Bulli urban farm | August 20, 2024 | Illawarra Mercury
How a Bulli family transformed an empty backyard to grow 500kg of food a year.
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00:00So my partner and I and our family of two kids moved from Sydney about four and a half
00:10years ago and when we moved here there was nothing on this block of land so it's about
00:17a thousand square metres, an old department of housing house and there was one tree in
00:22the front yard and everything else was just grass from wall to wall.
00:26So over the last four and a half years we have established this garden.
00:31Last year I calculated the inputs and outputs of the garden and in 12 months we produced
00:37approximately 500 kilos of food.
00:39It was a really busy year for us, I was working full time and studying full time.
00:43My partner was very busy as well, we have two kids and so the time was not something
00:50that we had a lot of and I calculated that to get that 500 kilos of food required less
00:58than three hours a week of our time and also didn't require much money.
01:04We use a lot of circularised resources in terms of nutrients for the farm, so chicken
01:09poo, seaweed, horse poo from nearby horse farms, mulch from mowing the lawn.
01:20As a result we don't need to add a huge amount of other inputs, nutrient inputs, so the cost
01:26of running the garden was about $300 or $400 to get that output.
01:31It's definitely a way that if you have access to land, which I know is a privilege and you
01:37live in the Illawarra Shoal Haven you can produce a whole lot of food to feed your household.
01:50For more information visit www.illawarra.com