Greetings from the hobby farmers down under.

Our farm owner, Alf, has more than 40 years of experience working on many wild and cultivated plants in Australia. Now approaching retirement as a teacher, it is natural progression for Alf to purchase and develop a hobby farm. He is developing a 5-acre hobby farm at outskirts of Melbourne 50km from city center. Alf hopes to enjoy his lifelong passion of growing plants, especially fruit and vegetables. With the help of some friends, Alf has also established an internet portal My Hobby Farm to share his ups and downs in his own piece of paradise.

We are interested to hear what other hobby farmers are doing in Europe and USA, especially in the area of grafting and cuttings. As most of southern Australia has had below average rainfall in recent years, we are also interested in water harvesting system. Hobby farmers will have little chance of success without an effective water harvesting system. As we write about the Challenges ahead. we are open to your comments, suggestions or questions. Please relate your thoughts or experiences concernning any topic discussed at our contact page. We look forward to hearing from you.

Welcome Bentan!

I consider myself a hobbyist, but that is restricted only to 725 sq ft (67.35 m2) of backyard land,

We are a diverse group here, Most of us have backyards in the city lots where we do our hobby on very pricy piece of dirt, but very few have a "backyard" as big as yours! Some of us own greenhouses and some own whole small island in the tropics. Majority of us do drip irrigation.

It is a real challenge when you have limited amount of rain, especially with the current global climatic change where Australia is mostly impacted.

Here's some useful links to a department from my Alma Mater: http://www.sarep.ucdavis.edu/

I think I have encountered various approaches to farming in very arid climate like yours when I took some graduate courses in sustainable agriculture. There are too many to mention so in laziness, I just provided you the link.

So how much rainfall do you get? Over here in Northern California, we averaged about 51 cm each year. But the state has sophisticated and complex water capture and delivery system.