After travelling around Australia WOOFING (working as volunteers on organic farms) and researching organic growing practices, Alison Mellor and Richard Walter came home and decided to start their own farm. In suburban Wollongong.

“We’d built up an idea of the kind of place we wanted to have and were interested in creating an urban food garden,” Alison says.

The raw materials

“A lot of people think of moving out to the country,” says Richard, “but we decided to buy a 1950s house on a typical suburban block. We wanted to demonstrate that you can live a sustainable life by retrofitting an old house.” While their block, at 923 square metres, is a larger than most, it’s the standard size for the old housing commission houses in their area.

When they bought it, the garden was pretty much all lawn and concrete with a swimming pool and a few small trees. “We spent three months renovating the house,” Richard says, “and in the evenings we worked on landscape design. We didn’t use consultants. We’d had a lot of experience and I’d done a lot of reading. It was time to put all that knowledge into our own plan.”

They checked their soil and discovered it ... “wasn’t too bad. We did some soil tests that told us what we needed to add to it to improve its structure and fertility.”

Goodbye lawn

The next stage was to get rid of all that lawn. “We hired a turf cutter, went over the whole block, ripped off the turf and retained the topsoil. We turned the turf upside down — it was kikuyu grass and, because it was so vigorous, we had to introduce some more vigorous groundcovers,” says Richard. “So we bought some additional topsoil and scattered large amounts of green manure crops — alfalfa and various kinds of clover — to out-compete the kikuyu and stabilise the soil. We did this at the end of spring and six weeks later cut it down.”

“That was the soil pretty well prepared for most of the block,” Alison adds, “except for the vegetable garden, which needed more emphasis.”