Creating a Sustainable Sunshine Coast - Nambour to Mooloolah

I'm a big believer in people growing their own food at home. I'm not talking about self-sufficiency, just eating something from the garden every day. I've left the corporate life to downsize and we now live in a much smaller (read less cleaning!) house, with a beautiful organic garden and best of all, we are mortgage free.

We have 2.25 acres of organic gardens here and we eat a lot of food from our garden, which also saves us money.

For example, for breakfast we could have fresh eggs, tomatoes, orange juice, with coffee or lemon myrtle tea all from the garden. (The Sunshine Coast is a great place to grow your own coffee plants if you have the space - we have 35 Arabica plants that supply us with lovely organic coffee all year that we process and roast ourselves).

Lunch is usually a big salad - lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber, capsicum, spring onions, herbs, beetroot, sweet corn... with lots of water with a squeeze of lemon or lime juice.

Dinner - is either a salad or vegies from the garden - in winter we grow broccoli, cabbage, cauli, pumpkin, zucchini...

you can't get much more local than that.

We only buy a few products for the garden, and we use them sparingly. We make all our own compost and we have lots of worm farms pumping out castings the feed our plants and ultimately us.

Last night we had 7mm of rain which was great and today is overcast, so not too harsh on the plants. The eggplants are coming along nicely and we have Jerusalem Artichokes in for the first time this year, they seem to grow well in this climate.

We are harvesting a lot of sweet corn, cucumbers, and salads at the moment. Melon and pumpkin plants are running rampant, but no fruit as yet... grass hoppers are finishing off the kale, and the chooks love eating them (we keep our chooks on an organic diet of grains, greens, grubs and grit), the cream sacred lotus is flowering in the dam, the bamboos are sending up culms almost daily and the garden is alive with wildlife.

In the past few days I've seen dragonflies, loads of tiny green frogs, the turtles have been sunning themselves near the dam, a tawny frogmouth was resting in the front garden (impersonating a tree stump when it was spotted), lots of orb spiders are setting their webs, rainbow lorikeets, scaley breasting lorikeets, pheasant coucals, king parrots, rail birds, and of course the ever present mynas have been busy in the garden.