It was amazing to come back from a four week holiday and still be able to harvest more than 10kg of food; it really is turning into a permaculture garden. Things are slowing down in there now, and thanks to all the help from Carly and Dan, it’s really just a matter of maintenance while we shift our focus to the house build. We remember saying to Al in January “we can’t wait for the day that you can’t see the back fence”, and can’t believe that day has already come, considering the first seedling was only planted last July!
We’re fully emersed in the house design phase now. Graham has been doing an amazing job (as both designer and marriage counsellor), and has showed an incredible level of patience to ensure that the internal measurements of every single room (after rendering) are in sacred geometric proportion to us and the earth. I’ll be hand rendering for many weeks, and if Karim gets out the tape measure to ensure that the walls are in haromy by the millimetre I think I will literally kill him!
It was exciting to get the first glimpse of what the house will look like from the outside. The curved section of green roof in front of the curved clerestory will hopefully be an earthern roof, these being two main features that are outside our budget restrictions (which we’re chosing to ignore for now).
It’s difficult for the computer software to generate the “organic” feel that the house will have with round timber posts, natural stone, earthen render and tapered windows, however this gives us a pretty good idea of what the view from the sunken lounge will be like, looking over the half height feature wall to the dining room and up to the kitchen. Of course if we turn 180 degrees, we’ll see the Huon River. The high ceiling over the lounge is the shape of the golden spiral and will be a major feature, possibly with exposed beams.
Here is Eva and James admiring the river views from the future dining room, which is also the view we’ll have from the lounge, kitchen (looking over the lounge), master bedroom and outdoor deck. We can’t wait to start enjoying this view more, and should be able to see the dolphins swim down the river like our neighbours do.
An interesting part of the process for Council planning approval was designing our Bushfire Hazard Management Plan, which is something we take quite seriously considering we don’t want to clear the forest that surrounds us, and Tassie Mania is well overdue for its cyclical bushfire. The plan has just been endorsed by the Tasmanian Fire Service, so we are ready to submit our planning application. We will also apply several design techniques to the house in order to protect it, as our strategy will certainly be “get the cats and go” rather than “stay and defend” if a fire storm is heading our way.
We hosted the second Permaculture Skillshare at the property last Saturday and Sunday, which was a wonderful distraction from the house project. Eva gave an amazing presentation of an old golf course that her and husband Drew have purchased in Brighton, which they are developing into a Permaculture property. Christian presented a Permablitz project that he designed in Melbourne, and being a circus trainer, he taught us how to juggle! We all watched some fantastic lectures and movies, held extremely beneficial conversations about training courses and the future of Permaculture Tasmania, and built a cage so we could trial a new method of hot composting. We chose specific ingredients to make this pile fungal biased, which results in an acidic environment that supports fruits and trees.
