Back in May, our Chinese pistachio tree in the front garden was lighting up the house, with its fluorescent red and yellow leaves spreading above and below. It was gorgeous.
A bright, flaming tree was also a reminder that I need to do more to prepare the house and garden for a bad fire season. There have been four minor fires since we moved here in 2012, and in 2019-20 we were surrounded by smoke from the huge fires. Last summer we got away lightly because of regular rain.
Murrumbateman Landcare did an excellent workshop in 2023 on how to make your house safer from the fiery holocausts that are likely to occur in the future. They have a really good guide on how to plan for bushfire.
Sue McIntyre showed how her completely native (except for veggies) garden could be very fire safe, by using gravel around the house, doing small cool burns to keep the grasses down for fifty metres around, and using native wildflowers (in which she’s an expert). The effect is really lovely, but only works for a new house where there hasn’t been existing exotic landscaping.
Ours has a hundred years of non-native planting.
Gill Hall brought out her set of priorities to make her older house more resilient. That involved upgrades to the exterior of the house, like metal roller shutters for the windows. It involved a lot of cutting back shrubs to be further from the house, and also remembering to clear out dead sticks regularly.
She reminded us to make a list and put it in order of priority, doing the big-impact/low-cost things first, then working your way down to the expensive items, such as shutters. My current list is below, including all the inexpensive, but urgent, things we’ve already done, and grading down to expensive “you’re dreaming” items that we’d like to do at some point.
Some things we have been doing every year. Our Mulliondale neighbours supply a grazing team (sheep) to make sure that the shed paddock below the house is well eaten down and less likely to carry fire. Beyond that is a crop paddock which is also sometimes ploughed up. On the other side of the house, we slash if the grazing team on that side hasn’t done a good enough job. That paddock is usually the leeward side of the house, but it has a lot of African lovegrass which burns hard and fast.
Another key item was garden plants. Gravel and succulents would make a house really defensible, but that’s definitely not what we’ve got near the house. We have roses and daisies, agapanthus, vegetables and plum trees. They’re not perfect, but better than eucalypts and cypresses.
I’ve spent the last decade removing eucalypts and gigantic cypresses from around the house. I didn’t know however that callistemons are just as much of a problem because they hold a lot of dead sticks and leaves. So we removed two by the front door and chopped one by the garage heavily.
The big things I got done were opening up a gap between the snowy river wattles and the garage, by making a gate and second driveway that also loops around past the big tank for fire trucks.
The second was replacing the rotten timber wall in the carport with a new stone wall, built by James the Bobcat Master, and including an old flywheel we picked up in the paddock.
A bonus to all the tree removal I’d got done was that in last December’s storm, only one tree branch actually clipped the house and caused damage, although there were many on fences.
A wonderful researcher, Lesley Corbett, has spent years setting fire to different native and exotic plants and rating them for flammability just so that we can choose wisely. Lomandras surprised me by being a problem, while eremophilas are quite good.
I rarely plant non-native things, but I make exceptions for ones that produce edibles: apples, pears, apricots and plums in the little orchard above the house, the olives screening the fence to the orchard).
The reputation of exotics is that they’re bushfire safe. Some are quite good, like oaks, but actually exotic cypresses and pine trees are a nightmare. I’m always astonished by how many people plant them near their houses. River casuarinas, despite the name, will grow just about anywhere and are not nearly as flammable. They do suppress other plants, so you can’t plant much under them. That said, if they’re dry enough, anything will burn.
After watching a video about a permaculture garden in clay soil being massively improved by large quantities of woodchips, I realised that I had inadvertently made my veggie garden pathways beautifully fertile by mulching them. Instead of suppressing weeds, the numbers of unwanted plants have been increasing each year. So much so that a visiting friend looked at one (weedy) area and asked “Is this supposed to be some sort of path?” Since woodchip mulch is also a fire risk, now the plan is to use the Bobkitten to scrape up all this nice soil and put it in the raised veggie garden beds, and put gravel from our farm pit on the paths, making a better fire-safe barrier. That is, as long as I rake off leaves and sticks.
