My Green Dream

Forgive me readers for it has been many months since my last post. I’ve been busy having babies (well, baby) and dealing with family dramas. Life has been all consuming but it’s all good and many wonderful things have been happening. Now I’m living a blissful life at home with my child and baby and dreaming of my maternity leave lasting forever!

Here in the land of ecovillage, it is swelteringly humidly hot. The garden is looking pretty lush though rather neglected as I’ve discovered young babies and gardening are not all that compatible. Hopefully when bubs gets to crawling stage and the weather is not so much like a sauna, we will be able to spend more time in the garden and make some inroads on the weeds. Sheet mulching is the way to go they say though sometimes I think a lawnmower and no garden beds would have been the easiest! But hey, we can’t feed ourselves on grass. Food Forest is our motto.

Pearl, Amber, Ruby and Opal are happy in their luxurious coop especially as I learn more about what tidbits they like to eat (like organic pet mince!). We still only get about 2 eggs a day from them though. I ponder adding some chickens but not sure I want to see the bullying as they establish a new pecking order.

We had our solar panels installed last week so now our metre is officially going backwards as we feed the grid on sunny days and draw off it on cloudy days. They cost us next to nothing thanks to a company that bulk buys from China and does 50 households at a time in one area – called a solar neighbourhood… and the government rebate of course.

John Palmer (see my previous post) continues to visit on a weekly basis and never judges or criticises me for my as yet undeveloped green thumb. I either forget to water the garden or leave the sprinkler on and waterlog it. Lucky we’re on a recycled water system here so I don’t feel guilty about using water, just about drowning the poor plants. Trouble is, the amnesia over the sprinkler always seems to occur just before a big rain spell.

John Palmer doesn’t like to fill up landfill so he returns things to nature as much as possible. If I’m out when he comes, I often return home to find little pagodas of coconut shells dotted throughout the garden – refuse from the resort where he is resident green man and tour guide. He mulches our garden beds with grass collected from the side of the road and plants discarded spring onions from the resort kitchens.

Well I can hear the weeds in the Mandala Garden sneering at me as they emerge almost as quickly as I pull them out. My recent weeding efforts have markedly improved the beds but a friend told me that sheet mulching is going to give me more mileage on the mulch. There’s a cloudy spell outside and a friend has just dropped off a pile of newspapers so off I go to attack the ever invading nutgrass, kikuyu and other pesky weeds that steal the nutrients from our vegies and herbs. 

About the Author...

Filippa lives in an ecovillage in southeast Queensland with her husband (K), her young son (Mr T), and "tummy bug" - due late September. She is passionate about nutrition, and enjoys nourishing dinner parties and luscious swims in the nearby waterhole. One day, she's hoping to say that she loves gardening too. First though, she's got to get past those childhood memories of Sundays spent pulling little weeds out of a manicured suburban garden bed.