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"We spend less than $50 per week on groceries"

Roman and I live in a rental apartment in the Brisbane inner-city suburb of New Farm with our toddler daughter Lada. Roman is semi-retired and I am a stay-at-home mum. We spend less than $50 per week in groceries and $100 per quarter for green power premium electricity. How do we do it? We live sustainably.

Roman and I grew up in the Czech Republic and were brought up living a sustainable lifestyle. It’s second nature for us to grow our own food on allotments and not waste valuable resources. When we arrived in Australia in 2008 we were taken in by how beautiful the country was and how favourable the climatic conditions were for growing food. We settled in Brisbane and set a goal to live a full and happy life based around family and community rather than the nine to five work grind. We found our apartment and are lucky to have a landlord who supports our desire to live sustainably. We set up our first garden bed in the small backyard and soon after had our first crop of lettuces, red radishes, tomatoes and zucchinis. After that we slowly expanded with more garden beds, planted herbs and quick fruiting trees, like bananas and paw paws, and set up a rainwater harvesting system.

Chicken or the egg

We had a bit of trouble getting chickens. We asked the real estate agent for permission and were initially rejected because of rat, mice and mite issues. But we wrote a letter outlining how we would look after them and promised that if they became troublesome we’d get rid of them, then asked everyone in our complex to sign it. We got permission straight away! Nowadays our landlord loves what we do as when prospective tenants come through they like the abundance of produce and sense of community so apartments in our complex are never vacant for long.

As tenants we were reluctant to plant fruit trees because if we had to move they would obviously stay so we planted quick fruiting trees in the garden and other trees in pots. Most of our 100 types of vegetables and variety of herbs are in self-watering, easy to move planter boxes. We have chickens, a worm farm and honeybees. In our first year we harvested 160kg of honey from our one hive. We also make our own laundry detergent and softener, house cleaning products, toothpaste, kombucha, sauerkraut, jams, cakes, breads, herb teas and more. We produce about 75 per cent of our family fruit and vegetable needs and share the excess of our garden produce with the other tenants and neighbours. We swap our vegetables for our neighbour’s fruit, barter honey for olive oil and go in garden and home produce swaps as part of the Ripe Near Me organisation. As a result our weekly grocery bill, of mainly organic ingredients we cannot produce like nuts and seeds, is less than $50 per week.

“We are living by example”

Solar power is a challenge for rentals, as panels need to be installed on the roof so instead we are purchasing 100 per cent green power premium from our electricity provider. Our electricity comes from renewable sources like solar, wind turbine and hydro and doesn’t cost a fortune, only about $50 extra each year. We have a solar oven and cooker, a solar yoghurt maker, a homemade solar hot water system and a cob oven for baking pizza and bread to reduce our energy costs.

When our little girl Lada was born in 2013 it reinforced what we were doing. We want our children to know we are doing our part to take care of their environment and resources and to teach them to do the same. We are living by example. We use cloth nappies not only for environmental and baby health reasons but also to use Lada’s nappy contents as a valuable resource, fertiliser on our garden. We use her bath water to soak her nappies and then use the nutrient-rich water to use on our banana trees. They go berserk, producing huge bunches of bananas! Lada loves eating bananas, producing more poo and the cycle goes around.

Anyone can do it

Living this way has vastly improved our lifestyle. We have managed to reduce our living expenses to a bare minimum, which allowed Roman to semi-retire at the end of 2014. Now he spends his time doing with he loves, sharing our sustainable living experience, ideas and inventions. All of his presentations and workshops are on a donation basis and that gives us the money we live on.

Living this way didn’t cost a lot to set up. Roman is a sustainable engineer and makes all the equipment we need from available resources such as kerbside collections, skips, Freecycle and upcycling materials. Being tenants didn’t stop us, either. If we made the excuse that we rent and therefore could not do anything we would have got nowhere. We also function just like any other family. When we go away we ask people from our community to look after the garden in return for fresh produce and eggs. It’s all very easy and achievable. Now the gardens are set up it take about an hour a day to maintain and is a great hobby. We also get a lot of pleasure seeing Lada out in the backyard foraging for food like strawberries, peas and capsicums and playing with plants and sticks rather than plastic toys.

A sense of community

I would suggest to anyone interested in living a sustainable life to go and visit a family who live sustainably. We do a lot of open days and workshops so people can come and learn how everything is applied in practice. We love meeting new people, showing what is possible even in a rental property and inspiring people to take the first steps to live a more sustainable life. Living in our small, but functional, community is very important to us and brings us a sense of belonging. Lada also gets plenty of contact with likeminded people so there’s a real sense of community attached to how we live.

Don’t make excuses to start otherwise you will be waiting your whole life! Start small, with the easy stuff, and slowly build on. Grow your own food, even if it’s just a few herbs in a self-watering, Styrofoam box or some sprouts – the healthiest, freshest and cheapest superfood we can eat. Living sustainably is such a lovely existence. We achieve a simple, healthy, happy work life balance. No stress, just joy.

Check out Jana and Roman’s website http://spurtopia.blogspot.com.au/ for sustainable living instructions, ideas and recipes.