Project Matilda

We received wonderful news this month, two great friends, Carly and John, are moving into the caravan indefinitely in January. Carly has been accepted into Hobart University to do a fine arts degree, and John is going to help us build the house. So along with our timber craftsman Jack, and our strong-man-good-mate Ben, we are heading into the biggest project of our lives with the best team of people anyone could ever hope for. We may even be able to keep the garden somewhat maintained on top of building the house, which would be so delightful after all our hard work to get it this far, and we could continue to reap the benefits of our labour, such as the 233 beautiful purple garlic that Anna and I harvested last week, which are now proudly hanging in the garage.

I’ve been training Karim to enjoy purchasing second hand materials so we don’t run out of money. As you can see, he’s come a long way from the 350Z sports car te he he

The energy assessment for the house has been completed (7.7 stars), house plans have been signed off by the engineer, we received the Certificate of Likely Compliance from the Building Surveyor, and the final drawings are now with council for our building application, so we hope to receive the permit this side of Christmas.

Council knocked back our waste water design because it was designed to accommodate tank water only, when the property has been connected to reticulated water supply (which is murky brown dam water from up the hill). Even though we won’t connect the house to this water supply, Council say that a future owner of the property might, and if they do, they generally won’t be as conservative with their water usage, so the reedbed has to be larger. Why anyone would want to shower in brown dam water when there is 40,000L of clean rainwater storage is beyond us, but that’s beaurocracy for you!

Our friend who is a model boat builder has been building a model of the golden spiral clerestory, so that we can design the nautilis ceiling soffits accurately, and position studs in the walls to support it, as well as plan the wiring for lighting. The process has been invaluable, as we discovered a few changes that were necessary. The benefit of tweaking the design on a one metre long model versus the nine metre long real thing is obviously enormous. This view is looking at it from outside the house, with the small squares being the clerestory windows. In the lounge room we’ll be sitting inside the spiral, which has a higher ceiling that will house the nautilis soffits, and the flat board you can see around the outside edge depicts the height of the lower flat ceiling around the surrounding kitchen and dining room.

The earthworks have been completed, and the footings contractors are currently quoting so we can pour the footings in early January. Bob ripped out the old cottage slab, and we used the concrete underneath part of the driveway that needed extending.

Once the house site was level, we created an upper terrace to aid drainage away from the house, and to create a guest carpark and elevated outdoor entertaining area, which we have already christened with Ben and Anna.

The final stage was to position rocks along the embankment that curves around the house, and the result was really stunning. We can actually picture the house nestled in there now.

We took a few soil samples from the site and confirmed that we have the perfect ingredients for the render and earthen floors.

So have saved and stockpiled an enormous amount of clay next to the house site. The excavator operator thought we were very strange asking us to save the clay so we could build our house with it, but we look forward to showing him the end result one day.

One of the many benefits of attending the strawbale working bee last month was discovering the various qualities of the straw bales. This led us to re-visit the farmers and change suppliers. The bales we had ordered were only about 11kg, versus the bales we are now getting, which are around 20kg – double the compression meaning considerably stronger walls. To weigh the bales we borrowed some butchers scales from a friend, and were greeted by their rescued wombat Matilda, which really made our year.

This month I went on an Adobe floor workshop run by a lady named Chloe, who taught at Cal-Earth Building School. I learned so much, confirmed that we definitely want earthen floors in the dining and lounge room, and met some wonderful new friends. We spent an ernomous amount of time getting rocks out of the clay, which in itself was a valuable lesson to learn, as we’ll have our clay sifted and ready to use in advance.

The property was a meditation retreat, and the owner didn’t want to use any machinery, so we tramped the mix with our feet and kneaded the adobe onto the floor with our hands. That was great fun, in a seven metre diameter tipi, but for our 70 square meters of earthen floor we may engage the help of a mortar mixer, or a few cows at least!

The result really was beautiful. Here you can see the cracked clay pad that the tipi originally sat on, and a section of the smooth new earthen floor that we installed.

