Eight Acres

This is a post from February 2011, back when we only had Eight Acres and were working on fixing the soil fertility and clearing the paddocks.  A few thoughts on what you can do with a small property. This is the second small farm/acreage property that we've lived on.  The first one, in the Lockyer Valley, was fairly flat and cleared of all but a few tall trees, with two good dams and few rocks or weeds.  We were hoping to find something even nicer when we moved to Nanango, but we couldn't find anything in our price range, so settled for one of the cheapest options we could find. We didn't know how lucky we were with the first property!  It was selected by Pete for its dirt bike riding potential more than any small farming ideas, but it worked out just perfectly when our focus changed to self-sufficiency.  The place we found at Nanango is steep, rocky, weedy and the dam was quite saline when we first arrived, but it was cheap and had a perimeter fence. ...

Behind the scenes of my blog I can see the search terms that led people to find my blog.  It can be quite interesting to look through them occasionally and see what people are looking for.  Most of them involve chicken tractors, but another question that comes up regularly is “what can you do with eight acres?” or “how much land is eight acres?”.  Today I will try to answer this question. yarrow flower -  completely unrelated, just a pretty photo Of course it is a very broad question, there are lots and lots of things you can do with eight acres, but I’m going to assume that you want to live there, feed your family and maybe make a little extra money.  I make that assumption because that’s what I know about, if you want to do something else with your eight acres, you will need to look somewhere else. If you haven’t chosen your land yet, here a few things to look for.  Focus on the things you can’t change and try to choose the best property you can f...

Over the past 6 weeks my husband and I have been working hard to secure finance for another property, and today we found out that it had settled and its now ours! The property is 258 acres in Kumbia, which is near Kingaroy and about 30 min from where we live now in Nanango.  The property has no house, just good fencing, a hay shed, nice solid stock yards, five dams and four divined bore sites.  The property comprises of about 60 acres of cultivation, with about half of the remainder selectively cleared and contoured, and the rest with natural vegetation cover. Many of you will wonder why we need 258 A when we already had 8 A.  There are two reasons.  Firstly we have been buying a lot of supplement feed recently and we felt that we would never be entirely self-sufficient with the number of animals that we want to keep on only 8 A.  We really need about 20-50 A, but a block that size is hard to find, and most are not good quality country, just the bad bits cho...

From what I can understand, classical hugelkultur consists of piling up logs and branches, filling over with topsoil and planting on top.  The decaying wood adds fertility and heat to the heap, which is good for the plants growing above, and it also provides some heat to the heap.  I'd never heard of hugelkultur until I read about it on  Craving Fresh , I thought at the time that it was an interesting concept, especially when we have such cold winters here, but I wasn't sure what to do with it.  Then someone from our permaculture group sent around another link with some  great pictures  and I was even more interested, but still not sure what to do.  The problem is that we lack topsoil as it is, and I wasn't going to buy any.  We do have plenty of logs that are too big for the mulcher though, so I was still interested. Then we went to a permaculture techniques day with our permaculture group, and looked at some hugelkultur and swales at the Bott...

Peter Andrews is an Australian farmer who has worked hard over several decades to observe, experiment with and understand the natural cycles in the Australian landscape.  The focus of his work is the role of plants in controlling the distribution of water and fertility in the landscape. I read Peter Andrews' books " Back from the Brink " and " Beyond the Brink " a couple of years ago and I decided to read them again recently to refresh my memory.  I'm so glad I did, because I had forgotten so much and I found that some of the things that didn't make sense the first time really clicked into place this time.  There's no way I can summarise all the ideas here, if you are interested in improving the fertility and water-holding capacity of your land, as well as reducing your input costs (fertiliser and irrigation), you really need to read the books carefully yourself.  However, I can summerise the ideas that we are applying on our property. Farms...

I often read that " a weed is just a plant growing in the wrong place ".  This is a sweet quote, and very true in the garden.   This link has some great tips and explanations about weeds in organic gardening. Lantana on the side of the road in the South Burnett - its hard to control when birds spread the seeds However, in the wider world, weeds are not so sweet.  The QLD Dept of Primary Industries says: Weeds cost Queensland an estimated $600 million annually and have significant impacts on primary industries, natural ecosystems, and human and animal health. The weeds that get d eclared in QLD are targeted for control because they have, or could have, serious economic, environmental or social impacts.  For the most part, this means that they are difficult to control (ie invasive) and/or potentially toxic to livestock.   Unfortunately our Nanango property seem s to have several examples of declared weeds and even some of national significance ! ...