"Grieve not too long, but look around, in nature’s gifts he can be found, a falling leaf, a growing tree, in every breeze, flying free.”
It was somewhat difficult to “carry on as normal” after Paul passed, but in his honour we did, and a few days later we taught our first Introduction to Permaculture course in Tassie Mania. Twenty students came along for the weekend and it was a very positive and rewarding experience. We’ve since been asked to do a presentation at the Woodbridge Community Hall in November, followed by a tour of our property, and to teach another course through the Department of Education early next year, so we are thrilled.
Our friend Jay arrived in Tassie the day after the course and we spent a wonderful week relaxing and seeing some of the sights. The highlights were a visit to Bonorong Wildlife Park, where we saw some of the animals that we’ve found evidence of on our property (but have never sighted), such as wombats, quolls and sugar gliders (oh my gosh they are too cute to be real!). We also got to see a white possum, owls, the Tasmanian Devils feeding and pat a koala, as well as loads of wallabies with joeys. We did a fantastic walk around the sea cliffs at Waterfall Bay…
It was a magical place full of beauty…
But unfortunately we also witnessed several areas of destruction along the way….
Jay also had the privilege of witnessing our first harvest on the land, only the biggest mushroom we’ve ever seen!
Following a few heavy rains the creek is flowing with full force, and since witnessing the local micro-hydro set up, we can’t help but see and feel an immense amount of energy when we visit the creek…
The property is looking great; we’ve planted reeds along all the drains to prevent erosion, completed the first coat of render on the fish pond and eradicated a lot of weeds from the forest before they take hold. The gardens are looking great, veges are growing well and the fruit trees have started blossoming.
The garage has been plastered and is now ready for painting. We’ve progressed amazingly well with the biggest challenge, being the wetlands system. We engaged the designer of our next door neighbour’s house, who has also designed large scale wetlands systems, to turn our idea into a technical document that could be submitted to council. The design is based on using large fish tubs as the reed beds, which we bought second hand from a fish farm for $30 each. The plans went into council, and the Health and Environment Officer is very impressed with the innovation and hopes to see more of this in the future :o) Now we just have to receive the permission to plumb the garage, considering it’s not for occupancy. If they give us any grief I plan to invite them to the land, show them how much we’ve been working there (without living there), show them Dean’s bush dunny and put the “perceived” health risks of all the Conservation Volunteers using that facility straight back at them. I have no doubt they’ll then give us the permit to install adequate facilities.
We had the first Franklin Permablitz in September, which involves community members coming together on each others properties to create or maintain edible gardens, share skills related to permaculture and have fun. It is envisaged that this project will enable us to gauge how much interest, commitment and momentum we have in Franklin toward food gardening. We will then be better informed to make a decision on whether creating and maintaining a community garden in Franklin is feasible. The ultimate aim is to make Franklin edible enough such that should food become unaffordable or inaccessible, we won’t even notice. Here’s Karim satisfying the main aim of the Permablitz… to have fun!
We’ll sign off this month from Tassie Mania with the real reason why the chicken crossed the road:
