Wednesday 14 September 2011

The story so far.....

We live in an absolutely beautiful part of Australia, in between Yass and Canberra in the south eastern part of New South Wales, smack bang in the middle of award winning cool climate wine country (that wasn't by accident either!). Our little oasis is the hamlet of Murrumbateman.

How we came to be living here is not really much of a story but rather a snapshot on how major decisions are usually made in our household.

After living all over the country and moving house more times than we can remember, returning home to Canberra from a weekend away we spied a sign to a land sale, followed the signs to have a look, called the Agent on the spot and voila! We were going to be fully fledged land owners!

It wasn't just a spur of the moment decision, we actually had been discussing finding a place of our own for quite a while (we had been renting up until this point). We wanted some space to grow some veggies like we both did as kids, and also for our kids to have space to run around and kick a footy, and play, yell and scream at the top of their lungs without having to worry about what the neighbour six houses over might complain about. But the crunch really came when we discovered the trampoline we bought the kids wasn't actually going to fit in the backyard. And if we did manage to put a swing set in (which wouldn't fit with the trampoline, it would have to be one or the other) the kids would touch the house going forward and hit the fence on the swing back. This was just not going to do.

So three years on, considerable stress of building and moving house whilst pregnant with twins over, we are gradually realising our dreams of living on our little acreage. After initially just wanting to grow veggies, this move has turned out to be so much more, and has opened our eyes beyond what we thought was being good environmental citizens such as being a good recycler and trying to grow some herbs in pots, to attempting to grow all (OK well a large proportion of it anyway!) fruit and veggies, installing solar panels, living solely off tank water, reducing chemicals in our household, building and using a greenhouse, planting plants for a purpose rather than planting them 'just because' and being more frugal and more conscious of our purchases rather than just doing what we had always done...because that's just the way we did things! We are now even looking at keeping bees!

Hope you find our travels to 'somewhat' sustainability useful!

MM xo

1 comment:

  1. What a journey so far. I look forward to reading more...

    ReplyDelete