Self Sufficiency in the 80s

Many years ago, when we first bought our little piece of self sufficiency, a very
Small farm, or, a very large back yard, depends on your point of view, the chores
were dictated by the degree of urgency they represented.

As the property had been part of a larger farm we had many internal boundaries that were not fenced, the subdivision had been done on old titles rather than where the existing fences were.

Thus our first endeavors were to get some paddocks with fences and gates to hold our sheep and cattle, then to get the existing shedding into a more useable state of repair.

These tasks took about 12 months to complete as they had to be fitted in with our job, which was taking school photographs in the surrounding districts, had we tried to live on the farm income, (nil for 12 months, and not much more for the next 5 years or so) we would have starved.

So it was with much relief that we got through these essential chores and were able to pick some tasks for pleasure, we chose to plant lots of trees, little 6 inch high trees, these required yet more FENCING to keep the stock from eating them!

Harking back to the self sufficiency theme that had led us here in the first place, we then dug some vegetable garden beds and planted out our veggies.

That was an over simplification of what we did, our soils were very poor, mainly clay, and starved of all the requisites for a good veggie garden.

So we dosed it up with vast quantities of manure, fortunately we had a good supply under the shearing shed, a liberal dose of gypsum to help break down the clay, heaps of compost that we had been busily making over the last 12 months, and last but not least plenty of mulch to protect the seedlings and conserve water.

This project was started as something we wanted to do, rather than had to do, but it took on such large proportions by the time we found we needed to build some wind break FENCES around the garden area that once again we were very pleased to see it finished.

We decided to have a break from these projects for a while, it was about then that we discovered that if you are farming, even in the smallest scale that there is never a time that you are not BUSY.

I will post this as episode one and just see how much more rolls from the production line later.