Hapley Park

Home-grown organic fruit and veg here we come!

We are finally in the new place! A cosy 3 bedroom cottage on 11.5 acres in the beautiful South Gippsland hills! We have decided to call it Hapley Park and have envisioned using 2-3 acres for organic fruit and veg, 2-3 acres for a park around the house and formal gardens and the rest will become a small vineyard in time. There will also be an area dedicated to bee hives, a large chicken shed and hopefully we will be able to build a small cottage on the separate 2/3rds of an acre title for farmstays. 

That's the plan and though we don't have mountains of cash, we have plenty of time and energy to do it.

We're not starting from scratch though. Already on the property is the lovely house, which doesn't need any work, 5 water tanks (3x10,000 litre Poly tanks, a massive 30,000 litre concrete tank which is cracked and leaking and will cost about $3,500 to repair, and a small 3,000 corrugated iron tank in the orchard). There is also a dam at the bottom of one of the paddocks but the neighbour tells us it has never held water, so that will need attention before we can use it.

There is an orchard of 25 fruit and nut trees, another 10 or so dotted around the house and park and several fruit vines, none of which have had any attention in about 3 years. There is a veggie patch which is completely overgrown with weeds and I'm not sure it even gets enough light to grow vegetables. There is also a lovely garden including a park area with lots of 20-30 year old European deciduous trees, which look just beautiful right now with their autumn foliage. 

There are things that need changing though, the trees and shrubs in the park have been planted in neat rows, which is not particularly appealing visually and doesn't make the space very usable, so at some stage we will look to re-position a couple of these to open it up in the middle a bit.

There are also lots of plants around the house, too close, that are too large, camellias, rhododendrons and azaleas mainly, with some miniature and full size rose bushes that never get enough sun. These will be moved to create a formal garden at the front of the house in the future.

As I mentioned, there is also a 2nd title of about 2/3rds of an acre at the far south of the property. At the moment there is a small stockyard there, but as we don't ever intend to keep significant numbers of stock, I would like to remove this and replace it with a small cottage (adobe, cob, straw-bale or mud-brick) for luxury farm-stay holidays.

There is a double garage with a concrete floor, brilliant work bench and power, which will be perfect for my furniture restoration, and a large hay shed that my husband has plans of turning into a blacksmithing studio.

We are so incredibly excited and looking forward to our organic adventure!