I've been prone to a little reminiscing lately thanks to Tammy and also to this book. Thinking about how we started out here on our little farm and where we were before that in Sydney's suburbia.

 

Little did I know when I first met Tim that we would be such kindred spirits and both have a zeal for gardening in particular herbs and vegetables. But we did and when we first set up our home after we married, we couldn't afford to do much to the house itself but we could definitely dig the soil and sow seeds. And we did. 

 

Although I had never done a lot of cooking whilst living with my parents, I knew my way around a kitchen pretty well and whether by necessity or maybe even to impress my new husband, I cooked pretty much everything from scratch from the very beginning. I loved cooking and I still do.

Vegetable gardening with children and chooks

Our block of land wasn't huge, about 700sq metres but we did grow quite a lot of our own vegetables. Given that the house was built in the late 1950s and a very typical Aussie yard, there was a well established lemon tree to give us some fruit but that was it. Also true to the era, there was an incinerator which we converted to a compost bin. Along the way we added more fruit trees, a couple of bantam chickens and a worm farm to the mix and things were good. Homesteading a little in the city.M sister even made a video of us for a university assignment which thankfully I have never seen. But we really did talk about and dream of making a move to a more rural setting.  When a work transfer opportunity came up in a country town, we jumped at it and in a nutshell that is how we managed to make the move from the city.

Georgina and the girls

 

To this day I don't think my lifestyle has really changed much living in the country. I still garden, I still cook our produce and I still have livestock but for the past 14 years that we have lived here, it has been on a much larger scale. And not once have I seriously thought about moving back to the suburbs or even into town. I am truly at home here.

 

Tracy