Love is in the Air

We were privileged to see another union of two very special friends this month, being Carly and John in the Central Coast of NSW, and I was truly honoured to be one of Carly’s bridesmaids. The wedding was simply magic, funky and full of love. Everything was perfect, from the rehearsal dinner, spending the night before the wedding with Carly, her mum and the other bridesmaids, the ceremony and the reception. It was also amazing getting to know Carly and John’s families better, and experiencing all the love they have for one another.

This photo is proof that apart from being special, it really was a fun wedding as well…

Unfortunately our first morning back in Tassie Mania was a big come down after such a great weekend, as the little joey (Nolam) died overnight. It was really heartbreaking, and has prompted me to go on a wildlife rescue course sooner rather than later to guarantee that we really do know as much as we possibly can to help increase wildlife survival rates. We need to learn how to deal with the emotions of not always been able to save them, but at least will know that we did absolutely everything we could.

On a more positive note, we met with our house designers, Guy Greener and Graham Richmond. They loved the concept design, though they did lose a little sleep that night thinking about how to design a four-way vaulted ceiling that meets at a central core supported by tree branches! Graham has already done fantastic work applying the sacred geometric proportions: the primary golden spiral defining the proportions of the whole house flows from the canon of the harmonic mean of both Karim and my heights; the centre of this spiral defines the "centre" of the house (which is where the tree with branches breaks out of the poured earth floor); the clerestory wall line is a golden spiral that flows from the canon of my navel; and the curved wall of the dining and living areas is formed by one quadrant of a circle having a diameter equal to 3/1000th of the semi-major axis of the earth. We still can’t really picture the house from the outside yet, because how to position the roof is one of the designer’s biggest challenges, but we look forward to receiving a 3D image next month.

Carly, Dan and I have been on a mission in the garden, getting it to the stage where (apart from planting each month’s seedlings) it just needs to be maintained over the next couple of years while we work on the house. All the garlic and broad beans are in the ground, the fruit trees have been fed and mulched, and the pigface hedge has been extended all along the whole length of the hazelnut bushes to keep the grass at bay (as well as attract the bees and provide edible fruit of course).

Dan has built all the garden beds extending off the mandala, creating lovely paths in and out of the potting shed and shade house. The foot path now extends all the way down to the chicken system, and extra beds were created along the fence lines to house climbers such as peas and beans. He dug massive holes in front of each post and buried Bokashi, manure and old compost so the earthworms can move in and create the perfect atmosphere for the kiwi fruit and grape vines that we’re planting in July.

He also cut access tracks into the fruit trees to make it easier for us to tend to the trees, and was able to use the soil from here to build the additional beds.

Peter finished building the roof over the frame of the hay shed that Joan built, and now that it’s full of hay it provides extra insulation for the chooks coming into winter.

And the natives are all enjoying being potted up over the past few months, and are looking forward to making their way into their new forest home in July.

We did manage to squeeze in some good times too, one being during a visit from one of Anna’s Melbournite friends, Bronnie. Here’s hoping the Aussies haven’t warped the minds of the poor English and Welsh woofers too much over the past two months, but you can definitely spot the Aussies in this photo!

We also had a fun Easter egg hunt with a few other neighbours and their kids, followed by delicious wood fired pizzas. The kids had a great time finding eggs in the garden and decorating hard boiled eggs.

The adults acted like kids guessing riddles then racing through the garden to find the eggs.

We’re now preparing to leave in two days time for Jordan, Egypt and then onto London for the next celebration of love and union (Gav and Wendy). Now that it’s getting cooler Carly and Dan are looking forward to upgrading from the caravan to the garage, and they continue to spoil the cats rotten. Ella has melted Dan’s heart so much that he’s threatened to carry this photo around in his wallet! So we can leave for a wonderful holiday knowing that they’re in good hands and well loved…

Concept Design for our Earth Home

We’re feeling rather excited down here in Tassie Mania at the moment, with lots of wonderful things going on. We finished the design brief for our house, met with a builder last week, and are scheduled to meet the designers next week with an aim to start building in summer. It’ll be interesting to see how much the final design changes from this concept design that we’ve done.

