A is for Apples

Fresh and free range... of course! Eggs - not only are they a tasty addition to breakfast but an essential ingredient in cakes, pancakes and custard. Unfortunately, we are unable to keep chickens as our block is just too small and apart from our driveway and front entrance most of our outdoor space is comprised of narrow garden beds between our house and the neighbours. So apart from the occasional (and very much appreciated) donation of home-grown eggs from friends like most families we are left to navigate the purchase of eggs from the grocery store. Last year in Australia new rules came into effect around the labelling of "free range" eggs. To be free range hens must have 'meaningful and regular access' to an outdoor range during the day and be free to roam and forage outside. There's also a maximum stocking density, which dictates how many hens are allowed per hectare of outdoor space. Good new right? Or so we thought until we actually started...

D is for dirt! In the words of ABC’s Dirt Girl - Go get grubby! It seems I have quite a lot to say when it comes to compositing and dirt! However this will be the last blog on compost and dirt for a while. Dirt is essentially a combination of rock, clay, sand and other organic matter - have I mentioned how wonderful compost is? Dirt is also packed with microorganisms and minerals. There are about 50 billion microbes in 1 tablespoon of soil. Soil is a very complex ecosystem, teeming with very diverse life. Like many keen gardeners - professional and amateur - I’ve been doing a lot of research into dirt - it’s actually quite fascinating stuff. Soil is far more complex than any ecosystem above the ground. I highly recommend that you start with research into what is commonly referred to the 'No dig' method of gardening. One of the most powerful things I have come to understand is that home garderns really need to stop ‘feeding the plants’ with lots of fertilisers and s...

The fifth R is black gold! Refuse / Reduce / Reuse / Recycle / Rot (or Compost)   Rot might be the last of the five R’s but as a gardener I think it the best of all. Even when we grow or buy just the right amount of fresh produce that we need we still end up with some food scraps. Our compost scraps go into four different places: 1. Left over orange skins go into a glass jar filled with vinegar to soak for about six weeks to make an all purpose household spray cleaner (more on this another time). 2. High quality veggie peelings and small scraps get placed in the worm farm. While our worm farm is currently out of action once the weather cools down we will re-fill it with lots of wrigglers. 3. Fresh uncooked fruit and vegetable scraps (minus onion and citrus skins) go straight into our compost bin. 4. Everything else we feed to Ashley (the Bokashi) All of our scrap buckets (and glass jar of vinegar) are kept in the kitchen and emptied regularly - re...

Why we love our bokashi bin (we named her Ashley... the bokashly) For the first time since starting down a path towards low waste I can finally say that zero waste is a real possibility for our household. We don’t tend generate a lot of food waste that can’t be composted, but we do end up with some cooked left overs, or things like the crusts off our daughter’s toast that can’t go in the compost bin. We’ve also struggling with having a naked bin - as some of the bits of left over food waste were, well a bit sloppy. Not any more! Last month we bought a bokashi bin from Bulleen Art and Garden . It’s been a great investment for our household. We are now down to about half a bag of rubbish each week, we get even more free fertiliser for the veggies and in the last month we’ve not had to wash out rubbish bucket - yay for naked bins! While I know a few people who haven’t found the Bokashi Bin system to their liking, we find it really easy to use. It has an unusual but not unpleasant s...

A is for apples, because today we bit into our first apple of the season! The Akane apple (sometimes called ‘Tokyo Rose’) is one of our early season apples and this year we have a bumper crop. After a long wait it is so satisfying to be eating home grown apples. Not long after we moved into our house we started planting out a small orchard. This included six applies from Woodbridge Fruit Trees. To be honest when we planted them I felt like I had spent a lot of money on six funny looking sticks that looked more dead than alive. Seven years on those funny sticks give us spring time blossom followed by beautiful sweet apples from summer through Autumn. I am always amazed at just how long apples can be kept in cold store and still sold as ‘fresh’ apples.  See  https://apal.org.au/storing-apples/ . I can only imagine how much energy is used across Australia keeping apples in cold storage, just so they are available all year round. Personally I love the anticipation of c...

It’s a New Year, and the Brown family have a new blog. Over the course of 2019 we are going to provide an A, B, C with a broad sustainability focus. We are a family of three (Mum, Dad and a kindy kid) living in the outer eastern suburbs of Melbourne. We have a small house (two bedrooms) on small(ish) block of around 525m2. We’ve always been environmentally aware, but over the last couple of years we have started shifting from awareness to reducing our impact. Many of the changes we have made have been small positive shifts in behaviour that we believe most households could make minimal effort. Some of the changes we are making include: Becoming more aware of all the things we consume, and buying less ‘stuff’. When household items need replacing we research sustainable alternatives - to make the best choice within our household budget. Growing more food (and making more compost - more on the awesome Bokashi bin later this month). A focus on refusing and reusing - not just recycli...