Abdallah House - Redesigning a Home

Principle 3: Obtain a yield   Abundant cherry plum harvest, turned into wine and drinks   We produced over 600kg of food in 2020, which was a significant improvement in our harvest from 2019 of 532kg.  This was harvested from a Garden Farming area of 387m² (land size, less roof area) in a year that we recorded 807 mm of rain, significantly higher than the long term average. This equates to a yield of 1.37kg/m². The increase in overall yield was due to the higher rainfall, huge pumpkin harvest and big increase in fruit harvest > 315kg vs 176kg last year. Having such a large fruit harvest is becoming quite problematic, as lots of work is required to preserve the yield - and there is only so much fruit you can eat. Another increasing problem is fruitfly. Proper fruitfly netting has helped increase yield and reduce preserving work significantly.  Our vegetable production was lower 233kg vs 310kg last year. I believe that my problems growing tomatoes is primarily caused by tomato russet

2020 Grape Trellis Harvest Richard standing in front of the grape trellis covering the northern deck. Back of rocket oven on left. Photo: Sen Yoshimoto.  NB. This post was mostly written in Feb 2020. The 2019/2020 summer was the most unusual that I can remember. Starting off with snow in the mountains, followed by heatwaves and an unprecedented fire season that incinerated 1.2 million hectares in eastern Victoria in a week. Then we got huge hailstorms in SE Australia that destroyed the CSIRO research centre greenhouses in Canberra. Next we got the flooding rains on the east coast. We've been fortunate in Seymour, avoiding the fires, hail and flooding rains. We've measured 110mm so far for the first 43 days of 2020. As a comparison we got 21mm over the same period in 2019, with 344.5mm for the year. But, this unseasonal weather of welcomed rain comes with it's downsides, with grapes splitting and mouldy. As an home education exercise for Sen (main photographer, ag