Picture straw bale external walls with earth renders, round timber posts, mud brick and stone feature walls. The living room is sunken, and you can see the Huon River from the dining room, kitchen, living room and master bedroom. While I came up with the layout, Karim focused on incorporating his strong passion for Sacred Geometry. For example, the curve in the middle of the house is the Golden Spiral, which is derived from the geometric mean ratios of both our heights (refer to Leonardo da Vinci’s “Canon of Man diagram below). One section of the house is derived from a square whose side length measures 1/1000 of the semi major axis of the earth, so the house is in proportional relationship to both of its principle inhabitants and the planet it sits on.

It was quite a challenge to pull this together with Karim being away so much, but we got there in the end. And thanks to having lots of great people in our lives, it didn’t get lonely down here without him. We hosted a Permabee early in March, which ten friends from the community came to. Sandy, and our neighbour Daniel’s mum, potted up loads of native plants.

Jack, Ben & Daniel built our new beaut worm farm from an old bath tub.

It was time to move our feathery friends into the second chicken tractor area, so Graham & Troy moved the net over (to protect them from hawks) and loosened up any remaining grass in the original run with the pick axe. Then Anna & Jayne (after planting lots of broad beans) removed the grass with Celia’s help. Thanks to these friends, and the chickens, we were left with a beautifully cultivated, manured and pest controlled section of the chicken run.

Then Carly and Dan moved in to sow green manures; Oats, Woolly Pod Vetch and Red Clover, which are all chicken forage as well as nitrogen fixing.

Carly looked after the irrigation during any dry spells since, and now the green manures are already well established while the chooks are working hard at manuring and cultivating the other run. Once the green manures are mature, we’ll swap runs again and the chooks can eat those crops, while at the same time they prepare that area for our crops. The green manures will also have fixed added nitrogen into the soil, so the resulting soil should be a lot different from the heavy clay soil we started with a year ago.

Loads more happened in the garden during March. We’ve set up a compost zone, which can now accommodate one of the richest sources of nutrient; humanure. This year’s humanure will sit in the first crate until September, and then we’ll start storing it in the second crate so that the first crate can age for a full year and be ready to put into the garden in spring 2012. To make the path along the compost zone more aesthetically pleasing, Dan has moved the single beds that accommodate all the baby trees that we’re nurturing, ready to plant in winter.

Dan finished lining the footpaths around the mandala garden with rocks, and then Carly laid cardboard for sheet mulch and topped it off with wood shavings. Peter and Dan finished building the potting shed, with a shade house attached to it for our food seedlings, which should help us protect them from slugs, which has been a constant battle to say the least. Dan also dug a massive hole and filled it with Bokashi, manure and compost ready to plant the grape vine that will hopefully one day cover the shade house (being a deciduous vine it will provide the seedlings with shade in summer and allow the sun to hit them in winter).

The mandala garden has already provided us with spinach, kohlrabi, broccoli and zucchini. The broccoli in here matured far quicker than anywhere else in the garden, and I’ve realised it’s probably because we turned Azolla into the soil (the nitrogen fixing fern that’s growing on the surface of the fish pond). Speaking of zucchini, you turn your back for one moment and there’s another monster hiding somewhere!

So Carly and Anna got to work making relish and pickles, and along with the blackberry and apricot jam we have a nice stock of preserves ready for winter.

While Dan chopped mountains of firewood, Carly and I weeded and mulched all the plants around the dam wall, over 100 of them. Our other friends who helped plant these last year, Carly and John, will be glad to know that they’re all doing exceptionally well, enough for the bags that protect them from wildlife to be removed.

