Farmville

While a few of my contacts on Facebook are busy playing farmville I’ve been playing a real life version.

For quite a while I have been growing vegetables and herbs that we use large amounts of and am looking to extend our little backyard farm going into 2010. Self sustainability is a little out of reach at the moment but reducing our reliance on commercially grown food has both financial advantages as well as reducing our global footprint.

For this post I quickly went outside and took three photos which I combined below. Since moving into this house I have removed a lot of lawn to expand this area as well as many large bushes that bounded the grass. I have replaced some of the bushes with citrus trees (not visible in this image) as well as planting bananas and grapes vines (also not visible below).

So here are the plans for 2010

I intend to remove more of the lawn  – Probably another 6 square metres which will be converted into productive beds. I am not a big fan of lawns anyway and think they are a frightful waste of resources, needing copious amounts water and fertiliser to make them look decent. I also spend so much time pulling the runners out from the garden and vegetable beds.

Long term plan will be to have no lawn at all (except for the front verge) and I’ve already made big headways with this out the front of the house.  As I still want the garden to be presentable when we have visitors over I need to think more on the implementation of this.

I’ll make a start on removing the small area of lawn after Christmas and, once  removed, I will be converting that area into a raised vegetable garden, as well as having a central area for perennial herbs.

Chickens have always been something I’ve wanted to get and we will be moving forward with that, starting with the conversion of the shed (which really only collects junk) into a coop. Originally I was talking about having them being able to roam the garden but Lia had some concerns about that so I’ll be looking at building an enclosed run for them.

Long term I’d really like to have a go at aquaponics but this is not something I’ll be doing any time soon due to the initial cost of set-up. Keeping trout in the pond would be great as part of the aquaponics cycle as well as a potential food source.

I’ll include some photos in upcoming posts.