With fern trees that are hundreds of years old, moss and massive ancient trees, you can’t help but feel the fairies when walking through this pristine valley, and you shudder at the thought of it being ripped up to supply wasteful and unnecessary products such as gift cards, wrapping paper, newspaper and glossy magazines. The forest floor was full of various shaped fungi that were brightly coloured; it looked astonishingly similar to a coral reef. It was a very special place indeed.
Back on home soil, while we don’t aim to be totally self sufficient, we can certainly see the potential to provide for most of our vegetable needs in the future. We consumed 20kg of goodies from the garden in February such as salad greens, beetroot, kohlrabi, pumpkin, zucchini, cabbage, beans, potato, tomato, squash, various herbs, strawberries and blackberries. The goddesses laid 71 eggs this month, some of which we traded for tomatoes at the local grocer. We helped Loris in the garden and received some zucchini, plums, cucumber and beans, and picked 6kg of blackberries for Loris so she could teach us how to make blackberry jam, coming home with eight very delicious jars of it. Constantly discovering what we can grow through the different seasons here, and adjusting our seasonal eating habits accordingly, is quite an enjoyable process on the path to vegetable self sufficiency. I have to say, we’re quite proud of our first ever pumpkin.
It’s surprising just how much we’ve managed to grow considering the lack of good quality soil here, on top of such a cool summer. We attended a soils and compost / compost tea workshop last week and are really excited about the garden’s potential once we start applying “actively aerated controlled microbial applications”. Bring on the microbes! Did you ever think that we would find protozoa, nematodes, earthworms, microarthropods, bacteria and fungi so exciting?
Mark, the English Wwoofer who arrived early in the month, was one of the most considerate and polite people we’ve ever met. He really took a shining for the chooks, especially Mayet, and particularly enjoyed doing jobs related to their health and wellbeing, such as cleaning out their pen and spraying it lovingly with a solution of EM (Effective Micro-organisms). One of the comments he wrote in the guest book was “If ever I am reborn as a chicken I’d like to end up living here, and if I live here as a chicken I’d like Mayet to be my girl – she’s gorgeous!” te he
Speaking of the guest book, because we only introduced it in late January, our first three Wwoofers are posting us their entries. Al’s contribution was these hilarious cartoons about his visit here, featuring Al, us and a few of our Tassie Mania friends:
They’ve also helped pot up the rest of the native trees, which were screaming to get out of the smaller pots. Dan then levelled the ground and made two fantastic shelves for all the plants with these old metal single beds that we got from the tip. These trees are the result of seeds that we planted at the rental property last year, and have really shot up since being re-potted… we can’t wait to plant them in the ground come winter.
The best news about Carly and Dan is that they are staying with us for a few months and will look after the place (and it’s furry and feathery occupants) while we are away in April and May. The cats already have them twisted around their little paws, so won’t even notice that we’ve gone. Because Carly and Dan will have worked on a farm in a regional area for three months, they’ll also be able to apply for an extra year on their work visa. Here’s an amazing photo that they captured of a baby echidna on their way to the Tahune Air Walk.
And the beautiful view of the sunrise view from the caravan
February seemed to be the month for publicity as well as productivity. An article on the Permabee scheme that we’ve been co-ordinating was published in the Huon News:
The Permaculture course that we’re running for Adult Education in March was published in their catalogue along with a tutor profile:
And an the article on our wetlands system was published in the Owner Builder magazine:
We’ve been on a mission to combat a few challenges lately, one being electromagnetic fields (EMF’s). Since moving into the garage we’ve noticed a very subtle but high pitched frequency sound when it’s quiet at night, and it’s often caused headaches and a general feeling of tension. We were getting quite stressed about it and after asking around found the services of a “Building Biologist”. He visited with meters that measure both electromagnetic fields and radio waves, and the findings were quite concerning, but luckily manageable. Actually seeing the level of EMF’s coming from electrical equipment on his meters was shocking to say the least, especially anything with a transformer (such as the IPOD, speakers, phone charger, camera charger, printer, scanner, laptop etc). The combined EMF’s coming off all this equipment was well above healthy limits, and interestingly it was still evident even when turned off at the wall. It was only when the plugs were removed from the sockets that the EMF’s went completely back to zero. Even worse were the emissions from the mobile phone and wireless internet as they worked hard to reach a signal through the steel shed to a radio tower located kilometres away. The Biologist mentioned that landline phone and internet is much healthier than wireless, and cordless phones are even worse than mobiles. Also worth noting is that many of our computers have internal WIFI software, so even when our computers are plugged into the landline internet supply or external 3G cards, our computer software is also sending out an additional signal that we’re not even using. Needless to say we’ve turned this software off inside our computers, everything is pulled out of the wall when not in use, and we’re limiting time spent on the computer and internet dramatically, and we’re already feeling better. I do wonder how much this has to do with us being on the raw food diet at the moment, and whether the diet makes us acutely aware of and in tune with our bodies and general health.