The following week we taught our fourth Tassie Introduction to Permaculture course, which was fantastic. Ten people came along for the weekend, including three people from the Adobe floor workshop. We changed the agenda for the weekend quite a bit, mostly because there are so many brilliant examples of permaculture principles in the garden now. So we spent a whole day on the property rather than two days in the classroom venue and only two hours on the property, and it was really beneficial.

We only had two negative events during the month, the first being the loss of another chook, Isis. She was fine when we put them to bed, but was dead underneath the perch the following morning. There definitely wasn’t any kind of intrusion or attack from another animal, so we really have no idea what happened to her. Maybe a bad dream leading to a heart attack!

And we found a tiger snake in the garden, which had unfortunately become tangled in some netting that surrounds the duck enclosure and died. We felt really bad because they are such an important part of the system, but also somewhat traumatised that we could have easily gone to turn the compost and not seen it. We’ll need to be extremely cautious in the garden now, which isn’t easy considering it’s like a jungle in there so you can’t really see what’s around the corner!

We hope you all have awesome Christmas and New Year celebrations, we’ll miss all our family and friends during the festive season, but will be thinking about you lots xox

It seems like only yesterday that we updated the blog, yet October has been and gone. You wouldn’t think it was November by looking outside either; the weather has been dreadful, with the past couple of weeks only averaging about 15 degrees. Yet my back is sunburnt thanks to no ozone layer, nice. It’s been too wet to complete the earthworks around the house site, but we have at least surveyed the area and are ready to wave the green flag as soon as the sun dries the ground out. Next weekend’s forecast is in the mid-twenties, so we may be able to get things rolling soon.

It’s probably a good thing that the weather has delayed us, as I went on a strawbale working bee in Mountain River and came back wanting to make major changes to our plans (not the design, but the way it’s being constructed). When we arrived at the workshop the house frame and roof were already constructed; it was our mission to get the strawbale walls built and apply the first coat of render to protect them from the elements. You can see here that the posts are square, and are positioned right in the middle of where the straw bales need to sit.

So we spent a ridiculous amount of time cutting notches into the bales with a chainsaw so that we could position the bales around all the posts.

Materials for a strawbale building are much cheaper than the average home, however it is very labour intensive, and the labour ends up costing more than the materials. So we’ve been working with the designer and researching around the clock to come up with solutions to make the construction as simple as possible. Instead of square posts that get in the way of bales, we’re using wide posts so bales can simply be laid flat against them.

We also realised that the “Cell Under Tension” method of construction that we were planning to use was very risky, considering it relied on the bales being exactly 900mm long, and we discovered that the bales ranged from 800-1000mm when they came out of the baling machine. We’ve been reviewing our wall and window heights to try and ensure that an even amount of bales will fit, again to avoid spending lots of time making custom bales. We could give many more examples of the changes we’re making to our plans since attending the working bee, but in summary, thank god I went. We’re now hoping to finish the plans in the next few days, get them through the engineer and building surveyor as quickly as possible and into the council by the end of November, which would result in a building permit before Christmas. In the meantime, pray for sunny days so we can do the earthworks!

The property that the working bee was held at was beautiful, on the top of a mountain with 360 degree views of the valley. The house itself was designed to frame the “Sleeping Beauty” (the mountain in the centre which looks like the side profile of a lady’s face).

Eighteen people attended the workshop and by the end of the second day we had the first four courses of bales raised onto the walls, compressed and tensioned with wire.

Once each wall was finished a cob mix was pushed into the gaps.

The weather on day four was dismal, and we found ourselves working on cement mixers in the snow. It was actually quite soothing though, as unfortunately the owner of this house wanted a lime and cement render rather than earth, a concoction that gave us three degree burns on our arms after several hours of mixing. God knows what the powdered lime did to our lungs! Willem is pictured here, who built a large timber mallet for bashing the walls into place, and at the end of the workshop he handed it down to us to build our house with, and we’ll hand it to the next person, which was really special.

By the end of day four all the strawbale walls were constructed and the base coat of render was being applied.

