We bought our property at Great Western in 2003 with the view of setting it up with a loose permaculture principles. The first thing we did was have the property yeoman ploughed to keep as much water on the property for as long as possible. We also ran swales across the property diverting water in to dams. on the banks of the swales we planted tree lucerne in hedge rows. we found the tree lucerne died in wetter areas so we swapped them for acacia retinoids, a local wattle species and found it to be very useful.

To fertilize the paddocks and to reduce our waste we set up an 11mtr x 2.4mtr worm farm.

for bedding material, we use horse manure which is plentiful in our area and we feed it with manure food waste and cardboard waste. The used burger boxes and serviettes are collected from our events and used to feed our worms.

Once the hedge rows were mature, we started looking for sheep. We decided on dorpers, a breed that handles Australian conditions well and doesn’t need mulesing or crutching.

Future plans include a pigs and using the collected worm lichate to grow our coleslaw.

stay tuned, thanks for reading