^Well, it’s significantly less dramatic than ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’.
As we prepare to relocate from a small rural property that has been home for the past 11 years to a much smaller, domestic house and block closer to children we’ve begun clearing out/throwing away/tidying up what we brought with us 11 years ago and the extra that has accumulated in those same years.
As I’ve been clearing up the shed and carpeted man cave I’ve paused to reflect briefly on some of the items being thrown away or otherwise disposed of.
This morning I cut up a timber frame that I had started putting together which was going to hold a flyscreen for a skylight we have in our kitchen area. It never occurred to me previously that I could make a flyscreen the normal way - with aluminium framing and flyscreen mesh. For some reason I opted for a light wooden frame that never held its shape.
Then there are the beehives. We had enough equipment for two fully-functioning beehives with a brood box and two honey supers1 each. We did have two hives operating in the early days. One was from a swarm I collected off a small tree in a nearby town and the other was a swarm given to us by an apiarist we know. The first hive provided around 5kg of honey, and the second hive provided around 20kg of honey. The first hive lasted one or two seasons, and the second one for two or three. Both hives left us during the winter months to find better pastures and warmer climates2. Given that our beekeeping equipment cost somewhere around $800 all up, that runs to around $32/kg for the honey. This is two or three times what you’d usually pay for it, but it was the best-tasting honey ever3.
And there was the vege garden and fruit trees. The vege garden has provided us with some very good seasons, some pretty average ones, and a few almost negligible. It always demanded more time than we (well, my wife) could give it; and it always needed more water than we had. The fruit trees were a mixed bag (pardon the pun) with some doing well and others dying (unlike the bees, the fruit trees couldn’t relocate themselves to warmer climes!) We initially planted a couple of walnut trees along with various apples, pears, stone fruit and nut trees, but the walnuts died early on. It’s been said that you only plant walnut trees for future generations, anyway.
I also wanted to do some beer brewing here. In our 11+ years I completed 22 home brew batches and, with one exception4, they worked well. I will continue this post-relocation.
We also wanted to try wine-making but that never got off the ground. We bought a kit complete with carboy and grape juice but never got around to doing whatever needed to be done to it. We did, however, make a couple of batches of mead (honey, water and natural yeasts, but we were never game enough to have anything more than a sip). On the other hand we did put down a batch of bean pod wine - seeking to emulate the pea pod wine oft-mentioned in The Good Life. The bean pods we used were broad beans, but it smelt just too beany so got tipped.
Cheese-making was also in the list and it was met with some success in the early days. It makes more sense if you have dairy animals rather than having to buy unhomogenised milk so, whilst it was a flavour success, it would never be an economic one.
Other things such as coffee roasting were being done pre-relocation, have been continued over these 11 years, and will continue into the next relocation.
I’m sure there were other things we tried out to reduce our planetary footprint. Some worked, some didn’t.