About the Farm
Our Permaculture Farm at Black Mountain on the Sunshine Coast
Frank and I live on six acres of rich volcanic soil on the side of Black Mountain. We built our own house and it is still a work in progress. We have been practicing Permaculture principles in growing gardens and utilizing our livestock for over fifteen years and this has resulted in building up systems that serve many functions. We have pigs and chooks that help us to grow their own food by taking advantage of their habits of clearing the ground of weeds. In a system of pens and runs, they are allowed to clear the ground whilst other runs are closed to them. The closed runs are growing sunflowers or any other grain that can supplement their diet, at very little cost to us. We also have access to a lot of manure especially from the goats and the cows. Their manure is shoveled into bath tubs and turned into worm farms. The resulting worm castings are then used for potting mixes and the gardens and for planting trees.
Permaculture has offered us many great ideas of farming efficiently with minimal human labour. We are enjoying being mostly food self reliant and we are saving ourselves a lot of money whilst enjoying fresh organic produce. We have many gardens all in a state of flux and there is always something to eat whatever the time of year. In fact we never tire of starting a new garden and have found it to be something of an addiction. We have gardens that range from a food forest, to a winter garden, to a tropical grain and vegetable garden, to a chook pen garden, the pig runs, container box gardens and a balcony garden that we are now in the process of building. We also like to use our tropical vegetables as edible landscape gardens and find that we simply don’t have any room for ornamentals! When do we have enough gardens? Never it seems, as we aim to feed more than just ourselves. Our livestock greatly benefits from the gardens as well as other people in time of need.
I’m very fortunate to have a concrete housing for the cow bale. Calves are locked up in there at night to separate them from their mum so I have some milk from them in the mornings, and there is also room for milking a cow in the bale without too much chaos. The goats also have their own housing and this is situated next to the cow bale. It’s a great collection point for manure and this is where the worm farms are sited. The gardens are not far from there so that the worm castings are easily wheel barrowed from there.
One day in the not too distant future I would like to build a methane digester to make biogas for cooking on. We have so much manure at our finger tips that it would be crazy not to contemplate it.
We also have our own bee hives and have our own delicious honey all year round. The bees are a bonus for the fruit trees and the European vegetables as they help to pollinate them. Six acres is enough to keep us busy as you can see. It is a great way to live and I’m sure it will keep us going when times get really tough.
