We met as Ph.D. students 16 years ago and from that time we knew we'd buy a piece of land somewhere, someday and build an eco-house and grow a big food garden and eat well together. Along the way, we have belonged to 3 community gardens, 2 in Australia and 1 in Seattle where we lived for a year.
In 1999, we bought our dream piece of land in Tasmania. It is 8 acres of ancient creek-bottom - sandy-silt with a reasonable amount of organic matter - that had been grazed by cattle for the previous 25 years.
We built 2 temporary gardens on this land while we were building our strawbale, passive-solar house. Both of these were not very successful probably because we were still quite inexperienced gardeners. Eventually, we settled on the site, just to the east of our house, of our orchard and garden. We planted our trees, fenced them in with an almost-possum-proof fence and planted vegetables in a few raised beds at the northern end (this is the southern hemisphere).
Over the years, our vegetable garden has grown to about 400 square metres. Late in 2007, we decided that we needed to expand the vegetable section. So, we moved trees in the winter of 2008 and cleared an opening in the middle of the orchard (the picture shows the setup as it is right now) that we could cultivate with our newly aquired BCS two-wheel tractor (more on this later).
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