Goal Setting

When Kim and I decided to sell Anabank and purchase a new property, we had a rough idea of what we wanted and so started looking online first. We soon realised that before we could get serious about looking at potential farms, we really needed to work out what we wanted. It's not until you actually sit down and reflect, and have a focus question, that you can really map out some ideas.

Back in mid July, we set our selves the task of answering the following questions:

Where/What and How do we want to be and live in 10 years time? And what do we need in a property and in our life to get there and to enable us to enjoy the rest of our lives.

So, sitting out in the sun, with some contemplative music playing, we both wrote some stuff - I wrote a lot, Kim wrote a little - however, we were very closely aligned.  This post is some of my goals, and now that we have our property, some bits may not fit, and that's okay. The goal won't change too much, just they way I get there might. 

We will have a small home, with a big kitchen. A home where people are comfortable to take a seat and just "be".  Grand kids will be able to run in and out and sit and a cuppa and a snack. Maybe leaving the big family meals to the boys to organise! A thriving veggie garden that is half wild with flowers, herbs and veggies. Where strawberries spread everywhere! When the grand kids come, they can wander through the garden eating whatever they can find.

A food forest for fruit and nut trees, with asparagus, sunchokes, sweet potatoes and pumpkins.

Chickens for meat and eggs. Sheep and goats and pigs too......

Smoke house setup, as well as a meat preserving room and cheese cellar.

A designated meat processing area - also to use for preserving and drying the surplus from the garden.

Our house maybe small, but I'd like a tiny house or two for accommodation for family and friends - The house is always open for friends and family to visit.

Property - I don't care about the size, as long as I can run a few milking cows and all the other animals. I'm happy to be bigger so that Kim can have a cattle herd.

Regen Ag - Mark Shepard's Restoration Agriculture (read more here) with some multi species cropping. If they boys want to, they can grow cash crops, otherwise I'm happy to just have rows of mixed trees - fruit, nut, legume, timber, deciduous trees, in between pasture to rotate animals through.

It will be a healthy, vibrant, food growing paradise, that we can encourage other people to follow in our example. We'll create community and celebrate life. I will be happy and relaxed and content.

What to look for? 

• Good land - run down isn't a problem
• A plain house or and old house, not a modern one
• An existing orchard, preferably with nut trees as well as fruit.
• Old buildings, wooden yards.
• Some cleared land, but also some forest for harvesting timber and/or firewood.
• An hour from the Sunshine Coast.

Serenity fits the bill pretty well, but there's going to be a lot of things I want to do soon. We've told ourselves that we won't do any major work for a year.....that's going to be tough! We will however, spend plenty of time planning, observing and making changes to said plans! We are lucky that there is already a reasonable amount of paddocks, so we can rotationally graze the cattle, although the water infrastructure is not as good as we'd like, so that's tempting to do straight away. There's a good chook pen, but I'd like to make changes that allows them to free range better. There is an orchard with nut trees (and wild macadamias), although I want to plant so many more trees. The goats and sheep are in movable electric fences, which we'll continue with - still need to source some pigs.......

The yards don't have a good milking setup, and while I'd like to have a dedicated space, that will have to wait. 

The property has been over cleared and is very hilly (steep!!). We will eventually do some tree planting on contour - using NSF (natural sequence farming) principles, and combine this with restoration agriculture principles. 

The house garden and orchard are pretty and neat and tidy. There's lots of lawn to mow. We need to plan how we can better manage this and turn it into a permaculture paradise so that we don't have to work so hard keeping it tidy! There is lots of flowers which I love, as I've never had the time to have a flower garden!

We got our small and old house! 

No old buildings, but a very big shed and storage container. I was actually photographing the kangaroo - the first and only one I've seen on the place so far.

Theres two rows of pines that have been planted (this photo and the next were from before it rained - it's very different now.)

Some of the cows - we bought some with the place. We definitely need to get some trees planted, but that will come in time.

The focus for the short term, is to plant out some of the trees that we've already got and to get a vegetable garden pumping. This has some challenges as the gardens around the house are basically straight clay. The house has been put onto a dug out hill and the gardens and orchard have just been covered with hay and planted, so there isn't very good drainage for my veg and too much drainage in the orchard. We're encouraging weeds as they are building soil (well, that's my story anyway). 

Sorry for the long post.......