Once Upon a Time…..
….we lived the typical suburban life working 40+ hours a week in stressful land development jobs contributing our professional skills to suburban sprawl, unaffordable housing and other projects that we didn’t really believe in. We spent the whole week looking forward to the weekend but we needed the jobs to pay the bills. It didn’t feel good. We couldn’t imagine living like this for another 30+ years until we could retire – did it really have to be like this???? Surely life is too short to spend so many years simply living for the weekend?
So we started to consider other options. Was there a way that we could reduce our bills and work less? And even better, be in control of the way we were earning money? After ticking off the easy things like cheaper phone plans it was time to tackle the two biggest costs in our budget – the mortgage and the food bill!
It seemed simple, all we had to do was downsize the house to downsize the mortgage and then start growing all our own food but as with most things, it wasn’t quite that simple. Especially if we wanted to do so in a low maintenance and environmentally friendly way.
After years of research and trying out different ideas, we finally came across the two things that would finally present a solution that we could get excited about. Firstly, we came across the Tiny House movement. We had always lived in smaller houses and enjoyed spending a lot of our time outdoors so could easily see how tiny house living would suit us and allow us to downsize our mortgage at the same time. Then by happy coincidence, while looking at tiny house videos on YouTube, we came across the concept of Permaculture. From there, things started to fall into place. Permaculture encompassed everything we were looking for – low cost housing, environmentally friendly, healthy local food and even the sense of community that had been missing from our suburban life.
The Dream
Now we could see the picture in our heads. Find a piece of land with enough room to grow all the food we could want. Build a tiny house on it. Cover it in food forests. Quit our stressful jobs. Live happily ever after.
Of course none of this could happen over night. We spent a long time looking for a property that ticked all the right boxes and even now we’ve had the land for a few years, we are still in the process of trying to finish building our ‘forever’ tiny house and establish our food forests. We are making progress though and even combined, now work less than 40 hours a week.
The long term vision is still a few years from reality, probably decades to be completely honest. Our site is an old forestry block complete with old rotting stumps. It is prone to erosion with damage that has only been made worse by periodic cattle grazing. Our vision is simple but by no means easy. We want to regenerate the site and leave it far better than how we found it. We want to build soil and native habitat while still using it productively to generate food. Our house will be off grid – solar power, rain water and wood fire heating. We won’t be using sprays to control weeds and we won’t be using artificial fertilisers to grow our crops. Our food forest will encourage native birds to make it their home, feed the bees year round and be full of a diverse selection of heirloom fruits, nuts and vegetables.
Ultimately, it will be an example to others of what is possible.
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spreading the word
Working in an industry where profit is key and innovative ideas seem to arrive at snails pace, while also personally searching for housing and a lifestyle that the market was reluctant to provide was frsutrating to say the least. We wanted solutions but were professionally contributing to the status quo at the same time.
We were lucky that our professional skills gave us insight and opportunity that others don’t often have but we have also learned a huge amount along the way. From fine tuning greywater systems and building our own tiny house to discovering the likes of syntropic agroforestry there is barely a week that goes by where we don’t learn something new – often the hard way.
Knowing how difficult our journey has been and the years of hard work, research, and trial and error it has taken to get to this point, we really appreciate the knowledge we have gained and now intend to share as much of that knowledge as possible so that others can tackle the same journey with more confidence and less drama.