Thriving The Future Ep. 46 – Shudra is Thriving Down Under

Welcome to Thriving the Future podcast, where we're finding positive solutions to thrive in the tough times ahead.
Welcome back to Thriving the Future. In this episode, I talk with Shudra on how he is thriving in Australia. Shudra is one of the contributors at the homestead journal, thehomesteadjournal.net. And you can follow Shudra on Twitter @TheShudraWay. Let's jump into the episode.

Scott:
So Shudra, what part of Australia are you in and what kind of setup do you have down there?

Shudra:
I'm in the Western part, Western Australia, which takes up a third of the entire country. That's quite big. About an hour out of Perth, which is the capital, up in the Hills, got 10 acres the forest, and the predominant treat species in the area at eucalyptus.
Very good hardwood for fine timbers and burns. Well, and they also used it for cobblestone in England at least a hundred years ago, which are still used today. So it's quite a very good, it's a very good hardwood. It was all Woodland when I got it, nothing here, so everything I've done and everything that's appeared here I've done myself.
Scott:
You were saying that you've got a lot of gravel and you had to build a lot of soil, right?
Shudra:
Yes. It’s a very dry part of the country. The leaf litter is almost non-existent. Eucalyptus holds onto their leaves so you don't get thick leaf litter like in deciduous forest, where you'll get all this leaf litter which will break down over the winter. But that doesn't happen here. They hold their leaves. So yeah, almost no soil, very thin layer of dirt on top of the gravel. The gravel is very pure actually. I have used the gravel for concrete. So it's that pure. All the soil that's here, I've either made or brought in myself.
Scott:
Okay. So how were you building soil down there?
Shudra:
Quite a number of ways? One of the most personal ways I've been building is a dry toilet. I don't have a composting toilet because I like to make the point that composting toilets don't work. You don't do the composting in the toilet. You receive the content at the toilet and then it gets ed elsewhere, ideally up in the garden.

So I've been doing a lot of that. Other than that, we've discovered recently hay bale gardens, straw bale gardens where basically you, you put thin layer of soil on top of hay bales and do your vegetables there. They break down over the course of the season and they, they turn into soil as well.

Yeah. And the last one is that I've just to take is livestock, which is least effort on my part and effective large production
Scott:
Mm-hmm so how much livestock do you have you mostly have chickens right
Shudra:
At the moment, mostly chickens. Um, I think last counts with the four babies have just been born, I think we might be up 34 chickens.

