About Us
G’Day folks, It’s Rob here.
We’re a small 3 (sometimes 4) person family living on a reasonably small (680m²) urban block in Ipswich, South East Queensland Australia.
We’ve been living on this block for the past 17 years & started to slowly develop it into a small Backyard Farm about 10 years ago.
The aim of our Backyard Farm is grow as much of our own produce as we could, which we did quite successfully leading up to our renovations.
We have many “water-wise” soil based "wicking beds" dotted around the property.
In 2010 I became interested in Aquaponics after coming across a link on a frugal living website. After a few months of research I built our first 1600L/425gal system out of recycled IBC containers & barrels.
Over the next few years the system evolved into the 3200L/850gal aquaponic system we now have.
We are currently renovating our house so we can hold small workshops on site & once that is complete we shall also be redesigning the gardens & aquaponic system.
We are very eager to complete this redesign as we've missed keeping chooks (chickens) & are looking forward to getting some more ladies to help us out in the patch.
If you’d like to be kept updated on the progress of the redesign you can do so by subscribing to our YouTube channel.
ABOUT ROB
Rob Gray grew up in a rural town in northern New South Wales Australia before moving to south east Queensland where he has been growing his own food for the past 20 years. He made a move into urban farming after purchasing a house in Ipswich Queensland in 2002.
The initial water saving wicking bed gardens quickly expanded to include fruit trees, chickens, composting, vermiculture, and aquaculture and aquaponic systems.
With family still living in New South Wales, Rob started to share his urban farming activities through his Bits Out the Back blog site and videos posted to his YouTube channel Rob Bob's Backyard Farming.
In as little as 5 years his YouTube channel subscriber base had grown from just family and friends, to over 70,000 viewers from all over the world & his urban farming videos have received over 11 million views..
Rob passion for food sharing has expanded to the group Share the Seed Australia, a seed saving & sharing group on Facebook. The aim of the group is to share seeds people save from their own plants with other like-minded Australians. The group encourages people to start growing their own food or to support those that are interested in growing plants they never would have thought to grow before.
Through this group, Rob was proud to assist the creators of Share the Seed America in setting up their own Facebook seed sharing group.
Rob has a qualification in Permaculture Design from Geoff Lawton and uses his experiences and knowledge to apply these principles where he can.