My name's Cara, I'm originally from England and I currently live in a northern suburb of Adelaide in South Australia with my husband and two teenage daughters. Ideally we’d love to have an acreage for a smallholding, but that's not going to happen any time soon, so I figured we may as well try and make the most of what we currently have, which is 185sq.m (2000sq.ft) of growing space which were calling our Miniature Smallholding.
I started sharing our journey just over a year ago via social media. On Instagram we are , on Facebook and YouTube we are The Miniature Smallholding.
Although we bought or house 7 years ago we've only really started trying to make it more productive over the last three years. Like many households gardens it didn't exactly have fertile soil and was filled with a lot of rubble from the house build and leveling. Chickens have played a big part in helping to increase fertility and every year we do a little bit better growing things.
The other big challenge, especially coming from a cold wet country, has been growing in the near dessert like conditions of a South Australian Summer. Again, each year we have learnt a little more and improved.
Plants which don't feed us or aren't medicinal have slowly been replaced as we don't want to waste water on ornamentals. Every available space is slowly being turned over to food for us or the animals. As we are growing without chemicals I've taken a more laid back view of pests and weeds; basically I've renamed them animal feed! When collecting bugs at night off the veggies I'm harvesting them for the chickens and quail. When pulling up weeds I'm harvesting them for the rabbits and chickens. I've even started learning which weeds we can eat! Not sure I'm ready to start eating bugs though...
Preserving our produce, when we actually have a surplus, is still a work in progress. I've experimented with a bit of canning and drying so far. Freezing still seems to end up being the default though.
Anyway, hopefully I can share our experiences and maybe even inspire a few people to see how much they can produce in their own backyards.