Australian Bush Life

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…

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…

We only use our wood fire for heating our house. As our home is under trees we wrestled with the concept of solar/thermal energy for heating but we do not receive enough direct sunlight to achieve this. We did not feel that it was sustainable to cut down our bush to gain access to sunlight. As the reason we had chosen this house initially was because of the bush (trees) and the beautiful wildlife biodiversity it provides. Cutting this exact bush down did not provide us with the moral answer. Also living under the trees also provides us with much desired shade in summer.

Firewood collection - sustainably.

Instead we manage and source all our firewood from our bush block in a sustainable manner. We feel that this is probably the most sustainable heating fuel option as it is truely a fuel that can provide a current and renewable energy source. Fossil based fuels source energy which is millions of years old, but the energy in the trees we use for fuel has been generated in less than 100 years and can be recycled within or lifetime.

After ensuring that our need to heat is as low as possible by improving insulation and reducing drafts within the home some concepts we consider to improve the sustainability of this home heating option are:

• Use trees that are already dead, but we don’t take every dead tree.
• Ensure that dead trees with good hollows are left as habitat.
• Leave some dead trees on the ground as logs to rot and provide habitat and nutrients to the forest.
• Only burn wood that has been thoroughly dried – no green wood.
• Protect and manage our bush habitat by reducing weeds and ensuring regeneration for future use.
• Planting indigenous trees as required in un-treed areas for future use and as habitat improvements.

Harvesting wood can be a sustainable product for human consumption such as heating, but this does not endorse some of the harvesting practices that are used in native forests around where we live. But the logging of native forests debate is a whole other issue for another blog post!

Cucumber recycled climbing rack.

Over the last summer we used climbing racks for our cucumber plants to climb on. We picked up this steel ‘rio’ frame off the hard waste, someones waste is usually something we can find a use for. Recycling the rubbish allowed our cucmbers to grow upwards and save garden space by going vertical not horizontal. The cucumbers also like to get up there and into the sunlight and actually seem to produce more fruit than when they trail on the ground.

The frame worked really well for cucumber plants. We planted a cucumber at the base of each foot of the ‘A’ frame shape and once we had helped the plants get their grip they climbed and filled the frame. Climbing frames make it easier to find and pick the fruit. Also the small birds like Superb Fairy Wrens love to climb on the frame and pull off any insects that they find on the cucumber plants, they are the best organic pest controller you can find!

More on growing our own food…

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…

Garden Art liked by King Parrots

We just love the look of wood that has washed up on the beach with all the wear from water. Usually this also reminds us of a camping or hiking trip to somewhere beautiful. We picked up all this wood and the rope on the same beach and also cleaned up other bits of rubbish off the beach too to leave it in a nicer way for the next people (and wildlife) that came along to use and enjoy. If there is too much rubbish for us to carry we particularly focus on picking up things like this wood that we can use for garden art. Also bottles and cans that we then put in the recycle bin (so feels like a double win). Or we pick up things that are dangerous to wildlife like nets or fishing line.

The King Parrots that visit us also like to use the garden art for fun. They can be quite noisy and wake us up in the morning.

We are doing quite a bit of ground works at the moment, particularly fixing our retaining walls after the bushfire. As we are trying to have the least impact on biodiversity in our area we have found it has been really succesful transplanting indigenous plants from the site we are working on to the new areas we have finished. As an approximate over 90% of the plants we have moved survive and this has been during peak summer weather with minimal hand watering, although we have had some reasonable and regular rainfall this summer too.

It is a great way to save on purchasing plants, ensures we are keeping the plants locally indigenous and also keeps bare areas to a minimum as the indigenous plants take really well when moved from one place to another immediately. Within a week or two the area just looks like indigneous bush. Species transplant information:

• Indigenous grasses; Kangaroo – Themeda triandra, Wallaby – Austrodanthonia pilosa & Joycea pallida, Spear – Austrostipa rudis, Plume – Dichelachne crinita and D. rara & Weeping Grass – Microlaena stipoides all transplant extremely well.
• Common ground covers such as Kidney-weed – Dichondra repens, Ivy-leaf Violet – Viola hederacea, Cudweeds - Euchiton involucratus & E. sphaericus & Toad Rush -  Juncus bufonis all transplant really well.
• Eucalypts and Wattles transplant well if you move them while they are really young so you can get all the root system, this also ensures a nice strong & stable plant when they grow up.
  

  Transplanted indigenous plants on new retaining wall

• Mat-rushes – Lomandra filiformis and L. longifolia and Flax-lilies – Dianella Tasmanica, D. longifolia & D. revoluta are more difficult to transplant as they have quite a deep root system that you need to get a lot of in your dig out to ensure their survival, but it can be done. They also need more watering in to settle.

This retaining walls we have made out of the supporting beams from the shed that was burnt at this site during the bushfire. Many people had items like this removed by contractors and taken straight to the tip (or recycle centre). We

 were happy to do this job on our own knowing that it is free to dispose of metal if we had decided not to re-use it anywhere.