We met a ceramics artist named Nana, who recently moved to Tasmania from Finland (only three days before the workshop in fact). Nana has since visited our property to test the suitability of the earth that we have to use for render, cob and poured earth floors. We couldn’t have asked for better results, we have extremely heavy clay, sandy clay, and sand with a rich colour pigment in it, so we shouldn’t need to bring any materials in at all for those parts of the build. Nana has also trained to do amazing relief work in earthen renders, such as the spectacular corner shown here.

On the garden front… we’re teaching another Introduction to Permaculture Course in November, but have re-designed the weekend’s agenda to spend the entire Sunday on the property doing practical demonstrations. So we’ve been working hard to get the garden in tip top shape, demonstrating as many examples of permaculture principles as we can.

First of all meet the boys; Tumble, Weed, Bumble & Bee. They are quite simple, yet simply adorable, and best of all… they love eating slugs! We dug a swale along either side of their paddling pond (which was a gift from Ben & Anna) to tip the murky water into each time we clean it, and the swales divert the water filled with duck poo to feed the fruit trees and raspberries.

So we don’t need to spend time ushering the boys around the garden when it’s time to go to bed, Karim set up these awesome barricades leading into their house, which makes rounding them up each night a breeze.

The green manures that we planted in the chicken run in September are thriving, and you can see in the background that the girls have nearly finished cultivating the other run. These green manures are not only building soil, fixing nitrogen and feeding the chooks, but they've provided ample mulch for the fruit trees so we don't need to buy straw. They also flowered before anything else, providing bee forage early in the season.

Btw the girls say hi…

The two fruit trees in this bed are surrounded by thyme, sage, coriander, rosemary, chamomile, parsley, beetroot, onion, parsnip, garlic, strawberries and a cabbage. The herbs on the edges have really benefited from the thermal mass created by the rocks, and have done a great job acting as a grass and weed barrier.

We are winning the slug battle and the carrot seedlings have emerged! This will be our third attempt at growing carrots, with the first two missions being unsuccessful, so here’s hoping that previous lessons learnt will result in a good crop this year.

The flowers are blooming, which delights the bees…

The tomatoes, capsicum and eggplant have been transplanted, surrounded by black plastic and rocks in an attempt to increase the soil temperature.

We’re also experimenting with black bin lids from the rubbish tip to increase the temperature around tomatoes and chillies, and as an added bonus they direct all the water to the root zone of the plant.

Evidence that lemon balm loves rhubarb…

Evidence that garlic helps prevent leaf curl on nectarine trees, as the nectarine tree behind the garlic in this photo was riddled with leaf curl last spring and there’s no sign of it now. We can’t wait to start eating that garlic next month. We’ve grown enough this time to eat all year and save enough to sow for next year’s crop (this is only one of the three garlic crops we planted).

These cabbages prove that the Albizia lopantha don’t compete for water and nutrient, they provide shelter and fix nitrogen in the soil, just like various layers in a thriving forest would.

We’ve constructed a trellis ready for cucumber and pumpkin to grow vertically, and have buried fermented Bokashi in the trench so that the earthworms and other soil life can turn it into perfect compost by the time we plant the seedlings.

We also built this container garden with used milk bottles to grow lettuce, coriander and basil without taking up space in the garden bed, and if it works we’ll make some more with the students at the course so the whole fence is lined with lettuce and herbs.

We let a few things go to seed last year, and now have dozens of new seedlings without having to plant a single seed, such as the coriander and radish below.

It’s hard to believe the frog pond was only completed last October...

We’ve been potting up succulents and other native cuttings with the aim of having some established plants ready to landscape around the house when it’s built, rather than live inside a beautiful home that’s inside a construction site for an extra two years. Let’s hope they surprise us next year like the plants around the frog pond have.

And last but not least, we’ve had a couple of naughty possum intrusions in the garden during the past few weeks, which has damaged a few of the fruit trees, so we’ve been altering the floppy fence at what appear to be potential areas of weakness. The last intrusion was about four days ago now, so we are desperately hoping that we have solved the problem.

So that was our October in Tassie Mania… Phew!

