A Lifestyle Block XXXXXXXXXX By MaryAnne Gaylor, Boyanup, WA. By xxxxxxxxx, xxxxxxxxx, xxx.
MaryAnne has utilised her generous sized block to create a wildlife refuge and a productive food garden, and is delighted with the results. Over time I have transformed my block to provide a safe haven for wildlife like quendas (southern brown bandicoots), lizards, butterflies, possums, visiting waterfowl, beneficial insects, birds, and my poultry. I have a half-hectare block of land one street over from a main highway in a little town in WA’s glorious south-west. I live in a weatherboard house with a verandah along three sides and a carport re-purposed into an outside room with an added storeroom built across the former entrance. I’ve just turned 75. The spirit is very willing, but the body is getting tired. getting established
I bought the property 25 years ago and I am still renovating the house and establishing the land as a habitat and multipurpose garden. The block is roughly 120m long by 40m wide, and flat until about halfway in, where it slopes down to the dry creek bed and then slopes up to the back fence, creating a little valley. It’s part of a natural wetland and in the cooler months, there is a natural rainwater runoff from the town creates a watercourse through the little valley, which feeds into the river nearby. The original owners built a bridge across the middle as the winter stream can become a raging river 12m wide on the odd occasion. The previous owner planted many trees. Some have blown down, providing mulch, firewood and stand-alone cut pieces of trunk to create internal fencing. You’ve heard of Stonehenge. In the middle of my block there is Treetrunkhenge.
Upcycled corrugated iron vegetable cubes.
The previous owner shared with me an interest in permaculture and planted a diverse mix of timber trees, a now huge white mulberry, fruit trees, native trees, exotics and several mountain ash trees, which may grow above 90m high in the future. Now 29 years old, they are halfway there and the black cockatoos, pink and grey galahs, white cockatoos and another 48 species of birds thank her for starting the ball rolling on a completely cleared block of land. G R A S S
18 R O O T S
I thank her for the cooler temperature in the middle of the block in my ‘forest’, but the big fellas shed bark twice a year as they grow, and drop twigs, branches and huge limbs over everything else, so it’s a lot of work to collect it all. I turn some into firewood, and collect long, good-sized branches or limbs to build fences and edging around beds, stacking them on top of each other horizontally. Much of the collected material has to be burnt in the permitted bonfire months.
