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!
