A Lifestyle Block

By MaryAnne Gaylor, Boyanup, WA.

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

On the other side of my street there is suburbia and what a contrast: houses and duplexes on suburban-size blocks with human inhabitants. Over the years most have had wandering cats, barking and wandering dogs, noise and other pollutants, and with lawns or weedy front yards.

As the third owner here, I’ve improved the basic little house, with renovations, alterations, additions such as double-glazed windows, roller shutters over windows, ceiling insulation, solar rooftop panels (perhaps battery storage in future), and a brand new and very different kitchen and bathroom.

The bath is now one of three bath frog ponds. When the single toilet died, its base became a plant holder in the back garden, and I enjoy the new ‘raised’ toilet in the new bathroom. Good for the bionic knees which replaced the old ones. Climbing geraniums grow out of an old washing machine and across a metal spring bed-frame, while Lebanese cucumbers grow in a laundry trough by the poultry pen.

The house has mains water, and sewerage was connected in 2003. A bore was installed in 2003 with 170m of underground 40mm tubing, utilising nine outlets with 18 taps to take water all over the block. I closed off the outlet under the lemon scented gum when the tree dropped a massive limb on it, breaking off the tap. I’ve just replaced the bore’s pump.

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My chosen lifestyle has provided so many different opportunities.

I have lowered my carbon footprint and I support local businesses, continually try to reduce my amount of ‘stuff’.

I’ve removed all the lawn and replanted to provide habitat for other living creatures to create a safe haven and a place for interdependence.

The garden changes and evolves. I used to have six rotating vegetable patches. Rabbits visit occasionally, wild ones, black ones, white ones, so I have cut scrounged roofing iron sheets into pieces about 50cm long, and punched holes in the edges to join 4 pieces with tie wire to create cube-shaped gardens on the ground.

I rake up truckloads of leaves, tear newspaper into strips, rip up plain cardboard, paper bags and add anything else on offer for compost. I create layers of these materials around each fruit tree, add chicken manure pellets, all purpose fertiliser and blood and bone. A similar mix goes in the metal cubes. I feed the worms that gather with vegetable and fruit scraps, and the fruit trees thrive.

In the cubes I add a 20–30cm layer of my own ‘good’ soil on top and then sow seeds for vegetables, using companion plants, adding white, yellow and purple flowering plants to encourage pollinators and grow herbs at the base around the cubes from dug up bits with roots.

I grow basil and tomato seeds together in a cube with spring onions and chives nearby. Ducks and chickens help to aerate the soil as they rummage for worms and bugs.

To avoid going shopping, which I hate, I stock up one to two years in advance with everything I need. I had 200-plus toilet rolls in the storeroom when covid arrived on our doorstep.

I repair, reuse, repurpose and recycle. The stainless steel bowl from a washing machine became a pot for a dwarf pear tree.

Nine dedicated lizard, bird, butterfly and bee-friendly drinkers sit on top of old fenceposts wired together or on top of slabs of trunk from cut-down trees, stacked on top of each other. A convection microwave oven’s turntable was ‘glued’ to the flat end of an old fence post with a big pot plant saucer fitted snugly on top of it.

I keep clothes until they die; old clothes become ‘wearing out on the block clothes’. I am not interested in fashion, I mostly source what I need from op shops.

To create a garden inexpensively I make new plants from cuttings, strikes, leaf propagation, layering, divisions and collected saved seeds. I regularly dig up and create multiple new plants from one bought plant if I build up the soil at its base for roots to grow. The plants are used for food, companion planting, enjoyment, habitat and to be waterwise with species like succulents.

I grow small and huge succulents and cacti (some are taller than the house) from pieces sourced from existing plants.

There’s a mix of groundcovers, small, medium and tall shrubs, exotics, cottage garden plants, herbs and vegetables, often planted together, and dwarf fruit trees provide easy access for my old bones.

To provide for the many different environments and interdependence I have a total of seven ponds in use: three repurposed baths, three children’s paddling pools and a big liner pond that holds about 5000lt. After the first year I had to start all over again with the liner pond because of a rich bloom of algae. I counted the buckets of water I removed and gave many plants a drink. It’s been naturally crystal clear for 24 years.

All ponds are regularly topped up with bore water, and I have to remove leaves from the big pond as the biggest bay tree in the southern hemisphere grows by the side of it.

The chooks need clean water containers everywhere. Ducks turn every water container into mud within seconds, including their paddling pools, cleaning their bills when rummaging for worms and bugs, and all the muddy water is reused on plants. Two former smaller liner pools have become bog gardens.

I’ve been vegan for 20 years but provide a home for poultry whom

I neither eat nor exploit. My geese were here for 20 years. Pekin bantams have been the chickens of choice over the years and my five year old Indian Runner ducks are delightful pets. I erected 50mm x 50mm weldmesh to a height of 1.1m alongside maybe 90m of the existing post and wire fencing to keep them on site and to prevent the ducks from swimming onto the neighbouring properties. They have a great time and wild waterfowl from the nearby river will often visit during the months when water runs through the properties. Some wild ducks have even produced offspring here.

All poultry are run free range, with plenty of shade and cover. They are protected at night by a totally enclosed 10m x 3m homemade pen with ‘rooms’ known as Chooky Poo Hilton, which were created from old roofing iron and Colorbond fencing sheets with repurposed weldmeshenclosed areas at each end, where plants also grow.

Another totally enclosed pen is nearer the house that can be used if a tree falls onto the bigger pen.

I use internal weldmesh fencing and gates to close off the various very developed garden areas at times. The chooks also have access to back garden areas behind and to the side of the house, which are heavily planted with a variety of plants. This is an area of about 1200m 2, enclosed by Colorbond fencing with various access gates, that is known as Compound MaryAnne. It was originally created to be a safe area from wandering cats. It’s very private and provides security too.

It all works so well, with occasional dramas, like the visit from a beautiful brown goshawk in the big pen saying hello to the two ducks who were in one of their two children’s paddling pools that are in use during the warm months of the year. I heard a new duck call that day.

I intend to leave here in a box. T