I moved back to South Australia in December, 2005, after being out of the state for the best part of 11 years. My marriage had ended a year or two earlier, and I’d ended up with one of our two rental properties. We’d only had it a few years, and it was bare-bones to say the least. We got a great deal at the time, and ironically I think it was due to the vendor’s marriage breaking down. Either way, it was a big house on a decent sized block, but the yard was largely unfinished. It didn’t have all of the fences or weather strips (concrete paths) finished, the front yard was an uninterrupted rectangle of grass, and the unfinished parts in the back, which was most of it, was covered in about 10 tonnes of white marble chip.

I had started looking for houses in the country pretty much as soon as I moved home. In the five years I was stuck in that suburban house we looked at many, many country homes, we completely revamped the garden, and in some cases revamped it three times over, and we also discovered permaculture, which helped shape our gardening philosophy, and ultimately our self-sufficiency ethos. This part of the blog tells those stories…

After the first front yard make over…