For a couple of nature-loving ecologists living on the Central Coast, staying home doesn't mean staying indoors, although they have plenty of nature inside their house as well.
Alan Kwok and Samantha Travers moved into the four-bedroom, two-storey brick house in Bensville in 2011.
They share their home with two rescue dogs Quartz and Topaz and three parrots, Pirate, Lumi and Alchey.
Their three outdoor chickens, Lurch, Stripey and Nugget, are also part of their family and produce eggs during the warmer months.
It's the first home they've owned, and it was built around 2001. They liked how spacious it was, allowing them to practice their many creative hobbies. Kwok is a nature photographer and Travers is a pole dancer.
They also liked the home's location.
It is close to the bush and beach and not far from where Travers grew up.
"We think about sustainability a lot and how we can reduce our impact," Kwok says.
They noticed that most of the lawns in their neighborhood were manicured, but they didn't want to buy a two- or four-stroke mower.
The first Saturday they moved in, Travers started to mow with a manual mower and two neighbours dropped by to help her edge and trim.
They were grateful for their friendly neighbours' help, but ultimately they wanted to make their front garden feel 'fuller'.
They took out the lawn and put down native grasses like myoporum, kangaroo grass and poa, as well as eucalypts, grevillea, callistemons, and Sturt's desert pea.
They put in woodchips and native blue banded bees started nesting.
Their land became a place for new life and habitats.
"Some (plants) are in pots, some are in modern brickwork beds," Kwok says.
"The house is relatively new, but a lot of what we have made (fences, planter boxes, etc.) is out of scrap wood off junk piles, and discarded wood pallets, so there's this contrast between I guess 'old and wooden' looking and solid human made again."
They have a bed in the front for colorful annual native flowers.
"Leading up to our wedding, I used it to grow paper daisies which ended up being a lot of my decorations and in the wedding bouquet. Then it was desert peas and the next thing going in will be sunflowers," Travers says.
Now that they're both staying home substantially more, it's given them opportunities to get creative in their raised edible garden beds.
The past couple of months have seen Asian greens and a lot of basil. They've also grown beans, corn, capsicum, cucumber tomatoes, silver beet, raspberries, blueberries and strawberries. They've found all the produce a useful alternative to grocery shopping.
"You can cut down what you have to buy by a fairly substantial amount just by having a couple of plants. We've also started doing a lot of microgreens. You can grow them quickly inside. Alfalfa and broccoli sprouts, you just grow from seed and harvest between 10-14 days," Kwok says.
Isolation is inspiring projects they might not have had time for otherwise. For one quarantine activity, they harvested 2.7 kilos of finger limes. They cut them in half, froze the flesh, then dehydrated the skin to grind up later.
Another project was to pick the over-ripened corn from their kernels, dehydrate them and then grind them to make cornmeal.
"We don't like wasting food," Kwok says.
Kwok got into gardening when he met Travers. For Travers, growing food is genetic; her grandfather was a chicken farmer.
"My living memory of him, he's still living on a couple of acres and has always grown his own food. A third of his land was the agricultural area and the rest was bush," she says.
"Every Sunday we'd go up there for the classic Aussie baked lunch and then we'd go for a bushwalk and be eating the produce he'd grown and be walking through the bush.
"I've always had that connection with nature and growing your own food."
The two clearly adore their community. They've even given ecological walks through the area with other nature enthusiasts.
With birds, bees and Asian greens, Travers and Kwok are living proof of just how fruitful the isolation lifestyle can be.
