Getting our Veg On
Sometimes I feel like I’m a pretend bush lady. People ask, “How many acres do you have?” “72,” I reply. “Any animals?” “A dog.” (Oh, and courtesy of my youngest this summer we also have three skinks called Lizzie, Lizzie and Lizzie.) “Chooks?” “No.” “Growing your own veggies?” “No.” Hmm people think. Internally I protest, we do have composting toilets, tank water and we’re solar powered off grid! To be real a bush lady, at the very least I need to to grow some veggies.
Being on tank water and with a small roof in a year of drought, we didn’t actually have spare water to grow veggies. Happily, since October we have had excellent rain and most excellent husband has installed an old water tank which now collects run off from the extended lean to off the shipping container, and that tank is now full! Dripping a little, but full. Water? Tick!
Back in the city we had raised garden beds built from corrugated roofing tin. We brought this tin with us when we moved in an enormous truck full of stuff I berated my husband we may never use again. Proving me wrong, the tin garden beds have been resurrected. One is lined up against a section of our yard fence which incidentally was originally a balustrade in a Mollymook house husband renovated. Some Sydney blue gum branches from our block are the frame for the wire covering. Our veggie patch needs to be bird, rabbit, possum and wombat proof. The old shack flyscreen door is one opening side, a tip shop $10 flyscreen door the other. Two tin garden beds are now side by side framed with recycled timber and critter proofed by discarded incorrectly sized flyscreens from a city job and a hundred year old flyscreen door from Melbourne’s historic Yarraville. Another of these beautiful old doors is now the door to our greenhouse polytunnel. The polytunnel has been constructed using tubing found on the block held in place with tip shop star pickets and a recycled timber base. The plastic covering is reinforced by recycled decking from a Moruya Heads residence. The tall garden beds I half filled with rocks, easy to find around our block but a good workout to collect, and leaf litter which we have in abundance. The only new items used in construction were the wire, staples, plastic and the soil. So if that’s not real bush building it’s definitely country style - use anything you have and pay for materials as a last resort. Cobbled together, slightly whimsical but entirely functional. The boys had a great time raking out the soil, then selecting and planting seedlings. This bush lady says bring on the veg!
