SpurTopia - Our Sustainable Living Story

Meet the SpurTopians

This is our sustainable-living story which we would like to share with you to provide information, ideas, inspiration and courage to take the first step in your life. Being less reliant on the system and becoming self-sufficient by growing food, utilizing recycled material and using the urban environment to our benefit, is our passion and lifestyle. We have created "a small kingdom" in a rental property in Brisbane, where we are living a fulfilling life in complete happiness. Enjoying every moment of life, a sense of belonging and achievement encourages us to take further steps into an amazing future ahead of all of us.

Ideas & Inventions

SPURTOPIA HOMESTEAD - Sustainable Paradise Video

Check this video and be inspired to create your Utopia!

Our family produce more food than we can eat, we are energy positive, water sufficient and nearly waste free in less than two years. Come and stay with us and we will teach you.

We Do:
- Practical workshops and talks
- Excursions and Tours
- Self-sufficient Skills Internship Programs
- Digital Detox & Wellbeing Retreats
- Airbnb and Farm Stays

Mead - delicious drink and medicine

Divine drink and medicine

We always thought that making mead (an alcoholic drink from honey) was a complicated and long process. The opposite is true – it’s very easy and can be very fast.
The mead we have been making at home takes about 1 hour to prepare and is ready to drink in about 10 days. Here is the recipe of our homemade mead.

Mead Recipe:
1.5kg honey
4 litres water
a small piece of ginger (about 50g)
5g sachet of brewer's yeast (available from Woolworths or buy mead yeast from a brew shop)

Mead on tap

Boil honey, water and ginger for about half an hour to get flavours, then cool down to room temperature. Pour into a home brew fermenter, add yeast, stir well and let it ferment for about 5-10 days (till it stops bubbling). Bottle your brew into clean sterilised bottles and store them in your fridge. You can drink it after 10 days, however the older the mead is the better it gets. It is the same as wine and women, the older they get the better they get :-). Once, I forgot a bottle of mead for about half a year and I have never drunk anything so delicious and healthy in my life.

Practical note: If you do not have a fermenter you can use a large glass jar, just make a hole in the lid to put through a bended straw. Seal around the straw where it comes through the lid with BluTak, and it can bubble into a small glass jar filled with water – so gas can be released but nothing can get in.

If you have your own honey like we do, you will be the very first person to touch and taste mead – a drink of the gods.

Self-watering Herb Spiral – An Idea Worth Sharing

A herb spiral is a great idea to grow herbs on a mound of dirt. However, in hot and dry weather with extra radiant heat from stones even herbs struggle to survive. To keep them alive a regular watering and a fair a bit of water is required. For that reason a self-watering way sounds like the way to go. But how to make it work in a spiral with steeping soil for herbs to grow? Being an engineer I came up with a very clever but simple design idea which should work marvellously. So here is a description how we designed and built our herb spiral.

The spiral has three water reservoir levels as shown on the schematic. Each level comprises of the following layers (described from bottom to top).

Softening layer (carpet) to smooth ground surface to protect black plastic
Concrete underlay (black plastic 0.2mm thickness)
Protective layer (carpet) to avoid punching holes in plastic
Ag pipe across an entire reservoir and bended upwards to supply and spread water
Water holding medium (stones)
Soil around perimeter and in fill soil in the middle
Stone to build outside wall

The pictures show step by step how we built each water level. The plastic underlay is as high as the stone water storage so the excess can overflow. From the top level it overflows into a middle level, from there to the bottom level which then overflows into the ground underneath. Each level watering pipe has got a float (a wooden skewer in a styrofoam rounded piece) to indicate the water level.

At the bottom the soil is about 10cm deep. When it curves around the spiral the soil depth increases to about 40cm. That’s where the next level starts with 10cm deep soil again. So in that way we achieved continuously raising soil without any interruption.

Our self-watering herb spiral is about 2.5 metres in diameter and 1 metre high. We planted over 20 different herbs around it according to their needs (e.g. mint in shallow soil thus more moist facing east; oregano in deep – less moist soil facing north).

We (two people) built the entire herb spiral project in just over one day with mostly freely available material on our property. It cost us a couple of dollars for the black plastic underlay. We located it in our newly built kitchen garden less than 10 metres from our kitchen. It’s already been well used for every day cooking.

There are more bright ideas to come and share from our Spurtopia Homestead, so watch the space.

ABC Radio Interview: Sustainable garden as a weapon in war on waste

We were privileged to do an ABC Radio interview with Terri Begley on how sustainable garden can reduce waste.

Listen to the interview ABC interview - Sustainable garden

Spurtopia story on TEDx

TEDx talk in Ispwich

What a great privilege to present our eight year sustainable living journey at famous TEDx talk.
TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an invitation-only event where the world's leading thinkers and doers gather to share ideas worth spreading and find inspiration.

Watch a 16 minute video of the TEDx talk

Spurtopia progress

Landscaping taking shape

In the last half a year we have been very busy establishing our Spurtopia Homestead. It is ever so exciting especially when you do something you are absolutely passionate about - materializing our vision and creating a beautiful reality and future for our family.

It has taken a lot of planning, sketching and thinking to get it right and make it work. So far we have:

Installed solar power on the roof (6kW system);
Solar hot water system ($700);
Self-watering planter boxes to quickly start growing our food;
Established several garden beds;
Planted 25 native trees;
Landscaping – created a stone retaining wall and levelled a part of land close to the house, prepared a pad for a shed, built swales on contours (about 500 metres) for an orchard and food forest;
Set up rainwater harvesting – 5000L (five IBC tanks) for a garden irrigation and we are in the process of installing 50Kl of rain water tanks for home use;
Three free range chickens, 3 beehives as well as 2 worm farms are our day-to day companions;
8 large compost bays for preparation of nutrient rich soil;
House face-lift such as decoration, renovation of a bathroom, laying tiles etc.

We have used a huge amount of materials to improve our unfertile and very poor soil:

Capsicons in Self-watering boxes

6 truck-loads of crusher dust and decomposed granite – minerals for garden and fruit trees;
2 truck-loads of wood chips, four truck-loads of soil;
70 cubic metres of horse manure;
three ute loads of cow manure;
and grass clippings and palm leaves from local garden maintenance guys.

As a result we already have an abundance of greens, tomatoes, zucchinis, eggplants, squashes, sweet corn, capsicums and rosellas. In our opinion these are very good results considering such a hot and dry summer (while writing these lines the thermometer shows 42°C in the shade!)

Our home production is in a full swing, making yoghurt, kefir, kombucha, sauerkraut, kimchi, sourdough bread, raw cakes, home brew beer, ginger beer, lemonade and absolutely delicious mead from our honey.

On a day to day basis we do natural parenting and home education of our two daughters which gives us a joy and meaning of life.

Vegi garden

Also establishing a local community in our neighbourhood is essential for us so we share our experience and produce which is starting some very nice relationships.

We already have a lot of people coming to see how we have been transforming our one acre property into a sustainable paradise. This year we are planning to have our place open to the public for visits, education, workshops and internship programs. We do what we are passionate about, we live our dream and in that way we’re creating our reality and shaping our future in which we want to live. 2017 will be another amazing year, full of joy, prosperity and happiness.

Your Spurtopians

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