SE Queensland | bunyagully

There are time when the procrastinating has to stop and you just have to start again!

Four years ago I started to record our plans and progress in setting up our place in the Sunshine Coast hinterland. There were a few posts – not really enough to provide a reasonable overview – and then they stopped altogether.

What happened? The short, and easy, answer is that we have been busy. It is, however, all a matter of priorities and the fact is, while I have frequently thought that something going on would be of interest to others in the same situation and worth a post, I simply haven’t given it the priority it needed to create a blog post. So I have changed the priorities.

A quick summary of where we are now. I left off with the construction of a causeway on our (then) new 500 metre driveway/road. The driveway/road did everything expected of it and, while it could probably do with a bit of work, it still performs its function. There is now a very comfortable and pretty stylish house set about halfway up the block on the side of the hill.

Looking down on the new house

There are a lot of stories that could roll out about that project but I will leave them to one side at the moment. Enough, for now, to note that it didn’t involve us in a tremendous amount of actual physical work (I sorted that by breaking my ankle when it looked like I might have to do a bit) but it did swallow up most of our time and interest for the best part of a year.

Contemplating the new house (broken ankle on show)

A key part of our plan for development of the block has been to use permaculture principles and operate organically. While there has been some action consistent with these principles, the actual development has been frustratingly slow. There are now a number of swales constructed across the contours of the hill below the house. These have been planted with a variety of fruit and nut trees, interspersed with some acacias and allocasuarinas. I intend to explain in more detail how and why this has been done at some stage but, in brief, the aim of the swales is to counter the effect of the heavy clay soils in the area by providing deeper top soil, better drainage and, at the same time, the best possible supply of water to the fruit trees.

Getting the levels right for the swales (hose and coloured water method)

The acacias and allocasuarinas are nitrogen fixers. Their roots will assist in fixing more nitrogen in the vicinity of the root systems of the fruit trees. Their pruned branches will be left to rot down on the swales, delivering further nitrogen to the swales. Over time, these interspersed trees may need to be removed completely to give the fruit and nut trees room to expand.

A dozen or so assorted citrus have been planted out in and area that has reasonable soil and also receives frost, whenever we get one here. We have spent a bit of time researching the appropriate chill factors for the various types of fruit trees we would like to have. If we have it right then there will be a pretty good supply of oranges, lemons, mandarins, yuzu and grapefruit at appropriate times of the year.

Citrus in foreground, house in the background and allocasuarinas on swales in between.

More swales will be developed specifically for avocados. These particular swales will provide deeper and better top soil and allow better drainage – conditions that avocados appear to enjoy. There will also be more other fruit trees planted. We have had a few losses in the first plantings and these need to be covered.

Next spring I intend to start planting out a bush food area with trees and shrubs. There are already some around but I am getting together a list of those that do well in these conditions.

Wildlife corridors are also under development. We have planted 300 trees using a Land for Wildlife grant this year. We planted over 250 last year, all natives endemic to the area, (but not with a grant from Land for Wildlife) but lost over a third of these. Lessons have been learnt. This year I have planted in autumn following, and during, good rain and I have used bio-degradable corflute type tree guards rather than the plastic ones I used last year.

Based on our experience of last year, we should have a better success rate with this approach. The plastic slip type tree guards were not sucessful in this environment. They seemed to overheat some of the seedlings and I could never spot the things from the tractor. The new ones are bright pink, made of stronger material and assist in establishing a suitable micro-climate for most of the trees I am planting. They are 3 times the cost of the earlier ones but reusable a few times.

Some of the reveg trees with their pink guards.

More reveg trees marching up the side of the gully.

Some equipment has come and some has gone. The East Wind tractor went to a new home – for a better price than I had thought I might get – and has been replaced by a slightly larger and, much more reliable Kubota. A Tree Popper has arrived and is being used frequently in weed removal. More on that in a later post. The old Simplicity mower has, possibly, come to the end of its useful life and has been replaced by a smaller Greenfield. There are now 2 brushcutters, his and hers.

The old tractor helped with the stabilising for this battered bank (which is actually steeper than it looks in the photo).

A new shed has been constructed, but, unfortunately, not yet completely finished. This will be a workshop for both of us and will have a section for home brewing and such things. Another shed will be built this year to house machinery and equipment. Two shipping containers are now in place up on the hill in striking distance of the house. These are for storage for us and the family.

Storage on the left and chooks on the right.

The only animals that we have – apart from the birds, wallabies, dingos, snakes, many, many small marsupials and the inevitable rats and mice – are chooks. There is now a Barnevelder rooster and a couple of Barnevelder hens along with a few of the crossbreed, commercial type ones we have had for a while. There will be more animals this year.

Not long after moving to the new house. The wallabies don’t need to wait for complete wildlife corridors.

Now there is a bit more green but no wallabies this morning.

