Making Compost

Once our vege beds were set up, we filled them with soil and mixed in some of our own compost to add more nutrients to the mix. This also minimises the amount of expensive soil you have to use. The method we use to create compost means that we have a new bin of compost every two weeks. We had actually tried a few ways to make compost, but we found a Compost in Two Weeks article we read in the gardening section of one of the Australian School of Meditation and Yoga's monthly newsletters seemed to work best for us. The people at the Australian School of Meditation and Yoga have kindly allowed us to reproduce this article below.

Ingredients

2 wheelbarrow loads of fresh lawn clippings ( we have virtually no lawn to cut on our block, but if you ask the neighbors you will find they are usually only to happy to get rid of them!).
1 sack full of brown leaves
1 wheelbarrow full of non-diseased green garden clippings (like leaves, old flowers, and weeds (at your discretion)
1 bucket full of vegetable, fruit (no citrus) and other vegetarian based food scraps (cut corn cobs into smaller pieces, avocado seeds are ok)
1 shovel of cow manure, or a couple of handfulls of pelletised chicken manure
1 ice cream bucket full of chopped up yarrow or comfrey or kelp (or all three if available) to act as a compost starter (we grow our own yarrow and comfrey)
1 handful of gypsum, lime and dolomite (these help to sweeten the soil)

Method
Place your compost bin on the ground in a sunny place with the open base in contact with the earth. Remove the lid and put all the ingredients mentioned above in to it. At regular intervals as you add the ingredients, spray on some water, not to much, not to little. The bin should be jam packed.

Don't add anything new to the bin for the next two weeks.

Everyday you need to turn every bit of the compost heap over. This takes about 5 minutes, and guarantees that the final compost is worth the effort. What we do is to lift the bin off the compost and put it beside the pile, then fork the compost into the now empty bin. If it is working it gets really hot inside the bin and then cools slowly as the two-week mark approaches.

When the compost is ready we shovel it straight on to the vege beds and mix it in. You can grow seedlings in it to. If you want, you can go to the local hardware shop and get a Ph test kit to test the Ph of your compost so you can fine tune the compost ingredients to suit what you want to grow.

Grow Your Own

We thought the best place to start our sustainable lifestyle was to grow some of our own food. Especially after reading that a study by the Melbourne environmental organisation CERES found that a typical weekly basket of fruit and vegetables travelled 8730 kilometres from the point of production to consumption. What a lot of extra greenhouse gases!

This has been simple for us, we just put in a few fruit trees, and set up some vege beds to grow the vegetables that work best in the climate and conditions in which we live. Anyone can do this, even in pots or plastic boxes, if you don't have a backyard. As mentioned in a previous post, a number of people we have met while attending programs run by the Australian School of Meditation and Yoga have very prolific vegetable gardens that they grow in pots and boxes.

We live in a sub tropical climate so we have put in a variety of suitable fruit trees and plants - bananas, lychees, mangoes, tamarillos, pineapples, passion fruit, red paw paw, grapes (coastal variety), figs and native rasberries in our garden.

We have built four vegetable beds to grow a variety of rotating crops. The beds were easy to put together using eight 1.8 fence palings screwed together to make the surrounds of each bed. These palings are cheap to buy (for us $1.50 each or $12 per bed) and are reasonably long lasting. Try not to use treated pine, as the chemical they use to treat the wood (copper chrome arsenate) is a poison and may leach into the ground and be absorbed by the vegetables. We used four 4 x 30cm square garden stakes to act as the corners of the bed. The fence palings are screwed to the garden stakes to form a 1.8 x 1.8 metre square box.

Once you have built your bed box, find a suitable place on the ground to put it. Preferably somewhere with good drainage and no large tree roots under the ground. The four corner stakes should each have a few centimetres protruding down, so that once you have put your box in your chosen spot you can bang each corner stake into the ground with a hammer to give the box extra stability. If there is grass or lawn growing where you have placed your bed box, you will have to remove it. The easiest way to do this is to use a shovel to slice up the grass into manageable 50cm squares, then wedge the shovel under each square and flip it upside down. This way the grass will be on the bottom, it will die, and form a nice base layer of mulch. All that is left to do now is fill the bed with dirt and start planting.

By getting out in the fresh air and growing some of our own fruit and vegetables, not only do we have a more balanced life, but a more balanced diet as well!

Sustainability

The word sustainability is used frequently these days in the news, especially when referring to climate change. If you are like us, you may have wondered exactly what it means.

In simple terms, sustainability is defined as an individual or society's lifestyle being able to meet their current needs, without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. Unfortunately, because of our western lifestyle, we are consuming so much now that it has got to a point where sustainability in many areas, especially our natural environment, are under threat. Our food, water and energy are of particular concern. In a recent United Nations report they said that human actions are putting so much strain on our environment that the ability of this planet's ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted.

So now that we are aware of this, we try to make lifestyle choices that are sustainable. This way not only do we benefit ourselves, but also all the other living creatures that inhabit the planet. This also fits in with the yoga system and the balanced life that we try to follow.