About Arch Gully

After years of keeping an eye on the market for the ideal property, finally the right now came along and waited for us.

My husband and I watched a property for several months before we were in a position to purchase it. That’s how we found ourselves with our two kids, beginning to establish our dream on 11 acres in the beautiful Mary Valley region on Gubbi Gubbi land. The land is steep but the soil is beautiful and has proven itself capable of growing a wonderful variety of crops with the prior owners of the land establishing mangoes, yellow mangosteen, mandarin, bananas, jackfruit and black sapote amongst others. The land was so lush and green with an amazing natural rainforest gully full of native plants through it.

We truly couldn’t have asked for better conditions to begin setting up our self-sufficiency dreams.

And then the drought hit…

On top of needing to be very active with watering my plants (I’ll admit, not always a strong skill of mine) I was also trying to protect my teeny garden from the marauding hungry wildlife who unsurprisingly preferred anything I tried to grow over the multitudes of dead grass. If it wasn’t the wallabies it was the bandicoot. I couldn’t even establish compost as the bandicoot would scratch it all out and eat whatever it could get its claws into!

I was very fortunate to be able to establish a few hardy perennials before realising the best spot to garden wasn’t quite where I had intended to garden at all. The wallabies had taken my terracing efforts as an open invitation to an all you can eat buffet but left an undefended silverbeet growing on the edge entirely alone. So I shifted my focus and slowly I saw some progress… Not before the chickens scratched up multiple seedlings. Two steps forward one step back all the way.

So we decided to bite the bullet and put an excluding fence around the whole food forest garden patch.

Finally we were getting somewhere! A few less hurdles to jump, a tonne of trial and error and garden experimentation and the results were starting to show.

We aren’t really aiming for true self sufficiency any more. We are incredibly fortunate to have wonderful neighbours all around us and a real sense of community where we look out for and support each other. Instead we are now working towards sustainability which covers many similar aspects.

• We are reducing the food miles for ourselves and others through selling in our roadside stall.

• We are gardening without the use of insecticides and synthetic fertilisers, instead working on restoring a natural balance of beneficial animals.

• We are aiming to reduce our waste and return organic material back to the soil. Many of our garden structures are made with upcycled or recycled materials.

That brings us to current day. Still plenty of trial and error but with a few more successes these days. I can often be found wandering around my little slice of garden paradise, staring in amazement at the plants that have grown, or seeking more critters to photograph and upload to iNaturalist.