The shed that we used to live in has changed. It is now fully insulated and lined with internal walls to create three bedrooms and a study, lots of lights and nice white paint. There are now more windows to let in light. A sky light is waiting its time to go in to assist in providing light, particularly during the winter. That shed has its own shed that incorporates a shipping container for lockable storage.

The big shed, aka our old house

We always had a thought that it might be possible to let the shed out to someone who could have a comfortable residence there and who would also keep an eye on the place while we travel. That has been a successful plan and we are now on the road again. Not for years this time, just a few months.

So it will be a while before there is a new post in this series. There will, however, be some posts as we move through Ireland, Greece, the United Kingdom and, just possibly another place or two. You can find those entries over at http://www.travelblog/slowfeet

Rainbow in the valley

Early morning looking over the dam

Same morning, same dam from bedroom this time

Sunset after the storm – looking across the valley

A road is only as good as the bit that fails. The most likely place for failure of our road is the main gully crossing. Well perhaps not fail exactly, more likely disappear. There are times when there is a great deal of water through there and a great risk that, left to its own devices, our causeway would disappear down the Mary River every time there is a flood. So, there needed to be concrete and fair bit of that.

I haven’t built a concrete causeway before and the rough estimate of the amount of concrete suggested that it might be sensible to see if we could get the job done by a contractor. Unfortunately, we ran into a problem we have encountered before in this part of the world. Finding a contractor capable and prepared to do the job was not possible. “Yeah, I’ll drop around tomorrow or the next day” is apparently code for “Look, I have enough work and I don’t need shitty little jobs where I can only pick up ten or twelve grand for two days work”. Talking to others in the area it seems that this isn’t something that just happens to newcomers. A bloke we were talking to recently spent 3 months finding a tiler.

Yet again, I became just a little irritated by people who give a commitment and don’t deliver and decided to do it myself.

The objectives for this causeway were pretty simple:

The running surface needs to be strong enough to carry a fully laden concrete truck without breaking up;
The ‘shoulders’, ‘skirts’ and ‘aprons’ – not sure if these are technical terms but I mean the bits on the sides and into the stream – need to be capable of withstanding a considerable force of water without breaking up and peeling away while maintaining the integrity of the running surface.

I wasn’t very concerned about looks although it is always nice if it looks OK.

I read a number of articles about how to build farm causeways and, while they provided some help I wasn’t really wasn’t much the wiser. I looked at causeways that seemed to work and tried to replicate the key elements. I should say that the basic formation of the causeway had been carried out by the contractor who constructed the road. We had a well formed causeway with 3 x 500mm ‘Black Brute’ pipes properly installed and covered with rock and road base. All that was required was concrete.

The plan was to, first, concrete the skirts and the aprons on both the up and down stream sides. There is a chance that we didn’t need the downstream cover to the same level as the upstream but I decided to put the same cover on both. The upstream apron was set into the stream bed 200mm. Reinforcing was placed in both skirts and aprons supported by 75mm chairs. Concrete at a minimum of 100mm thick was laid using a standard mix of 1 part GP cement, 3 parts 20mm drainage channel rock and 2 parts crusher dust (in lieu of sand). I kept the mix a little ‘stiff’ to assist in holding it in place on the sides of the causeway. The skirts and aprons took a little over 5 meters of concrete.

The running surface deserved a little more care and strength. I had intended to bring the skirts up to about 150mm to provide a bund wall that could be used in lieu of form work for the running surface. This didn’t pan out. I couldn’t really bring the skirts up that high and keep them strong. So I placed 150 mm form work for the running surface, laid builders plastic and reinforcing on a mixture of 75mm and 100mm chairs – with a few rocks after I ran out of chairs of either size.

I faced a decision at this stage. Bring in a truck or continue to mix by hand?

The150/160mm slab at an average of 3.6 x 18 meters was going to require 10 cubic meters of concrete. In this area the cost of 5 meters of concrete delivered was about $1,400 plus an additional $200 per load as a ‘Saturday’ surcharge. I would not be able to handle 5 metres of concrete on my own. With extra hands it might be possible, although with 2 of us, still tough.

Option 2 was to mix half the concrete myself and bring in a truck for the last 5 metres.

Option 3 was to mix the lot.

I decided to start out mixing and keep open the option of bringing in a truck for the last 5 metres.

As it turned out I developed a rhythm and mixed the lot. By the time I finished I reckon I had it pretty right.

The total cost of the project was a little under $3000 in materials – Reo, builders plastic, 20mm aggregate, crusher dust and cement – and 11 days mixing, including a couple of days when there were 2 of us on the job. The record amount mixed in a day was 2.3 cubic metres, achieved with Adam and I working. The best I did on my own was 1.8 cubic metres. Early to bed that night.

I used a mix that should achieve the 30MPA standard and, at the 150mm thick, should deal with a fully laden 25 tonne concrete truck but I will only be able to assess my performance on that criterion after the first truck, just as I will have to wait for a flood to see what effect that will have.

bunyagully

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Causeway – Done!