minimising the Swift Parrot – Lathamus discolor collision threat. These design techniques could be applied to any home and if implemented in the design can reduce overall avian death through window strike which is a huge problem.

We have been using the same enviro laundry ball now for over a year and they are fantastic. You don’t need to use any laundry powder at all – don’t worry we questioned this at first but they work! It is amazing to see how much dirt comes out of your clothes.

We were concerned about the laundry products we use as we put all our laundry water (grey water) out onto our fruit and vegetables during the warmer months between about September – April. Then during winter it goes into a septic system. We didn’t want to have powders that effected the natural (microbial) systems of either our garden or our septic system.

Most concerning in many laundry powders were the levels of salt and nutrient (like phosphate) which can adveresly effect plant/s and soil life (microbes). So doing some research we decided to give these a go and they have been just fantastic. We have had a very successful growing season this summer - all our fruit and vegies have loved the extra grey water and they tasted just great.

There has been some great research done on environmental issues around water quality from laundry liquids and powders and we recommend checking out these results if you use your grey water on your gardens, particularly your edible garden. click on the “laundry brochure” for a PDF summary on the “laundry” page at Lanfax Labs Research.