Hi there, welcome to the urban homestead academy.
This morning we woke up to quite a bit of flooding on the homestead so we opened up
the front door and here it is, you can see a huge big puddle. If it had of come up any higher
we would have probably had to do some sandbagging around the front door.
This has shown us that we need to perhaps get some raised garden beds happening here.
Here we have our summer beds. We've recently rotary hoed these and in another video,
we showed that our plans for this bed are to put corn, potatoes, pumpkins and sunflowers
in. We were pleased that the flooding didn't take any of the topsoil and we didn't have a
lot of topsoil runoff, so it's really just given this recently ploughed area a really good soak.
We've had about a hundred millimetres of rain in about a six-hour period which is a record for
the area that we live in. It's a day for gumboots and sloshing around.
Here's Michael checking the water tanks. These are quite new that we've put in and it looks
like they're filling up really nicely which is good. We've still got some plumbing to finish
tidying up and need to pineback and landscape around all of that area but we'll get there.
This is the backyard area with our large chicken run and we can see that the chicken
fence was washed away by the gushing water that's come through there. It's a bit of a
waterway, a watercourse there so we've now got a bit of a new river in the backyard. But
we'll know for future planting as this is an area that we were thinking about
running a big orchard through. We'll have to rethink whether that's a good idea now.
Here are our chickens, little chicky babes. they were stranded on this little island
there but as the water subsided they flew the coop. They took the opportunity to run
free around the backyard and they were having a wow of a time getting all of the worms that
had come up out of the ground there. It took me quite some time to coax them back into the yard,
cheeky little things. These pine bark piles we've got piled up is one of our winter jobs. We want to
plant a lot of natives along the boundaries to attract the birds and the pollinators so we've
just got these sort of dumps of pine bark there if you're wondering what those are.
This water was actually quite deep in places and flowing quite quickly.
This one looks like a big creek, it's the first time we've seen it on the property.
Here's Michael inspecting the beds that we are working on.
We had a load of loam delivered only a couple of days prior, and look, we should have put a tarp
over it. You can see a lot of it's been washed away, but you live and learn. The main beds
that we've been working on are okay. This one here we just need to put some borders around.
YAY, our seedlings survived and this is the advantage of having raised beds. We built these
up a little bit, not too high, then boxed them around and even though we've had that
hundred mils of rain they've survived okay. Lots of water there and you can even see the
temporary river at the back of the plants. We are so pleased we didn't lose these because honestly,
that was days and days of work for us to prepare that. Then and then we jumped in the car
and we thought let's travel across a few other suburbs to see what 100 millimeters of rain does.
We went across four different other suburbs and even though the water was starting to subside
while we were travelling around we could still see just the downpour that we had.
This section here is normally a small creek
And this is a road that runs over the creek. I think the people in those far
houses might be stranded for a little while yet.
At this point I was walking in the water trying to get a good shot of this splashing water here
and Michael had to call out to me as I misjudged and I nearly filled my gumboots full of water.
This is a pathway that winds around the creek, and it has two pathways one on either side and
as you can see completely covered. No one is going to be walking there for a while.
And no ducks today, normally there are a lot of ducks in this area. I didn't see a single duck.
And look at this. A bonus, a great rosehip bush. So I'm going to come back to this, I've made a
note of this and I'll harvest some of this at another time. This is said to be really good
for arthritis and good doses of vitamin c so I want to explore what I can actually do with that.
Okay, we're on the road again, off to yet another suburb. Michael, the horticulturalists in him,
just loves looking at farmland and what's happening, particularly after this lot of
rain. We're seeing a lot of farmland where whole paddocks are just waterlogged. Look at that.
I think it's a very tough gig being a farmer trying to battle drought
and floods and the rising cost of inputs to produce food and still making a living. So hats
off to farmers, I think they do a wonderful job in very very difficult circumstances.
Here we have some 'behind the scenes' filming. We
are taking the opportunity to film another bit of video footage on climate variability.
What we've seen here is that the farmer's lost a lot of their topsoil
out of these paddocks. They recently sowed, it was only a few days ago they were actually irrigating
these paddocks because it was so dry, like drought type conditions and now we've had flooding.
This is one of the many reasons why we advocate for home-grown
food because you can have a bit of control over what happens with the weather patterns,
particularly when you're growing in raised beds or in areas that you know aren't prone
to flooding. And it just helps to shore up some food security, some local food security.
Here we are in another suburb off to another creek to have a look.
I'm trying to get close to the creek and film the water flow, but not too close!
All right, I think it's time to call it a morning. I think we'll head back and have a nice hot cup
of tea and think about what we're going to do for the rest of the day now on our sloshy
wet property. If you enjoy our videos please like and subscribe so we know to keep making more,
and in the meantime happy gardening. Bye for now.