Today marks five years since the first national COVID lockdown in Australia – five years since (like so many others) my wife Chris and I watched our small business seemingly evaporate overnight.
It was a bleak, scary time for us. Chris, ever the practical one, responded by going out and getting a second job. Me, ever the romantic one, responded by building a new vegetable garden.
In retrospect, Chris getting a second job did far more to rescue our finances than my growing vegetables could ever have done.
In my defence, however, we still have what we now call the “Quail House” – a 14-metre-long enclosure encompassing espaliered fruit trees and raised vegetable beds, all protected from birds, rabbits and possums by a roof of wire netting.
I was excessively proud at the time that I built it all myself, and also that the whole thing cost less than $1,000.
Five years later I remain excessively proud that the Quail House is still standing, still producing large volumes of fruit and vegetables and – here is my favourite bit – still being effortlessly weeded by a tiny herd of guinea pigs and a bevy of uncomplaining quail.
How I built the Quail House
For anyone who wants to play along at home, below is a step by step guide to how I built the structure pictured above.
I paid $200 to buy a wrecked greenhouse frame from a local guy on Facebook marketplace, and $100 to get it delivered.I pegged out an area 14 metres long and 3.5 metres wide. My first task was to flatten the site, To save money, I did this with a shovel and crowbar, which took a couple of weeks.I re-used as many uprights as I could from the wrecked greenhouse – hammering them into the ground with a dropper-knocker. I was short two uprights, so I had to buy a small amount of steel pipe to make two new ones (about $50).I spaced the uprights 1.5 metres apart, so I could re-use the 1.5-metre spacer pipes I salvaged from the wrecked greenhouse.I paid $408 for 2 x 50-metre rolls of 12mm wire netting (including delivery). To lift it over the frame, I attached one end of the netting to a steel bar, and dragged it over with ropes. It was easier than I expected.I ran a wire below ground level at the base of the uprights to crimp the netting to. I also added some extra steel spacers to hold the sections apart (cost about another $150), and I put diagonal braces on the end uprights (I used old bits of pipe I had lying around for this).The ramshackle shed on the right is our Guinea Pig House (which houses the family guinea pigs).I was pretty pleased with the way I did the back wall of the structure, tying off the wires using an old ring-shaped thing I found in the shed, and a piece of green-painted steel pipe I had lying around in the yard.The entrance door took a bit of thinking. I used the steel struts of an old Hills Hoist, held together with some joiners salvaged from somewhere, and a bottom hinge I bought at Bunnings (see next pic).A few details – taps, door frame and door hinge. I re-used some old taps I had in the shed, and bought some more from Bunnings. The pipes and risers etc. were all stuff I had lying around (I am one of those people who hoards odd bits of steel in the shed – the Hills Hoist I took down about 20 years ago, while some of the risers and joiners are even older).I finished the basic structure by late May. Total cost to this stage was around $950.I dug a trench to the guinea pig house and buried some 200mm PVC sewerage pipe (from Bunnings) to create a tunnel for the guinea pigs. They started using it almost immediately.I made the raised beds out of old corrugated iron, held together by tech screws and some 25mm square steel frame. I laid some waste cardboard on the bottom, and filled them with autumn leaves, leaf litter and bark etc. from our garden.I kept filling the beds up with any organic matter I could find – bark, sticks, branches, leaves, then topped them with soil I dug from our driveway drain. I also shovelled in lots of manure from our chooks, and added some worms. It took a couple of years to properly settle down and become soil.I made three raised beds, and strung some wires along each side for espaliered fruit trees. Within a couple of years I was harvesting large amounts of many kinds of veges, and increasing volumes of fruit in season.In combination, the guinea pigs and quail are great ground-level weeders. In five years, I have never had to weed outside the raised beds, and neither quails nor guinea pigs can get up into the beds to raid the veges. Over the past five years the fruit trees have grown, and I have kept adding new things – such as the removable wire frame on top of the tomato stakes (image on right), which makes staking the tomatoes easy.
With the benefit of hindsight, it might sound as if I knew what I was doing the whole time. It might sound as if I planned each step meticulously, that I had all the skills, tools and foresight I needed, and that I was confident it would be successful. None of the above is true.
At every stage of the project I doubted my capacity to get it done. I was an overweight man pushing 60, who had spent most of my life in front of a computer, with a rudimentary understanding of the tools and materials I was using. In short: if I did this, anyone can – given time and motivation.
At time of writing, the tomatoes are just finishing. Many, many kilograms of tomatoes – what we didn’t cook or eat fresh, we gave away, or preserved by drying and freezing. We also picked many, many kilograms of plums, figs, apples and other fruit – including cherries at Christmas.
oldmanure 