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If you can’t tell by now, I love the word sustainable. It can be used in so many contexts. Today, I’m ranting on how sustainable your actual day to day life is.

My fiancee is a primary school teacher. While she does like the work, the workload is just ridiculous. When people complain about the amount of holidays that teachers receive, I get quite frustrated, as the majority of holidays that she takes are spent marking, or planning for the next term. It’s a 8am till 10pm job most days for good teachers. Full on!

Take last night for example. It’s a pretty standard night – we both get home at around 5pm, prepare dinner, eat, then clean up. By 6:30pm she is off in the study marking and planning until 10:30pm, then we go to bed. This isn’t out of the norm at all – it’s just day to day life. She has said herself, “I just can’t do this forever”. While I have spoken to her a lot about it and have encouraged her to entertain the idea of changing jobs, it’s nice to hear her actually saying, rather than me.

While she could technically teach forever, she would never have any hobbies, our lives will continue to be very separate, and in my opinion she would live a life of working and working only. No time for kids either!

The hobbies point has always struck me as interesting. I ride my bikes, I work on them, I dig trails, I work on computers at home, and so on. I’m always up to something, it’s what keeps me sane! Turn that around, and my fiancee has none of this. Obviously I don’t expect her to have the same hobbies that I have, but surely you need some sort of outlet for enjoyment and stress relief?

Next year is going to be a year of exploring. We are exploring the world, exploring our career options, and essentially exploring our lifestyle choices. With any luck we will end up in Whistler, Canada, working in jobs that are completely different to our current jobs. While they might not be our dream jobs, they will be different, and allow us to compare them with what we are doing now, and explore the options that we have for our lifestyles.

So have a think about it when you get some free time, can you keep up your current lifestyle forever? Are you giving much thought to where you want to go?

About two months ago I read “The China Study”, and came to the conclusion that I should be eating a lot more fruit and vegetables. While I try and eat as well as I can, I believe that one of the main reasons why I don’t eat as much fruit and veg as I’d like is because of the quality that we get at the shops here in Adelaide. What concerns me is that apparently we have it pretty good here! It must be very hard for some people to eat well in places like London.

I came to the conclusion that starting my own veggie patch was the go, so my family can eat that bit healthier and hopefully we can grow some better tasting food too.

I found a spot in the yard that has three retaining walls around it, and purchased some straw-bales to lay across the front to act as another retaining wall. After filling it with organic loam we now have a raised bed. For the past two months I have been composting all of our organic waste with some straw and soil and that is going quite well. Unfortunately the rain got into it over the past few days but I have since sorted that out to keep it a little drier and warmer during the heavy rain season. While a slow process, composting your scraps will produce a great organic fertilizer for your plants and is well worth the effort.

Last week I bought some seed trays and planted broccoli, cauliflower and brussels sprouts in it. After just one week I have some very strong looking seedlings. After another couple of weeks I will transplant these into the vegetable garden. Direct into the ground I have now sown carrots, lettuce (mixed), silver-beet, spinach and snow peas. I will encourage the snow peas to climb up the fence using wire.

My tips for starting a veggie patch are:

• Unless you have great soil, starting with a raised bed is much easier. Buy some organic loam to get you started.
• Compost all of the organic waste you have. It’s free fertilizer and is made by nature. It’s the best for your crop!
• Do some research as to what to grow and when. Gardenate is a great website for this.
• Start small and enjoy the process rather than feel the burden of a massive veggie patch. Go bigger when you are ready.

Sort of following on from my post the other week, “The Great Outdoors”, spending the time outside in the garden has been really enjoyable. Maybe because as a kid I was always outside – my dad was a landscaper and loved working in the garden – I would always be outside helping my parents in the garden.

Working with the environment just charges me up and gives me so much energy. Watching the plants grow is an exciting process and very rewarding too. It’s little “wins” like this in life that makes me a happy person. Try it for yourself. It’s a bit of work getting setup but well worth the effort.

It’s a long term project, but my fiancee and I intend on building on our property one day. About a year and a half ago now we purchased just under ten acres in the Adelaide Hills, South Australia.

Currently we are considering our options to build. Looking at house plans, having our home designed by an architect, or trying to do it ourselves, there’s a lot of options just in there. Then we can go with a builder, get a kit home, or owner build (self build). After that there’s still a heap of other options within those choices… It’s never-ending!

We have always wanted an efficient home – a sustainable design, passive solar and passive cooling – the simplest way to create an efficient home. In Australia this starts with North facing windows, to allow the home to warm up during the winter, and strategically placed windows, doors and hallways in the house to allow cooling breezes to keep the home cool in the summer. I have quickly learned that this cannot be done properly by using a builder with set house plans. The design must suit the property.

So you’re left with either designing the home yourself, or if you’re not comfortable doing that, seeing an architect.

You also need to decide on what materials you would like your house made from. We are personally trying to build a green home, so we are choosing strawbale for the external walls. Strawbale houses are incredibly efficient, with very high insulation properties. Taken from “House of Bales“:

In winter, the sun and combustion heater keeps the house at a very comfortable temperature. In summer during 40+ degree heat waves the hottest the house got was 27 degrees.

Aside from the strawbales, we would like a concrete slab for thermal mass. This is a tough choice, as concrete production creates a large amount of carbon dioxide, however over time, a house built with concrete will save a lot of carbon dioxide production. To add to this thermal mass, we hope to use rammed earth walls within the design of the home too.

Then you have the smaller options along the way. These options can make big differences in the final comfort of the home. For example, using timber window frames can help keep the house warmer in winter. These should not be overlooked, as the price for a better solution is not often far from the price of the “standard” option.

Building an eco house takes time, lots of effort, and usually a huge amount of research on the owners’ behalf, but what more of a rewarding way could there be to build a house?