Our plans for this patch
We have big plans for our patch, tempered only by the fact we want to establish a lifestyle with the cash proceeds from the sale of our house and any money we earn in the meantime. Put simply, we will go at the project until we have reached our reserve cash limit, then its back to work to earn enough to complete the project.
We already know we don’t have all the cash on hand to finish which is a nice reality to be honest. “Can’t spend what we don’t have” budgeting at its purest.
Our immediate plans are to re vegetate certain areas, mainly as windbreaks as the wind up here can be severe. Once this is done we will establish a large woodlot, which will be used to grow timber for firewood and perhaps structural uses such as fence posts later.
We are about to put before council plans for a shed of 15 x 6 metres, 9 x 6 of this enclosed for a workshop with a 6×6 carport for sheltering the cars in wild weather. Off the shed we will have 50 000 litres of rainwater storage. This storage will provide our legally mandated 22 000 litres water storage for bushfire fighting and that leaves 28 000 litres of storage for the green house and vegetable patch and for us to use during the build. These tanks need to have hardware compatible for CFS (Country Fire Service) trucks to take water from if needed to fight fires.
This shed also means we need a proper driveway placed close to it. Again, there is mandated widths and access roads for fire fighting equipment and vehicles that I need to carefully research before we go ahead with that. The shed is only 20 metres from the road boundary so it won’t be a huge imposition to make a path for trucks to the shed tanks.
Down the hill there will be a green house with attached chook shed and fenced veggie patch. All this will be designed with permaculture in mind so each area will have multiple uses other than growing vegetables or housing chickens.
Running off this area will be the house, with orchard linked to the chook shed and vegetable patch to allow the chooks access into the orchard.
The house is going to be large, 28 x 9 metres of actual living space with a further 2.4 metre wide verandah right around the perimeter. If I claim the size of the house like your typical real estate agent does, the house will be around 41 squares in size, or 4110 square feet or 453 square metres.
Here’s a rough mud map of what we want to do in the paddock closest to the road. This is all proposed, currently the block is used for grazing and is a blank canvas. One thing you will notice is lots of water tanks, we want to have 150 000 litres of storage.
The angled boundary is actually an easement containing a buried water pipe for a property a further kilometre away. They were smart enough to place this just inside the paddock fence, making it easy to find.
There is currently a woodlot just past this easement, however it is not large and it sits in the lowest point where a dam would be perfect so as we cut this lot it will be with no view to regenerating the trees. The woodlot we establish as in the mud map above will be cut as a regenerating woodlot.
The fall from the road boundary to this easement is approximately 40 metres, with a plateau where the shed is and also where the house is proposed to be located. The shed will need 5 minutes on a bobcat to level where it will go. We’ll need to cut approximately half the house base into the plateau up to 50 cm deep and fill the other half a similar depth.