Bubbling Along

Tassie Mania generally experiences some crazy weather patterns in September, and this year was no exception with temperatures ranging from minus 1.1 to 22. We’ve never seen weather like it anywhere else in the world, where several times during the day the sky can change from bright blue without a cloud in sight, to being dark with sideways rain. Warmer weather is definitely upon us now though, as the Welcome Swallows have returned to their nest in the carport. We’ve witnessed a group of fairy wren chicks grow up over winter, and thought they were all female. However a few weeks ago one of them started looking “motley”, then we noticed a tiny glimmer of blue. Within two weeks he was a superb bright blue male, a remarkable development to watch. Now there is a second chick developing blue feathers, which is just wonderful.

The garden is constantly improving as we gain more experience and experiment with different techniques. Our neighbour taught us how to build our own compost tea brew kit, which we now have bubbling away every time the wood stove is on. You can sense the microbes having a breeding frenzy and it feels so great applying it to the soil.

With new spring seedlings emerging it’s crucial that the slug battle continues on a nightly basis. I’ve spent so much time planning the garden, sowing seeds, transplanting and feeding this season’s food crops that the war will be waged until there are clear signs of defeat, otherwise weeks of nurturing can be destroyed overnight. It’s so worth it knowing that what’s currently on this table will end up feeding us for several months.

I thought I was nearing the point of defeat (at least in the mandala garden), when a few nights ago dozens of eggs must have hatched that were left behind by the adults that I’ve been slaughtering over the past weeks. It sure is hard to stay positive when that happens, but I am winning and the front line is continuously moving forward. We did a controlled experiment to determine the success of yeast traps versus beer traps, and the beer traps won hands down (smart snails), so we’ve purchased a home brew kit (and the snails won’t be the only ones indulging).

A Permabee was held at Ben and Anna’s early in September, to help them build the paths and fence around their first food garden. These photos give you an idea of what they started with, as we look forward to sharing some before and after photos of an established and thriving edible garden in a few months’ time.

And thanks to a Permabee that was held at our property yesterday, we’re ready for the arrival of the (hopefully) slug eating Khaki Campbell ducks. A few of us erected a net across half of the garden to keep the ducks in their designated zone, while Ben finished building the quoll proof duck house.

Our house plans are really close to being completed, but it’s been surprising how many changes and difficult decisions we’ve had to make in the final stages. We were planning on poured earth floors throughout most of the house. However, because we are on highly reactive clay soil, the earthen floors can only be poured as “infill”, so require concrete strip footings under all the walls. You can see on the diagram below that this created extremely complicated footings that would have cost a fortune, as well as left us with a myriad of muddy swimming pools to work in during construction (because the earthen floors get poured at the very end). We’re still having the poured earth floors with hydronic heating in the kitchen, dining and lounge room, but the master bedroom will be a timber floor, and we’ve changed the back bedrooms, toilet, bathroom and mudroom to a concrete slab with floating timber flooring and tiles in the wet areas.

The hardest decision we’ve had to make recently is to forfeit the section of living roof. As magical as it would have been, the additional structural support required, the waterproofing and all the other layers involved would cost more than $20,000. This is an expensive garden to have on the roof, when we have 15 acres of garden and forest around the house. The fact that the roof would more than likely leak at some point in time also had a huge impact on our decision. There's been some nice improvements aswell though, such as a lovely curved wall through the hallway, and my stepmum Jen helped with the decision to render the clerestory wall rather than use timber cladding, which we think will look great. This is how the house is looking from the outside now, and at the end of the day, it’s still beautiful without the roof garden.

Because we thought of it well in advance, the engineer has allowed us to use green timber that’s being cut on a Lucas mill at a nearby property for some of the frame (instead of dried hardwood). When timber is cut it shrinks during the drying process, but by milling and racking it up now, it should have done all its shrinking by the time we use it. It’s saved us about $4,000, and it’s exciting looking at all this timber that we know we’ll be building our home with soon.

Well the sun is shining and the chooks are calling for their porridge. We need to break the news to them that it’s October now, so no more warm porridge for breakfast until next April. Have a wonderful month everyone…