March was full of excitement as we installed our first structure, the garage, which will be our home from December 2010 until we build the house (probably about three years). It's not exactly an eco-structure (concrete & steel), but we hope to make up for that by taking our time in the design and construction of the permanent house.
Where was Dean when we needed him for all this dry stone walling???
The installation didn’t come without a few hiccups – all the wall and roofing sheets had a small dent in them and had to be replaced, but it only put us two weeks behind schedule and we got to keep all the slightly damaged sheets, which will be great to use as a roof on the wood shed or chook pen. So it all worked out for the better, and we now have a fantastic new garage.
We’re hoping that it will also serve as Karim’s office, depending on the regularity and volume of night-time conference calls with Israel and the feasibility of trying to work with four furry friends climbing all over him! This is the section that we’re fitting out to live in, which is 12 x 4.3m, so it’ll be cosy to say the least :o)
The caravan is safely on the land now, and ready for its first guests in April – our future next door neighbors Ben and Magali. They’re coming down from 
After years of saving for this life change, it’s been somewhat difficult to watch the money disappear as the project progresses ($10k for the garage slab, $12k for the kit, $5k for the double glazed windows, $4k for installation). At the same time, we’ve become professional bargain hunters at demolitions, for example we’ve picked up a second hand solid blackwood kitchen for $400 (courtesy of the coin jar) and a Stanley wood heater/stove/hot water unit worth over $7k for only $3k, which we’ll move into the permanent house once its built.
I think the salesman noticed my hand shaking yesterday as we also handed over $15k for water tanks, irrigation and fencing, which will all (fingers crossed) go up in April/May once the dam is built. Having never done anything like this before, planning the water harvesting system was one hell of a brain teaser. We plan to pump water from the dam 150m uphill into a holding tank, and from there gravity feed it back down 200m to irrigate the gardens. We’ve made sure we can also flick a switch and use the dam water to pump directly to fire fighting taps. There will be a drinking water tank on the garage, which we’ll also pump up to a separate holding tank so that we have gravity feed water to the garage and future house (which means we’ll always have water, even when there’s no power). It sounds easy, but involved days of mapping out and measuring the distances and heights on the land, which in the end resulted in ordering over 130 parts – nipples, elbows, tees, joiners, pumps, filters, poly pipe, gate valves, adapters, float valves, taps, strainers etc. And of course the three water tanks, which had to have exactly the right inlets and outlets to facilitate the plan. Put it this way, we’ve learned a hell of a lot about irrigation systems this month!
A wonderful thing happened in March – the tiny abandoned kitten, Hedge, recovered and grew big enough to finally go to his new home in New Norfolk, not before melting our hearts of course :o)
And talking of Hedges, we’ve planted our first Hedge along the eastern boundary. When constructing the driveway we asked the excavator driver to carefully mound the topsoil on the eastern side, and it's now thriving with a mixture of Showy Honeymyrtle, Calistemon Kings Park Special and Acacia Retinodes, all of which combined will fix nitrogen, attract the birds and bees and provide some privacy.
Oh – and very exciting news indeed – it looks like we definitely have a resident wombat in the forest! As far as I know no other creature deposits logs like these (squares that are joined together)
I’m progressing well in the distance Accredited Permaculture Training that I’m doing through the National Environment Centre. Topic 1 is complete, which was summarising the 12 ethics and three principles of Permaculture and giving examples of how we can apply them, measuring our own ecological footprint (if everyone lived like me, we’d need two planet earths to provide enough resources – crikey!!), and analysing food miles. I’m half way through Topic 2, which is writing a client brief, doing a site risk analysis and a list of plants that can grow in the area. These studies will not only support our own designs that we implement on the land, but will enable me to teach accredited Permaculture courses in the future.
Last month we wrote a list of things we love about Tassie. To add to that list, the following photo says it all te he he (yep, it’s for real)
And finally, we need you all to do us a massive favor – over the next week please visualise us having a wonderful dam on the property. The excavator is coming in on Monday 19th April, and we’re nervous to say the least. Have we surveyed the waterline properly, have we chosen the right location, will we have enough catchment to fill the dam, will there be enough clay to seal the dam??? We look forward to our April update, when we will hopefully be letting you know that the answer to all these questions was YES!
