hello and welcome!

Hello there and welcome to my brand new blog!

I am quite nervous about starting my own blog, but figure that I should really give it a go, so we will see what happens!

For those of you who haven't read my profile, I live with my husband and our 3 year old daughter in eastern Victoria.  We have a beautiful 10 acre farm where we grow most of our own vegetables and have chooks, a goat (named Safari - our pet), 3 cows and 8 sheep.  We have also planted an orchard with several fruit trees since we moved here 2 years ago.

We aim to be as self sufficient, and live as sustainably as we can.  Our house was built in 2009 and is a little house built with the best quality materials we could afford.  When we built, the key factor was to build something as environmentally friendly as possible.  We chose to have a smaller home to allow room in the budget for double glazed windows and doors, extra insulation, a grid connect solar system, solar hot water, water tanks, enviro paints and quality fittings.  We did quite well really and we are so glad we considered these important factors before we started building!

Self sufficiency is something we really strive for.  However, we both realise that being 100% self sufficient is quite a challenge, so we grow most of the veggies that we eat.  Our chooks provide us with eggs (and lots of entertainment!), our sheep and cows will provide meat for us once they grow and enjoy time grazing the grass on the farm with the sun on their backs.

We bake our sourdough bread from scratch and make our pasta and own soap too. It's a constantly evolving journey for us, but one that we find very rewarding.

I hope that you enjoy following along with my blog and that we can share ideas along the way.

See you soon I hope!

Yasmin

Our goat, Safari is exploring!

Our sheep (with Safari looking on in the foreground!) and looking across our property

Planting garlic in one of our veggie beds

Our girls

Our cows (taken sometime ago, they are much bigger now!) from left to right Tinkerbell, Lightning McQueen (because he is red) and Terence - named by our three year old.