Craig’s sister Vicki went full bore after the Marysville fires in 2009, and installed a lagoon just below their new house, which is much more beautiful than a blue plastic swimming pool, and a great supply of water for firefighting.
Anyway, if you live in the bush, go and see the Murrumbateman landcare information, or your local fire service, and maybe also use the new tool from the NSW government to assess your risk. Currently, despite all we’ve done so far, we’re still rated 1 out of 5 for riskiness, so there’s a lot more to do, much of it expensive.
| BUSHFIRE PREPARATION | ||||
| WHAT | HOW | COST | TIME | PRIORITY |
| Cut callistemons near front door away from house | Chainsaw, use for erosion control replacement low bushes | $ | done | 1 |
| Cut wattles and lucerne trees near garage and gravel | Chainsaw, load of gravel for levelling, new eremophila and native pigface | $ | done | 1 |
| Clear dead material below driveway, replant low non-flammable plants | Gardening time, new plants eg eremophila, lomandra | $$ | done | 1 |
| Metal panel for downstairs under-house slat door and old woodbox door to make more fire resistant | Measure, buy a metal panel, attach with screws – or make door from pebble tiles like beside stairs?? Might be too heavy, time consuming, expensive | $ | 1 | |
| Keep gravel paths weed free and raked | spray and rake | $ | ongoing | 1 |
| Convert small mulch pathway to gravel toward shed | put gravel on top – probably enough gravel on hand | $ | 1 | |
| Convert large mulch pathway around veggie garden to gravel | Dig up mulch and use for garden bed improvement because years of wood chips have made it fertile, Quantity of gravel might need bulldozer to push up more. Lay with bobkitten | $$ | 1 | |
| Clear roof gutters and leaf baskets | ladder, trowel | $ | ongoing | 1 |
| Move winter woodpile to below house | ute | $ | spring | 1 |
| Prune feijoa near house for better sightline. | ladder, chainsaw on a stick | $$ | done | 1 |
| Trim giant cypresses back to reduce circumference | Will also reduce collapsing, need clippers, ladder | $$ | removed 1 | 1 |
| Cut nandina and callistemon away from carport | clippers or saw | $ | done | 1 |
| Ensure gravity feed tank is full and operating | repair river pump check foot valve | $$ | ongoing | 1 |
| Access to house and garden tanks for fire trucks | Access past garage to side of large house tank after trees taken out. | $ | done | 1 |
| Metal kickboards for all exterior doors | Measure, buy metal panels, attach with screws – not sure how to do sliders? | $ | 1 | |
| Replace slats under stairs with stone | Tile panel, pebbles from river, glue and grout. Measure area and cut to fit, then glue pebbles | $$ | 2 | |
| Replace wooden stairs near front door with stone | River rocks, boards for framing, lots of cement. James job | $$$ | 2 | |
| Replace laundry door with metal | Because the existing one is cardboard core and damaged. | $$ | 2 | |
| Replace wooden stair treads on north side with concrete or stone slabs | Metal frame should hold stone or pavers? | $$ | 2 | |
| Replace gate to tank paddock with wider gate for better access by trucks | Fencer | $$$ | done | 2 |
| Sparkproof guttering for Annexe when gutters replaced | Also keeps out mice. One available is wrong colour | $$$ | quote | 2 |
| Metal Shutters for living room and downstairs bedroom | Metal, hinged? DIY Plantation Shutters has aluminium ones with hinged vanes and a variety of colours. Archi Expo has metal ones with fixed vanes | $$$$ | 3 | |
| Replace wooden decking with concrete | Hardie Deck boards would work – grey and unpainted I think as paint burns. Still ugly | $$$$ | 3 | |
| Replace sleeper wall by carport with stone | A James job. Rocks from old rock mulch plus more, concreted | $$$ | Done! | 3 |
| Replace Annexe windows with metal double-glazed | Because they back directly onto garden beds rather than verandah, and because they’re currently not closing properly. | $$$$ | 3 | |
One Bend In The River 