Bulli urban farm | August 20, 2024 | Illawarra Mercury - video Dailymotion

How a Bulli family transformed an empty backyard to grow 500kg of food a year.

Transcript

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