Scott:
I really like your humanure strategy. Like you said, you have the dry toilet and then you take the sawdust or whatever else you put in with the manure and then you dig a hole for a tree and you put that in there with some mushroom compost, right?
So do you plant immediately into that or do you let that break down before you plant into it or what's, what's the process
Shudra:
It's not intentional. It really depends on whether I have a tree available or not. If I've got all my buckets filled and I need to do something about getting some free buckets and there's no trees available, I'll make the hole and the hole will sit there until the tree goes into it, or I've had other occasions where I don't have any free buckets and I've got trees waiting. And so as soon as a bucket's finished that's going into a hole and, and a tree's going immediately on top of it. Um, I, I've not seen any difference in success between the two ways, whether it's had to mature, whether it's going fresh. I find that there's, there's no, there's not enough of a difference between those to worry about which, which method I use.
Scott:
How do you make your mushroom compost?
Shudra:
The mushroom compost. I buy from mushroom farms.
So that that's probably the most expensive part of the endeavor. I also mix that in with coffee grounds. Sure. Which I collect on the way to work. That's not a special and they're free cause coffee actually takes up quite a lot of bin space at the cafe when they get rid of them. And they're paying for bin space and bin weight when they, when they pay for their dumpster bins. So they're more than happy to get rid of the coffee cause that's saving them money on paying for the volume of their bin.
Two 65-liter barrels at one time., which is what a15 gallon bin. So I have two of those on the back of the truck when I head in and I also, and I'll fill both of those and I'll also have quite a number, maybe 12 or 13 or 14 coffee bags, the ones that they put in their knock boxes and they knock the coffee in ground into, so quite a bit. And that's once a week. Yeah. So that's once a week and I mix that in 50 50 with the mushroom.
Sit there and wait, it doesn't actually take up that much coffee ground to get the mixture for the toilet. So the rest I'll just dump on the ground and mix it in the soil. I did go through a phase once where I was just dumping the, the, the coffee ground in the chicken yard and they would scratch around to see what was in there and naturally kill it into the oil cause they, they don't seem to learn that there's nothing in there. their natural instinct, their natural instinct in to see a fresh mound of, of something unknown is to scratch and see what's inside that that's an easy way of getting it tiled
Scott:
In. So does that get your chickens? Uh, do they get some of the coffee grounds and get kind of a caffeine high off of it or anything?
Shudra:
They, they, they don't, no, all they're doing is looking for what's in there and, and that they, they till it into the ground.
That, that, that's another way I've built up all as well, just by having the chicken coffee.
Scott:
I like how you troll people on Twitter with, if someone's complaining about something or whatever, then you use your meme of plant trees, get out of debt and grow your own food.
Shudra:
In the end, that's all you need to do. And I think people get caught up in the technological life and when, when you're at that stage, any little problem seems to be much larger than it is, but if you or you are doing is tending your problems, disappear and life seems are much easier.
When you, so when you're chasing the model iPhone or the slightly larger TV screen that that's when even the minor in seems to be a major problem to people mm-hmm
Scott:
So what's your, what's your main advice or your steps to get out of debt?
Shudra:
Um, I use the Dave Ramey debt snowball that so I haven't come up with a better way of doing it than that. Mm-hmm the way he does it is you, you, you, you rank all your debt from smallest to largest any spare cash. It goes into a smaller debt and you just make the minimum payments on the, on the larger ones and everything gets focused on that smaller debt. And the, the reasoning behind that is that it's a psychological milestone when you, when you get rid of that first debt, so you you're hitting it. Um, you're getting that first milestone early and that's encouraging you to go along then. From there, everything that was being put into that smaller step goes into the next smaller step. And you just keep doing that until you've got nothing left. It's the largest step.
Scott:
Yeah, that's great. So what all kinds of food do you grow down there?
Shudra:
I've got an aquaponic setup with ebb and flow beds and that gives us the bulk of our salads. Lettuces, spring onions or green onions, all the major salads where you get your nutrients and minerals from - they're done in the and flow beds. Cause what we're found is on the grounds, even on a straw bed they will be attacked by other creatures, especially when we got chickens running loose in the garden for rehabilitation. They tore up our chart pretty good. So, but anything the aquaponics area seems to be fine. Other than that, obviously the fruit trees growing in the garden. We do have some of the more perennial herbs, they're in the garden. And obviously eggs from the chickens, which is a very major source of protein for us.
At the moment the most successful fruit trees are locust, which is odd because they're quite a tropical tree or semi-tropical tree, but they seem to be doing just fine here. Mm-hmm which I suppose you plant everything and you'd be surprised at what does end up being a good, a good tree. So I would never have expected locust to grow here, but here they do as well as elderberries. They don’t mind the dry, but they prefer wet areas. And this isn't a wet area. This is a dry area and they seem to be going pretty good here as well. Then we've got our name grafted varieties, apricot peaches, extra grapes. The grapes grow well. We use grapes mainly as shade canopy. So the area actually has grapes growing over the top of the roof. In the middle of summer, when it would be quite formidable, inside the aquaponics room the grapes actually make it quite cool. And shady, you got almost full cover over the top of you. Growing grapes up the trellis and onto the Arbor and over the aquaponics.
And when I do a partial water change on the aquaponics, I've got sprinklers underneath at the base of the grapes. So the water from the aquaponics to the grape. So it's feeding itself, which is quite good.
It’s a partial water chain, so maybe 10% of it. I just run the sprinkler for about 10 minutes. I use aa build pump that just goes in. I just dump that into the pond at the end of the sediment being dragged to the, the way I have it set up. The circulation pump pulls it, and pushes from one end to the other. So you've got very, very slow current that drags all the sediment down one end. That's where the pump goes into and just pumps 10 minutes into the garden. The grapes get nutritious water and the, the fish get little bit of a water change.
Scott:
So you said it's pretty hot down there. What kind of temperature range do you get in the different seasons?
Shudra:
Um, in the summer we're getting up to high 30 fives to mid-forties, I suppose, about 100-120 degrees Fahrenheit. So I find it quite comparable. I follow Jack Spirko’s videos on YouTube, and he's in Texas. And I find our summer very comparable to the Texas summer.
Which is it's manageable, but you'll have those two or three months in the Midsummer where you are not doing anything and you wouldn't want to start anything. All you're doing is focusing, keeping things alive.
But on the other hand, in Texas, you'll get a frost in winter where things will go dead, but here we won't have a frost and we'll stay quite comfortably above zero (Celsius) all of winter. So I suppose the main advantage of I'm living is that I can, I can power through winter, still planting stuff, still actually having stuff growing. Whereas in, in most parts of the US, you've got a frost and that really closes your plants down and you're not doing too much there.

Scott:
Right. So do you close down the aquaponics in the winter time or, or is it warm enough to keep going?

Shudra:
Yeah, it it's definitely warm enough that it, the aquaponic area doesn't even flow down. Um, our greens go right through winter and they have no problem doing that.
We're mainly in double digits in winter and occasionally we'll get close to freezing, but more than an hour before sunrise and then the sun will, and everything gets warm up again. Wind is not a problem here. I think that's, maybe that's one of the main advantages of where I am.

