wwoofing in Julatten, QLD - Part 1

wwoofing in Julatten - Part 1

For two weeks in June we stayed and worked on a property between Julatten and Mossman, 110km north-west of Cairns, at the northern end of the Atherton Tablelands. The property was once a nursery for rare palm trees but has been somewhat neglected and so Fred and Jeanette (the new owners) are tidying it up and restoring much of the native habitat. There is a creek that runs through the property that is part of the Upper Mitchell River catchment and that makes the property eligible for grants to improve the 'health' of the creek.

Lots of great tropical plants

This is one of the exotic palm trees. Covered in spines like an echidna. No climbing!

Misty sunrise

 We were involved in a couple of interesting projects while in Julatten. The first was the new herb garden. This was Rosie's project and as you can see it turned out beautifully! It's an old bath tub standing on cement blocks to keep it out of reach of furry creatures.

We also built a vegetable garden. We learned that vegie gardening up North presents a number of challenges that aren't as much of a concern in other areas. Fred and Jeanette's last vegie patch was a bit of disaster, destroyed by a combination of white-tailed rats, pademelons, wallabies, the neighbour's peacocks and the heavy rain during the wet season (Julatten average annual rainfall is over 2000mm and the record rainfall for a single day is 801mm!) so this time Fred had put a lot of thought into how to make this garden a success.

Fred is an engineer so he tends to think things through. (He is passionate about solar energy and I learned a lot from him about how solar power works and how to get the most benefit from it.) So Fred had observed where the water ran during the wet season and planned the garden on one of the 'drier' spots. Fred dug channels half a metre deep around the border of the garden and used corrugated iron sheets as the edging.

Elijah was in charge of soil testing

Stu learned to operate a tractor, and tractors became Elijah's new favorite thing!

We laid sleepers as edging for the garden beds so that there was a path down the middle. We filled the beds with soil and freshly-collected cow poo. Fred welded the door on and we used irrigation pipes as the roof supports. The ends of the pipes went over star-pickets and we braced the top with a length of square steel tubing. Next it was time for the chicken wire. The entire enclosure needed to be covered with chicken wire to keep out the pests.

Rosie "c-clipping" the chicken wire

Next we installed a watering system and Rosie planted the first seeds.

The finished project. Hooray!

A Big Catch Up!

It's been a long time coming (2 months since our last post) and there are SO many adventures to share with you!

After our wonderful stay in Grasstree Beach and lovely couple of days with January, Stu, EJ and I headed north to Townsville. Our days were full of family, fun and food :)

Somewhat serendipitously while we were in T'ville, we ran into Cyndi O'Meara (nutrionist and health advocate extraordinaire - her website) at the local organic store and had a great chat. She was doing a health talk along with a thermomix presentation the next night, and funnily enough hadn't we just been umming and aahing about whether or not to get "the Greatest Kitchen Appliance ever". So the universe lined that one up beautifully and we are now the very very happy owners of a thermomix (TM). I am really looking forward to sharing some of our creations. It truly makes eating nutriously SO easy.
(While I've been writing this, I'm baking bread that I milled the flour for myself. it took about three minutes to knead the dough in the TM and the heavenly smell of scrummy bread baking away in the oven is filling my nostrils.)


After a great catchup with family, we headed up to Jullaten for our first wwoof. Woohoo!! It was a fantastic experience.
I know Stu has a post in the works about all of our adventures there so I'll leave those stories up to him.

 Now we are in Atherton, and we are loving discovering the incredible tablelands.

As it's well past my bedtime, I'll let the photos do the talking for the moment. :)


More updates soon.

Our first (unofficial) wwoofing experience

While staying with Rosie's Mum & Dad in Bundaberg I took on the task of creating some gardens for growing organic vegies. I figured it would be a good way to toughen up my 'chiropractor's hands' and get used to a bit of manual work. I thoroughly enjoyed having a project to keep me busy! Here's how it panned out...

Deltry prepared the area a few weeks before our arrival by laying down some black plastic to kill off the grass. This turned out to be only moderately effective and probably needed to be done for a lot longer to really make a difference.

It took me a day or so to remove all the grass and level the area as best I could. That earned me a few blisters!


We decided to make 3 garden beds each 3m by 1.4m with a 90cm path in between each bed. Now we needed the wood for the edges. I did some research and decided that the best wood to use would be untreated hardwood. Treated pine is easier to use but the chemicals from the pine can leech into the soil, which is not ideal for growing organic vegetables! I phoned around and managed to find a second-hand timber yard that had some fascia board that was perfect, and so much cheaper than buying new timber. In total the wood cost $70.

I cut it all to size by hand and enjoyed using some 'elbow grease'. I secured the corners by screwing the fascia board to some square hardwood beams I found with stainless steel decking screws ($20).

Elijah kept a keen eye on things and seemed to approve of the progress.

Now that the edges were in place we needed to fill them. On the bottom I laid some cardboard to deter the weeds. We had plenty of cardboard from all the boxes we used to move out of our house. I had some soil from where i had to dig to level the gardens but we needed quite a bit more. I bought a trailer load of organic mulch from a guy at one of Bundaberg's local markets and also bought some soil/compost mix from the local landscape place. All up the soil cost $120. I also decided to cover the paths with some woodchips to stop the weeds and make it tidy.


And here is the finished product! Deltry has planted a range of different vegies and they are doing well! I'm looking forward to sampling some of the produce in a few months time.

Now we're ready for 'real' wwoofing!