1stop Organic Gardening

It's been a long while since I've made a post. How does the time get away so quickly??? I've not had help with the chook shed since my last post, so it still looks the same - incomplete. Life is really busy for us right now. We have a sub-division application in with council, there's renovations happening, work in the garden (mostly structural, but some veggie plantings), organising of quotes and tradespeople. Why are so many of them unreliable?
But I manage to keep my website - www.1stoporganicgardening.com - up to date. There's always new info being added and a RSS feed of articles I write for www.ezinearticles.com . Plus I've added weather map & info to my Barossa Valley page, for those who live in my area.
I'll make a more concerted effort to add posts more regularly now that we're done with Christmas and the 6 weeks of school holidays. Til then.... Happy Gardening

We spend some of the weekend building a new home for our three girls. As you can tell by the pic.... it's not quite finished yet. But the basics are done. I dug the holes while several people relieved a few frustrations demolishing an old shed that we're recycling the materials from. The posts have been cemented in after making sure the structure was square.

It looks a bit rough, but I'm sure the chooks won't mind - especially when I surprise them with a new rooster! It measures 4m x 3m, so is a good size for my girls. It will have a section for roosting, elevated laying boxes and rain-water collected from the roof to provide them with clean, fresh water. I haven't decided whether to cement the floor or to bury wire around the perimeter to keep the foxes out.

The walls will be iron, apart from the front (north facing) which will be chicken wire - to let in the winter sun and allow fresh air. The orchard is the other side of the main shed, so the girls will still have lots of area to scratch around in, keeping the insect populations down. There'll be more pics when I've done more work!

Lots of other things are happening here now. I've been busy painting rooms; negotiating with the local council about sub-division; moving soil - the hard way, with a shovel and wheel-barrow (lucky I'm a strong chick!).

So I attended Dream Life 2006.
The ideas I came back with from the internet marketing event that I attended in Melbourne a few weeks ago has kept me busy with lots of research, checking out various options to go further into - very interesting. The guys who ran the event are from the World Internet Summit team. They have regular events around the world. I have been to several and am gob-smacked with the amount of information and ideas they introduce. You can take a look here and see for yourself! I met some great people at the event (potential Joint Venture partners).
I have a bedroom to do a second coat of paint on now - but I promise to write more soon.

OK, so this is my first post to my very own blog! Hmmm... what to write??? Well I'll start at the beginning. We made a "tree change" to the gorgeous Barossa Valley in South Australia in Jan 06.

The property is a little over an acre, with views accross farm land with large gum trees and granite boulders - plus the sheep. I've spent a lot of time setting up my first web-site on Organic Gardening. I've also written an e-book on Companion Planting (a must for all organic gardeners). I'm now writing organic gardening articles for various article directories, which you'll find on this blog once I work out how to do it!

The property has a transportable house on it which I am re-decorating (the previous owners were a bit slap-dash with the paint brush). It's coming along quite nicely.

I've made a space for my new veggie garden to go. It's north facing (perfect in the Southern Hemisphere), has wind protection and is close to water. I've formed in my mind how I want it set out, so now I need to pace it out and put it on paper to fill in the details. I have some ingredients ready to go for my compost heap. We have a few chooks which free-range the property at the moment, but I really need to build a chook house before the garden gets going, or they'll get more to eat than we will. Have to get going with it soon as it's August already!

I'm flying to Melbourne on Friday for an Internet Marketing conference. I'm very excited about it. I'm sure I'll get some great new ideas for my site.