Abdallah House - Redesigning a Home

Principle 2: Obtain a yield The ' wetland ' area at the front of the property, now referred to as a 'basin', harvests water from rainfall allowing it to soak and store within the earth. Top soil that was put aside from earlier earthworks was mounded up to create a raised bed with the idea that water would wick up from the moist soil below, much like a wicking bed , without flooding the plants. Horse manure collected from local stables was used like mulch and spread across the raised area before planting potatoes in the bed. Soil mounded in front yard water harvesting basin for vegetable plantings Basin fills with water after heavy rains, mounded bed mulched with horse manure Potatoes growing on mounded bed require very little watering and are thriving Other food producing garden beds have been built close to the back decking, where they receive lots of attention and get plenty of sun. We planted herbs and salad greens around the Red Gum stump with mint

Principle 11: Use edges and value the marginal I've got a lot of timber left over from the deconstruction of the old house as well as other material that I had collected along my travels. It's been taking up a substantial part of the backyard and finding what I need for other building projects has been a real challenge. Time to get organised... Unused timber from demolition of original house stacked in backyard I'd collected a number of metal poles from a local demolition job that I wanted to use to build a rack to stack the timber in. The poles were of slightly different lengths, but all around two metres long. I wanted to keep the height and not bury them too far into the ground so I decided to dig to the level of clay and lay a couple of bricks to create a solid base, rather than a deep hole and use concrete. With a slight slope in the landscape I figured that I could use the longest poles up the back and the shorter ones up front without the need to cut any o