Another challenge has been the compost toilet inside the garage, which has always been a touchy subject with me. Firstly, the list of “council approved” compost toilets are made from cheap plastic, use a lot of energy and produce a lot of emissions during the manufacturing process, are shipped miles to reach our doorstep, and cost a fortune. It’s somewhat annoying that they work in exactly the same fashion as many compost toilets that are homemade from recycled materials, such as the one we built for the caravan, yet council will not approve these. To add to my frustration, the instructions say to add 50% peat moss and 50% sugar cane mulch as the bulking agent, both of which are really unsustainable. Homemade compost toilets work very efficiently with locally grown materials such as hay and sawdust. So I contacted the company to discuss alternatives, and opened a massive can of worms. You would expect people buying compost toilets, and the manufacturers, to be somewhat environmentally conscious. Well, they were unable to offer any alternatives to the sugar cane mulch, and when I asked "does that mean our $3,000 toilet won't work if transport links between Tasmania and Queensland are cut off and we can't get the sugar cane mulch?" they said "can't you buy enough for a few years just in case that happens?" mmmm The only alternative they were willing to offer instead of peat moss was coconut choir, but surely they know that we don’t grow coconuts in Tasmania either?! To cut a very long and painful story short, we’re going to use comfrey instead of peat moss, and locally grown wood shavings inoculated with fungi instead of sugar cane mulch. The toilet also keeps getting infested with vinegar flies. Visualise me dealing with the first major infestation back in January while I was stopping smoking… it wasn’t pretty. We’re currently dealing with the second major infestation, and are close to ripping the toilet out of the bathroom and ignoring the bureaucracy of council approval in order to install a homemade, sustainable system that works just fine.
Unfortunately the frog pond is another huge challenge we need to face at some point because it’s sprung a major leak. We sought advice when the rendering was finished to see if we needed to apply a flexible waterproof sealant before filling it, and the advice was to only go to the expense and effort of doing that if it ended up leaking. We’ve since learned that a problem was highly likely given that it’s concrete render on heavy clay soil (which moves and shrinks, cracking the concrete). It would have been so much easier to apply the membrane on clean, dry render, but after a few hundred man hours of construction the pond now needs to be emptied, scrubbed, fixed and sealed, a process of several steps and coats that will take about 20 days, while we somehow try to keep all the life that’s in there moist in buckets so it doesn’t die. We’ve been so busy that we think we might leave it until next spring, and hopefully regular rains will keep it moist in the meantime.
But to end on a positive note, another battle, which we will win slowly but surely, is eradicating unproductive blackberry from the forest. Some would say that the forest is Zone 5, which should be completely left to nature, not controlled or maintained in any way, the only thing we do in Zone 5 is observe and learn from successful natural systems. However, after speaking to other permies, we decided that blackberry is not part of a natural system in Tasmania, and if we don’t eradicate it there won’t be any successful natural system left to learn from. With this thorny vine covering hundreds of meters of natural understorey it’s a daunting job to say the least, however Anna and I are tackling it together… rotating at each other’s properties. These before and after photos highlight ferns that could have died soon if we didn’t save them, being strangled underneath the blackberry.
Apart from the cuts and bruises it’s a rewarding process, which we can celebrate with a row on the Huon River… that’s if we manage to get out of the boat shed. Here I am almost bursting a blood vessel trying to get us out, without realising that a) Anna was rowing us in the opposite direction and b) the anchor was down doh!
