Growing Sovereignty: Tending to our Acre

What we're doing on/with/for Our Land, and a bit of subconscious reprogramming

Two turnips grown by us in our kitchen garden.

In February I got married!

And on the day after our honeymoon, I drove to an Ashram for a two-week residential permaculture design course. It seemed like a good decision at the time. And it was! It was great fun. It made gardening into even more of a spiritual experience than I already knew it was.

I had decided that with my time off from study this year, I would do things that I actually want to do. And in doing so, figure out what I like.

It seems silly to have to figure out what you like. But I realised that having pushed myself in my studies for so long, I had started to believe subconsciously that I must struggle, and that I therefore couldn’t just do something for fun because I love it. Since becoming aware of this subconscious belief, I feel I have a responsibility to myself to change it into something better. So I’m allowed to be happy, the reminder on my phone says each day at 10am. And I’m starting to believe it. 2024 is the year of doing things I like.

A big part of that is setting up our home and land. I love it.

After my course at the Ashram (which was excellent), we moved all our things up from Geelong to Beaufort with the help of parents and parents-in-law. And then we got to work.

My husband and my dad making short work of the gums, and chopping some into circles for me to make the stepping-stone path of my dreams.

First, the three big cypress trees beside the house needed to come down. The arborists made short work of them, and we had firewood and woodchip. The trees were a fire hazard so close to the house, and were shading the whole front yard so we wouldn’t have been able to plant anything. Plus, they made the soil acidic — definitely had to go. We had the three gums in the backyard taken down too, as they were also very close to the house and therefore also fire hazards (with the same/similar high oil content, and lots of dry bark hanging off them). Their roots were interfering with the septic system as well. They are now chopped up into firewood and the smaller parts were made into woodchip, which has circulated back into the land through our use of it on garden beds, for landscaping, and for starting the orchard!

Red acre cabbage, turnips and celery growing happily in one of the raised beds in our kitchen garden.

Another of the first jobs was to build our kitchen garden. We had accumulated a generous bounty of Bunnings gift cards as wedding presents, so we cleaned the Ballarat Bunnings out of their Birdies raised beds (over a few weekends) and put ten of them in a north-facing corner beside the house. We built up the beds with logs, sticks, side-of-the-road manure, garden soil bought in from the local supplier, and lucerne mulch from my Grandad. It was a big job putting together all those beds and filling them, and we’re starting to see the rewards now — last week I got to cook with three heads of broccoli we’d grown ourselves! Might not seem like much, but to two growers who dream of growing 90%+ of their own veg, it’s a small starting victory.

The kitchen garden at the start of winter, when it was still bare.

One of the beds the other day when we sowed beetroot and parsnip. Already growing are lettuce, peas, coriander, celery and cornflowers.

The broccoli I cooked with the other day, grown in our own kitchen garden.

The market garden rows, with cover crops.

We also started to work out our market garden rows. We want to be able to not only grow veg for ourselves, but grow some for the benefit of the community. The rows are built in a similar layering manner to the raised beds, but without the hard rotting stuff on the bottom (i.e. logs and sticks). We tried our best to break up the clay soil and rake off the quartz, put cardboard down to stop any grass/weeds coming through, then used varying layers of straw, manure and soil to create the rows. We planted out a cover crop on half of them and we’ve just terminated¹ that cover crop and added more soil and mulch layering. Building soil takes time and effort, we’re learning. But it’s so worth it. I can already taste summer’s tomatoes in my dreams.

It was actually really well-timed that we moved in before Winter and had the dormant season to lay all the groundwork before we really get into the proper growing come Spring (soon!).

The market garden rows as we first made them.

Bread made with sourdough discard. And our kitchen garden out the window.

I have learnt that I like cooking. I like making bread, and I like keeping my house tidy. I like arranging flowers and I like growing them even more, I like working hard outside, I like sowing, I like grocery shopping (crazy), I like researching how to build things for the garden and which varieties of things to grow. So the ‘what do I even like?’ question is answering itself. I like this. My life.

All this liking has got me questioning whether to even continue my law degree at all…

Me with a very special apple tree we just planted.

