Australian Bush Life

We have reduced our general waste produced from normal lifestyle habits within the home considerably over the last 5 years. Mostly we avoid buying things we don’t need, which is good for your savings too! Food is the hardest lifestyle area to reduce waste production as it is a necessity. Here are some ways that we have reduced our waste through food, but we still have a long way to go to have a completely sustainable lifestyle.

• We always store food in recyclable containers – no cling wrap or plastic bags EVER.
• We buy in larger amounts i.e. 10kg of rice and try to choose paper or other recyclable wrappings.
• We grow most of our herbs and vegetables and are planting fruit and nut trees.
• We sometimes make our own dips or pasta and package in our own storage tubs.
• We make our own sauces for Italian, Indian or other asian stir fry type meals.
• We select items that are wrapped more sustainably over other choices.
• We write to companies if a small change in packaging will make their product more sustainable.
• We avoid plastic bags wherever possible – we use any plastic bag as our bin liner i.e. bread bags.
• We recycle and compost wherever possible.
• We always look for new options or better ways of minimising waste.

Recycling metal beer bottle tops in metal can.

We struggle with drinks containers as mostly they are uneccessary if you just drink from the tap. We don’t buy bottled water – EVER! Beer and wine is our big downfall as we don’t make our own, yet (another future project!). We have come up with the idea of collecting metal bottle tops and squashing them into an empty metal can which we squash closed before putting into the recycle bin. This ensures that the magnets at the recycling centre don’t miss them as small individual items.

Recycling small pieces of aluminium foil…

Unsure what to do with all the the shiny and smooth alumium blobs that seemed so interesting after the bushfire we finally decided that we had to use them or recycle them. It took us a year but we did it and we think they make our pot plants that bit more interesting.

By using local bits of junk to add interest it avoids having to purchase pot plant items of interest like river rocks etc which can be quite unsustainable from an environmental point of view. Especially if habitats and environments are destroyed so that we can have interesting gardens.

We have a few cactus in pots as they are good from the point of view that they use such a small amount of water, but we wouldn’t put these in the ground (ground) as they do have the potential to be weedy. We have seen some parks where people have dumped their garden waste and the cactus just take off and being so hardy and propogate so easily they are really hard to get rid of.

More garden art…

It amazes us to see some of our neighbours busily buying hundreds of new plants in pots to re-plant their gardens after the bushfire. We haven’t spent a cent on plants and have more than enough to overfill our own and some willing neighbours gardens & bush blocks with free plants. We even noticed one neighbour buying a local indigenous plant Purple Coral-pea – Hardenbergia violacea in pots to re-plant on fences – if they only looked at their ground after the fire they would have had heaps of this local indigenous plant species sprouting up. Better still using your own local indigenous plant species avoids problems associated with the potential for nursery plants (same species) interbreeding and mixing genetic material with the local indigenous plants that have evolved to the local conditions.

Here are some tips to regenerating your bush and native garden for free:

• Pot up indigenous and native garden plants that have regenerated on paths and areas where they are not wanted for re-planting later when you are ready. You can even source all the pots for free from curb side hard waste.
• Make you own soil to be more sustainable – take some old dry soil from pre-disturbed garden areas (not the bush) and mix it with a bit of compost to revitalise it.
• If you know what the seedlings are you can move some directly into garden beds where you want some new plants. This worked particularly well for me with correas, daisies, violets, hardenbergias, dianellas, goodenias, prostantheras and idigoferas.
• Pot up all the excess eucalypts, there is probably no way that you can take them all on your own block, but we are giving them away to neighbours who will take them. We figure that so many were lost in the fire and then by the subsequent tree clearing that many people undertook we endeavour to get as many back in the ground as we can.

Hardwaste is when people discard large household objects out the front of their house to be picked up by local

Hard waste iconic telly - now a funky shelf

 councils. We know the secret is out but we have been hardwaste hoarders for a number of years - it is our secret bounty. Keep your eyes open while hardwaste is out as you never know what you will find. Mostly the objects are good to use in the garden particulary for garden art or for building.

Here is where we used a particularly beautiful classic old style telly – bound for the tip now a feature shelf at our doorway. Mostly we collect wood and metal for building as this is a really sustainable option; recycling objects that were going to the tip and saving us buying brand new metal or wood. Other most useful hardwaste items include shelves, chairs and tables. We even picked up a new (but old) microwave on the hardwaste the day after our one died – and it’s still going strong after 12 months of continual use!

Unfortunately we lost loads of hardwaste goodies in our shed during the bushfire, but once we get to rebuilding a new shed we will have loads of space to collect new hardwaste – WARNING HARDWASTE COLLECTING IS HIGHLY ADDICTIVE BEHAVIOUR!

We are not huge christmas tree fans but got right into it this year, particularly after a few bevvies (beverages). We started cleaning up boxes of junk that have been lying around our house since the Victorian bushfire in February 09. As we lost all our shedding we had heaps of interesting bits of burnt junk that at the time we just couldn’t quite deal with throwing away. After the fire I suppose you are so overwhelmed that you are just not sure whether to throw burnt junk away or not so we ended up with heaps of interesting bits and pieces of junk in boxes.

 We were deciding what to do with all the junk objects and I still wasn’t able to throw the junk out so had to come up with something quickly before my other half decided it was time. As we are also in the current stage of deciding whether some of our trees are actually going to survive or not – particularly our lemon tree. We decided to put the two together and make some garden art out of junk.

 Objects that went into the lemon tree:

Saw blades, door handles, clamp, part of an iron, chain, tin mug, lantern (one that gets fitted onto a gas bottle), our camping jaffle iron (for making toasted sandwiches), melted beer bottles (the only things that survived in our recycle bin that was full and out to be collected). And a big melted blob of all sorts of goodies that we had to scrape really hard to remove off the concrete floor. It has all sorts of nails, bolts etc melted into an aluminium blob.