Illawarra Organic Food Co-op!

Organic food Co-ops are a fantastic way to build community and support organic farmers and local food producers. They’re run collectively, with an emphasis on making sustainably grown, minimally packaged whole foods, available at affordable prices.

Exciting news for Wollongong is that an Illawarra Organic Food Co-op is now forming. The next working group will be held on Wednesday November 12, at the Thirroul Neighbourhood Centre between 6pm and 7pm. All with an interest in helping a fantastic food co-op come to life are welcome!

Fruits of the Forest

Miracle fruit that makes sour things taste sweet, chocolate pudding fruit, juicy bright yellow babacos, ugnis that explode like a strawberry sherbet bomb…there’s a whole world of gorgeous fruits out there that you will never find at the supermarket!

Our suburban block is designed to grow over 120 organic fruit trees, shrubs and climbers. Of these 120 plants, 50 will be unique species, including native food plants.

Check out our fruit trees article and the 'Garden Design' for a mouthwatering summary!

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Keeping it cool, keeping it hot

Summer’s almost upon us, and one of the easiest and most effective ways to help keep our homes cooler in summer and warmer in winter is to pop in some insulation in the roof, and in even the external walls, or under the floorboards if your place is above the ground.

We’ve been surprised at the difference it's made since we put insulation into our roof last month. And there’s rebates available at the moment too - the NSW state government will pay half the cost of installing your insulation, up to $300. Bring on summer!

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Putting Nature Back Into The Nature Strip

What a fantastic day we had bringing life to our nature strip with the help of our wonderful neighbours! Like most other nature strips around, ours was just a strip of grass between the road and our front fence. But in just one day we transformed it into a beautiful space that welcomes people to our home, provides a great space for people to walk through, and will continue to grow as valuable habitat for local wildlife. And it will never need mowing! All we did was:

• Spread some gypsum to break up the clay
• Sheet mulch the area with newspaper to keep the grass out
• Create a wide wood chip mulch path for passers by and the postwoman
• Plant 50 native plants - mainly locally native grasses, shrubs and a few low growing trees that won’t hinder the powerlines (we got the plants cheap from Wollongong City Councils Greenplan nursery, on a sale day)

 

So many people have commented on how great it looks, and have said that they would love to do the same. So we’re looking forward to helping our neighbours through ‘nature strip working bees.’ Thanks again to our neighbours for helping us! Let’s bring life and beauty to all nature strips!

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Lawn into Lunch

Would you rather be able to get an amazingly fresh and tasty lunch from right outside your back step than have to drive down to the supermarket? Sounds good to us! We’re on a mission to transform our lawn into lunch.

Now most people would sensibility start small. But we decided to tackle the whole lawn in one day - about 600 square metres of it. So off we went with a turf cutter, cutting the grass and flipping it over in an attempt to kill that ever so vigorous kikuyu. Yes we almost killed ourselves in the process – turf cutters have a mind of their own, and lawn is not exactly the lightest thing to flip over!

But our future fruit trees will love us for replacing the kikuyu (which they really don’t like), with non invasive grasses like cow pea, millet, pintos peanut and clover (which they love). And we were able to keep with the organic nature of our place and not use any chemical weedkillers.

We baked the flipped over lawn for a week, spread a bit of top soil ontop, and sowed some soil improving seeds. The ever invasive kikuyu is trying to make a comeback, but we’re keeping ontop of it by hand weeding. And we’re looking forward to having the most luscious, organic supermarket in our own backyard!

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Food For Thought

Here’s something that can be a bit hard to digest. Even if we have the most water and energy efficient house and use public transport, we can still be really big consumers of water, emit lots of greenhouse gases, and have an awfully large eco footprint (that’s the amount of land needed to support us). How can this be??? Well, it’s because of all the water, energy and land that’s needed to make all the goods and services we use. And surprisingly, its food we need to think about the most to have more sustainable lives.

In Wollongong we have a pretty big ecological footprint – 6.14 hectares of land are needed to support each one of us. If everyone lived like this we’d need another two or three planets! Would you believe that food is responsible for 43% of this ecological footprint, compared to personal transport at only 3.8%! And 26% of our greenhouse gas emissions come from the food we eat, compared to the electricity we use in our homes, which contributes only 13.3%. What about water? Well food guzzles 44.7% of the water used to support our lifestyle, compared to household water use at 19.7%.

Wollongong's Household Eco-Footprint

It starts to make sense when you hear that it takes 20,000 litres of water to make one kilo of coffee, that Australia’s meat products industry emits 91 mega tonnes of greenhouse gases a year, and that so much of our food is produced far away, and comes to us packaged and often processed.

Luckily when it comes to food, what’s good for us and our community, is good for the planet too. We all know the story – fresh, whole foods, lots of veggie dishes, eating what’s in season, buying organic and fair trade and supporting local growers. And we can be so much more creative! Backyard food forests, school permaculture gardens, fruit trees in our streets and parks, food co-ops, sprouts on the window sill – it’s all about food. Sustainable living begins with your next bite!

For more information about how food affects your sustainable lifestyle, see http://www.acfonline.org.au/consumptionatlas

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The Greenprint

The Greenprint is the landscape design for Happy Earth. It’s our vision, our dream, and what we’re working towards. It’s come about from all the ideas and experiences many wonderful people have inspired us with on our journey of sustainable living.

