In the beginning….

Welcome to our first post! This will be one of our longer posts as we need to get everyone up to speed and introduce ourselves. My wife and I are working professionals that maintain a typical lifestyle in the outer northern suburbs of Melbourne (Australia). We don’t live lavishly, but do enjoy the odd perk in life. We have two beautiful dogs (Harley and Bella) that will frequent in the photos to come.

We have been renovating our house for the past few years, and we are now starting to focus some attention on the backyard. We bought this house with the intention of providing a large space for our dogs, a play space for our future children, and growing our own produce. We have a larger suburban block of land being just shy of ¼ acre, and our house being double story has a small footprint. This leaves a fairly large yard for tinkering with! We live on a very sloped block of land which makes landscaping difficult, but makes aquaponics easy…

Here is a couple of photos of the backyard after we had just bought the place, and put new fences in. Unfortunately this was taken from the bottom of the yard facing back towards the house so one cannot really gather what the yard looks like from this photo, but it’s all I have at this stage:

Pre-Retaining wall photo:

My passion for aquaponics started a few years back when I discovered this fantastic method of food production on the internet via various forums. Since then I kept my eye out for bits and pieces to build a system from, and slowly started collecting…

Fast forward to today and we are almost ready to put it all together and start farming! We figured this was an ideal time to start the blog so that others can also learning a thing or two from our rights and wrongs. We recently remodelled the backyard with some earthworks, a large retaining wall, and some trees (Lilly Pilli’s) across the back to kick off the landscaping of the yard. The large retained platform has been made especially for the aquaponics system with a greenhouse and other earth bound produce like carrots, potatoes, etc. Here are some pics:

Retaining wall drainage and plastic layed down:

Another view:

 Shed site being cut:

Birds eye view: 

So there you have it! That is where we are up to at this stage. Since the earthworks and retaining wall construction, I have cleaned and moved the IBC's down to the back left side of the retaining wall as intended. I have also cut the metal stands (pictured above) to an appropriate height for planting and maintenance.