Suburban farmers for 25 years in the western suburbs of Sydney Australia

“The choko (sechium edule) is a real survival food, prolific and easy to grow, with multiple uses (although they can be a bit bland unless spiced up, unlike this site!). They do, of course, grow on vines not trees but we have an old orange tree which the choko vines grow up every year and this has been christened the choko tree. Thus the choko provides sort of a symbol for the intent of this site.”

Nevin and Linda Sweeney’s website is named “Under the Choko Tree”

By Nevin and Linda Sweeney
Website includes 161 articles on their experiences.

Excerpt:

Back in the late ‘70s I packed up my new bride and set off for the wilds of…………….. Western Sydney! Well it was a little bit wild back then. The estate had no shops and no public transport but the housing and the loans were cheap and so we found ourselves on a 600 m2 block with an east-west facing, brick veneer, 3 bedroom house.

After many threats to head bush we are still here, concentrating on living as self sufficiently and sustainably as we can in the suburban environment. Here are some of the things we are up to –

We grow as much of our own veggies as we can organically, using open pollinated seed, our own where we can. We make seed rasing mix using worm castings, sand and cocopeat, once the seedlings are up we pot them on into cardboard tubes and then plant them out when they are ready. I have developed a spreadsheet that follows a two weekly sow/pot on/plant out rotation. We have a small greenhouse that we use to raise seedlings and grow a bit of out of season stuff during winter. During summer we have a shade “cupboard” that we use to raise the seedlings in.

I get in grass hay from a local supplier and let it get worked over by the chooks and then use it as mulch. We have 13 beds, each about 1m x 2 metres. We fertilise using a chook tractor which is designed to sit directly over a veggie bed. The chook tractor spends tow weeks on each bed twice a year. The chook tractor has 4 chooks in it and we can get up to 4 eggs a day but we also have the “Retirement Village”, a shed where the non-productive chooks still do meaningful work by digging over the hay and turning it into mulch.

We also have fruit trees – a mandarin; lemon, lemonade and orange tree, half a dozen bananas in a banana circle, a mulberry tree, native plum, olive, feijoa and two lime trees (one Tahitian, one Kaffir) and more recently a couple of apples, a nectarine and macadamia nut. We have a carob tree which we have had for many years and it flowered for the first time a couple of years ago, but it turned out to be male, so no carob pods for us and I am just considering taking it out.

We have two recycled steel bathtubs, one which we use as a fishpond but also grows water chestnuts and an similar plant called Arrow with decorative arrow shaped leaves. The other houses our worm farm which helps us process our veggie waste and provides castings to make the seed rasing mix with.

More on their website here. Be sure to take the time to dig deep into the links on their site. The authors share lots of their experiences.