Then came the trees. Apples, pears, nectarines, peaches, apricots, a hazelnut and a chestnut, a cherry and an almond and a quince. I got a job at a local nursery and it has kickstarted my new passion for buying more trees than I should. It is such an exciting luxury to have enough land to be able to plant them all! The orchard is currently scaled to 19 trees: two rows of seven and a row of five between them. I’m pretty certain it will expand, though. We want to have a little olive grove (maybe six trees on the south side of the orchard) and I can’t seem to stop accumulating apple trees… I have plans to add a a fig tree and another quince, among others, to line a future driveway too.

I am amazed by the fact that we have an orchard. That soon enough we’ll be able to walk through it and pick enough fruit to eat and preserve. That we designed it and put it together. That the world today is so bountiful that we can easily access a diverse variety of fruit-bearing trees from across the globe for a small investment (we spent less than $30 per tree), assemble them all together, take care of them and get what one might call free food.

Next: the cottage garden. Or, what will be the cottage garden!

Since we moved in right before winter, there wasn’t time to establish any plants properly before the growing season slowed to a halt. So we landscaped. First we sheet mulched the triangle-shaped front lawn to suppress the grass, and then we added soil and woodchip mulch on top. Made a little path lined with quartz rocks plucked from the field (there are millions), and created a few teepees with sticks, for future sweet peas and other climbers to grow up (plus, the structures deter the kangaroos — slightly). Within the triangle, I wanted to make a circular, more ornamental garden in the style of the Diggers Club gardens at Heronswood. In the very middle of the circular garden ‘petals’, lined with more quartz, is the place we buried our departed kitty friend Claudio several weeks ago. I’m going to plant jonquil and daffodil bulbs there so that the circle will bloom at the anniversary of his death each year. He is the centrepiece of the cottage garden, and it feels right to honour him by creating a beautiful forever resting-place for him. The growing and cycling garden life around him will be a constant reminder of the life-death-life cycle.

Claudio, and the cottage garden under construction in the background.

My vision is for the cottage garden to be an overflowing bounty of flowers, herbs, medicinal plants and some of the more ornamental vegetables (think fennel’s decorative foliage, ornamental kale, cherry tomatoes), and for the space to be not only beautiful but practical, useful, fruitful. Cut flowers, dinner ingredients, a great view, pollinator heaven, a space for future small people to play (and big people — being in the garden feels like playing to me!). A bit of a jungle, but still curated. A living immune-booster. A little bit breathtaking and a little bit wild.

A huge part of why we’re doing all this is sovereignty. Yes, we both love gardening! But we both love independence from flawed systems just as much. Building resilience. Creating something on our private property that is just the way we like it and that outsiders (the government) can’t touch. Expanding our knowledge of healing food — food-as-medicine — and growing it ourselves, doing our best to stay out of the ‘health’ system. Doing everything here for the benefit of a small handful of people: us, our future family, and our community. Untouched by any regulation but our own imagination’s limits; self-governing. And for the glory of God.

Me & my bestie, the currant plant!

For now, I’ll leave you with a silly picture of me being photographed with someone I’m clearly a huge fan of: a black currant.

So in the short space of five months, we’ve created our market garden rows, set up the landscaping and soil foundations for our cottage garden, planted an orchard, built a kitchen garden from scratch that we’re now harvesting from, and accumulated useful knowledge about this new climate we’ve moved into. This is just the start!

We’ve got a lot more planned for this place. Future endeavours include learning how to espalier apples and pears, organising spring and summer planting, selling our produce at markets, installing tanks and putting up anti-roo fencing, building the micro flower farm, creating a farm stand, building a couple of polytunnels… and so on.

Later on, we plan to build a shed and and create a new driveway up to the back of the block, where we might put a tiny home beside the orchard. Come and stay!

Thanks for reading all of this. If you want to follow along, we can be found on Instagram at @beaufort.sovereigngrowers. :)

1. ‘Terminated’ is the terminology, but sounds very grim. I promise no cruelty took place! Terminating a cover crop just involves killing the plants and returning them back to the soil, where their decomposition adds nutrients to improve the soil quality.