We’ve been burying our Bokashi along a specific row for the past six months, in preparation for raspberry that we’ll also plant this winter. The bed is now ready, and the trellis is in place.

No-one else we know has been able to grow really good pumpkins here this year, yet we planted our pumpkin in an old Bokashi hole and have an amazing crop, causing a bit of local pumpkin jealously. So we can’t wait to see how the raspberries go…

We had fun with Anna harvesting the potatoes, all 43kgs of them, which is absolutely fantastic considering that we only planted 8kgs. We also harvested over 30kg of other produce from the garden during March.

Even better than the potatoes themselves, there was no decent soil here in October; it was a patch of hard rocky ground. The potatoes were simply laid on a thin layer of horse manure and hay, and mulched twice with hay during their growing season. Look at the soil now… potatoes are a truly wonderful, cheap and fast way to build soil.

While harvesting the spuds we met a new friend that was living in there. Some would say foe, but he’s SO cute, and we definitely got more potatoes than he did which is the main thing. Carly and I did our best to identify him in the Tassie wildlife book, but found it too difficult to tell if he was a baby Swamp Antechinus or White-footed Dunnart, a native New Holland mouse (which is wholly protected) or a regular house mouse.

We’re also nurturing this adorable Paddymelon joey. We’ve spoken to the wildlife rescue crew and it appears that he’s just out of his mum’s pouch, and should be able to survive without her now. However, he hasn’t quite learnt enough yet to be out of danger, for example he shouldn’t be hanging around out in the open during the day, watching us gardening and posing for the camera!

So we’ve been training him to take shelter in the bush with the help of a little apple, carrot and rolled oats. Obviously that works (not) as seen pictured here hanging out with Dan while he chops firewood!

Amongst all the fun in the garden we ran another Introduction to Permaculture course during March, for the Department of Education. It was an extremely rewarding weekend and great preparation for the Permaculture Design Certificate course that we’re helping to deliver next January.

Carly and Dan have had their first of three house sitting experiences while we were lucky enough to zip over to Terrace Downs, just over an hour from Christchurch, for John and Andrea’s wedding. What a magical weekend it was, the wedding ceremony was just beautiful, and the setting was simply amazing. It’s so wonderful to see such a great friend find such a brilliant woman to share his life with.

So in summary it’s been a fantastic month full of friends, progress and fun, as evident by this action shot of me and “Fish on the dance floor” that we’ll leave you with…

We celebrated my birthday in February with a really enjoyable trip north of Hobart with Anna. Our first stop was meeting Peter & Blythe, who have built their own home with cordwood. It was both interesting and inspirational, and we easily could have chatted for days, we’ll stay in touch with them for sure. Second stop was a beautiful walk to Russel Falls in Mt Field National Park, then on to Camp Florentine. Activists have been working hard to protect the ancient forests of the Upper Florentine valley since 2006, and have established a permanent camp that consists of several complex structures to block the road from destructive bulldozers and logging trucks. They’ve conducted many peaceful protests and been subjected to several violent attacks from forestry supporters, police raids, arrests and court hearings.

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:

A few days after Mark flew off to Queensland to help some flood victims, a young English couple arrived, Carly and Dan. They’ve been such wonderful visitors, not only because of all the help they give us, but they are fantastic company now that Karim’s travel commitments for work have increased again. Carly and Dan have already worked on loads of projects here, including planting more veges, picking berries and making jam, shredding paper for the compost, making plant pots from people’s used newspapers, watering the gardens, feeding the chooks, harvesting and planting pigface, fixing our wood basket, weeding thistles and helping us to collect and stack over 2,000 bricks that we’ve purchased second hand ready for the house build. They’ve also been working hard on the mandala garden, defining the borders of foot paths with rocks, filling the beds with soil and creating more garden beds off the mandala, which we’ve planted green manure crops in. Dan has also helped Peter progress with the potting shed, which now has two walls constructed.

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!

Enjoy the start of Autumn friends…