Scott:
What do you think has been your biggest challenge on your homestead so far?

Shudra:
Other than soil? It would come down to more the type of bureaucracy we have in Australia compared to the US, I hear about people getting bulk seeds in like bulk radish seeds, or bulk carrot seeds or something like that. That concept doesn't exist here. We, we don't get bulk seeds. We'll get maybe the and what else am I bought in bulk lupins, which is a Legume, but other than that for us to buy like five pounds of seeds to broadcast it, it in a bulk thing, or to do my, that doesn't happen here. So it's individual or saving your own seed. So that's one, that's one challenge I've noticed wherein the US, you definitely have an advantage over us, but you can, you can buy something in bulk seeds where that doesn't happen here.
Scott:
So do you do any grafting on your trees? Do you do any grafting on your fruit trees?
Shudra:
I did not last year. I think it might have been last year or the year before I, I tried my hand at grafting for the first time ever. And I cut myself pretty badly. I opened my hand up that had to go I had to go get stitches really
That stitched up. And, and I thought to myself, you know what, maybe not, it's not for everyone. And I decided not to do that. And it's just far easier to buy a grafted tree and bring it home then. Yeah. Have to learn that, that, cause I speaking to other people online about it afterwards. Yeah. You're dealing with wearing gauntlets, right. Special gloves that aren't going to get cut. And I thought, no, you know what, maybe that's not something not a skill I have to learn. On that no till have discovered a species of peach that has come up. I think it, maybe it was an ornamental peach that for whatever reason, it decided to fruit and its quite nice fruit. It's actually a very tasty peach and the seeds will grow quite significantly within 18 months.
So I started planting these everywhere. They are sort of a black colored flesh and the stone is quite large compared to the rest of the fruit, but they're quite tasty. And because it's so prolific at growing, what I'm doing now is just selecting the ones that have smaller stone and larger fruit.
Scott:
I was really impressed by your story of Heath. Can you share how that worked out?
Shudra:
I think it was February this year. So we're talking the peak of summer and I was walking around the garden. We'd noticed certain plants were, were being eaten. And we, we knew at the time that we out the garden had become a sanctuary for bandicoots. They were nonexistent in the area and now they seemed to be totally concentrated in on our property simply because it's so protected by the fences as well as moist over summer. So before we put it down to bandicoots, and then we noticed that the leaves very high up the, what are the climbing up there or something, we couldn't work it out. We couldn't work out what was eating these things. And I came home one day and there was this kangaroo sleeping in the shade under one of the areas what is going on?
My thing was kangaroos are bad because they will eat everything. So I took it outside the fence area and it was really hot that day. And it looked quite dehydrated. I'll give it some water and then once it's got its strength back it'll hop off. Next morning, when I went out to do my chores, it was standing outside the gate waiting. Oh, wow. I opened the gate and it popped past me, didn't even care about me and went into the garden to get a drink. So I thought, okay, one kangaroo we’ll rehabilitate it and send it on its way. And from there attached to it we found that Heath was only eating grass.
It wasn't eating any of our salads, wasn't eating anything that we would not have wanted it to eat. And so I thought, okay, we can have a pet kangaroo. And by that, I mean, we totally don't have a pet kangaroo cause that's not legal. So we had this kangaroo that tolerated us and hung around the way and fast forward to maybe a week or so ago. When I went outside and I noticed there was a head sticking out of Heath’s pouch a little, and we thought, oh, we don't have a Heath anymore. We have a girl kangaroo. So that was quite a shock. And then I started doing some research on kangaroos, because I know almost nothing about them, and found out that they can in times of stress, like if the heat of summer in February they can pause their pregnancy for as long as they need to until times get better again and then just hit play again on their pregnancy and continue through. So she could have been for any number of months leading up summer.
It’s not Heath. We decided Heather's not going to be work. So we call her Tilda. And we have boy and girl names, lined up for whatever the Joey is, and I'm not even sure how long it's going to take us to find out whether the Joey is a boy or a girl.
Oh, she has no intention of leaving . At the moment we're only seeing the Joey's sticking his head out of the pouch. So he's very young and hopefully in the coming weeks she's also keeping her distance too, which is purely instinctive thing I would imagine. So she's down in the wild area. And we'll only occasionally see her coming up to get some water and feed. We leave some feed out for her, so she gets some get some energy food. And hopefully once he's out and about moving around, she'll be more confident to bring him up and to her.
Scott:
That's great. Cool. Any final thoughts?
Shudra:
Plant trees, cultivate gardens and raise that's the only way we're going to get through this and get out of debt.