As sustainable food production is key to eco living, the heart of the design is – you guessed it – organic vegetable gardens and an abundance of fruit trees. But this design’s a bit different to most. You won’t find any rectangular rows of veggie beds here. What you will find is a vibrant forest of food that works with the house – so for example, water for the garden is harvested from the roof of the house, and the trees in the garden provide the house with cooling shade in summer, and warming sun in winter, as well as fuel for the woodfired combustion heater. Our garden also works with the gifts of nature – so it’s all about placing the right plants in the right places, according to the amount of sun, wind and moisture in that particular spot, and looking after the most wonderful and important workers – the millions of microbes in the soil. Check out our Garden Design article for more info.

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Natural Floors

Floorboards are a fantastic flooring option. They're a natural material, low allergy and can be cleaned with a microfiber mop - no vacuuming needed! Natural oils are a great way to protect your floors and bring them to life. They're also much more people and eco friendly than synthetic finishes like polyurethane.

We just oiled our floors with ‘Livos Ardvos wood oil’ from the Natural Paint Place, which is a linseed based oil. We found it really easy to work with, and the floors have come up brilliantly. An added bonus with these natural oils is that you can spot repair any scratches. Check out flooring article for more info.

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Non-Toxic Painting

We all know that ‘fresh paint’ smell isn’t good for us…but the thing is even after the smell is gone, standard paints can off gas nasties such as Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC’s) for months and months, aggravating asthma, irritating our eyes, nose and throats and causing lethargy. And the chemicals used in paints can have a nasty environmental legacy.

You might be surprised to know there are alternatives - we certainly were! BIO paints are high quality non-toxic paints made from plants and minerals, not petrochemicals. They can be colour matched to most colours, and are great to work with. And we love that these paints are 100% biodegradable so you can wash the brushes out onto the grass!

Check out:

http://www.greenpainters.com.au

http://www.energyandwatersolutions.com.au

http://www.bioproducts.com.au

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Switching to CFL Efficient Lighting

A quick phone call was all it took to arrange for someone to come and swap all our incandescent light globes for energy efficient CFL's. And they did it for free! The new CFL bulbs are brilliant - they last much longer than incandescents, and use a quarter of the energy. Please don't be put off by the flickering, long warm up time, and stark white light of old compact fluorescent lighting. The new CFL lights have all overcome these problems and you really can't tell the difference between incandescent lighting and CFL lighting now, except for the shape of the bulbs!

Remember when disposing of CFL lights at the end of their life, you can't just throw them in the bin - they need to be properly disposed of on your Council's chemical clean-up day. This is because the CFL's contain more mercury than incandescent bulbs - but overall in places like NSW where most electricity is from burning coal, they result in less mercury being released into the environment because they require less energy.

For more info contact Green Alliance on 1300 787 749 (local call cost), email info@greenalliance.com.au, or visit www.greenalliance.com.au

Home Renovations

Think of a sustainable home and you're likely to think of a sleek new architect designed building with all the new efficiency gadgets. But making changes in our behaviour and smart alterations to existing homes, is a much better environmental choice than building from scratch. And just because a building is given a five star eco rating, doesn't mean that people will use it that way - it's all about what we do within our home. If you grow some of your own food and support local food producers, your probably already miles ahead of houses that produce all their own energy and water, as food is by far the biggest part of our ecological footprint.

So, healthy and eco-friendly renovations is the name of the game at the moment! It's fantastic to see more green home renovation products becoming available. But separating products which are marketed as healthy and environmentally friendly, from those which live up to their promises, and then actually being able to find those products locally is quite a challenge. We hope our ideas and local resource list is helpful for you!

So far we’ve:

• Removed the carpet to expose the floorboards, which will be polished with a natural linseed based wood oil. Floorboards don’t hold pollutants and allergens like carpet, new carpets and their glue often contain a number of harmful chemicals, and floorboards are easy to clean – no vacuum required!

• Reused materials where possible – wall panelling is being used as veneer, tiles will be given a new life in mosaics, concrete from the driveway will be cut up and used as garden paths.
  

• Opened up the wall between the kitchen and the lounge room to improve social activity around the preparation of vibrant, healthy food.

The Total Environment Centre has produced a great  'Safer Solutions Guide to Renovations' at http://www.safersolutions.org.au . There's also a fantastic manual for renovating and building sustainable homes at  http://www.greenhouse.gov.au/yourhome/technical/index.htm.

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Green Power for a Green Future

Let the wind blow because today we’ve gone 100% Green Power! By joining more than 500,000 Australian homes and businesses that support Green Power, we’re supporting the development of exciting renewable energy projects like solar, wind, and wave. Perhaps Wollongong could be the first Green Powered city???

Check out our article on Green Power for more info.

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The Adventure Begins!

And so our adventure in urban sustainability begins! A cute little 1950's commission house, a good-size north/north-west sloping block with few trees...sure there's a huge swimming pool and a garage that could be a second house, and the previous owners had a love affair with concrete to rival our love affair with sustainable living and sharing home grown organic food, but haven't we got plans! A healthy and eco friendly home, vibrant organic vegetable gardens, a grove of subtropical fruit trees, ponds, rainwater tanks, grapes growing up the back veranda ... let the fun (or is that work?) begin!!!!!