Ozearth Blog

Our first workshop

happened last weekend. The workshop was hosted at Nala Pakana, a Yogic conscious living centre at Charlotte Cove, run by Theresa Taylor.  Theresa very kindly and capably took responsibility for catering, hosting, publicity, bookings and site preparation (under our instructions) leaving us free to concentrate on teaching.

The project was the final coat of an adobe tipi floor which was erected as a workshop space at Nala Pakana this year. Including Theresa, Chloe and myself, we had a group of about 10 people participating throughout the weekend.

It was a lovely, highly-skilled and knowledgeable group. We did great work together, and as well as providing learning for the participants (and possibly even moreso for us!!) it was a great way to meet likeminded people.  We’re really grateful to the participants, and also particularly to Theresa, for kicking us off in such a positive way. Youse rock

We have about another 2 square metres of floor to lay, and a skim coat on top after that, and then the floor will need oiling and / or waxing to protect it.  So there are still heaps of opportunities to be involved in the project; if you’d like to take part, just drop us a line and we’ll let you know when the next phase is happening.

Our next project,

having been incubating for the last few weeks, has just this week kicked into full throttle.  We’re building earthbag benches, cob worktops and a pizza oven for St James College in the centre of Cygnet.  Fabrication of metal tools and parts for the job has already started, and materials have also started flowing in.  It looks like we might be able to start building as soon as this coming Wednesday!  Huge props to Marcus, a fellow Permy who teaches at St James, for getting all the necessaries happening so rapidly.  We were privileged to be able to visit his smallholding and see his owner-built octagonal mudbrick house, which is as much a work of art as it is a home, and his amazing Permaculture systems, which at a mere seven years of age are looking extremely mature and gave us plenty of food for thought.

If you’d like to get involved in the Pizza Oven project, you can do so completely free of charge.  We’re not yet absolutely sure of a start date (watch this space), but once we do kick off we’ll be doing practical workshop sessions on Mondays and Wednesdays between 2 and 5 pm.  We’d love to see you – just let us know by the evening before that you’re coming, so we can plan accordingly.

MEANWHILE,

we’re really happy to have been invited to audit an Introduction to Permaculture course being given by Penny Milburn, one of our floor workshop participants.  She’s a fantastically knowledgeable, energetic woman and her course was jam-packed with a huge amount of Permacultural information, plus some really cool demonstrations including how to put together a hot compost pile and how to brew compost tea.  She and partner Karim have been developing their Permaculture smallholding for less than two years, and the results are extraordinary and incredibly inspiring.  The great news is that the four of us are going to be looking at various kinds of future educating partnership, which is really exciting for us.

We’ve also been spending some time hanging out with Kate, another of our workshop participants.  Kate is a cob expert (trained with the Mud Girls in Canada) and is currently working on a strawbale build in Nichols Rivulet (in order to upskill some more!).  We hope to be working with her on lots of future projects.

AND THE REST

We’ve spent a goodly bit of the last couple of weeks out on the clearing with the chainsaw and the chipper, limbing the felled trees into burnable chunks and setting them aside for drying, and chipping whatever was left and building that into the drystone quasi-swales C’s been working on. C’s also sown several varieties of soil improvers / green manure, and it’s all coming up a treat despite the nightly depradations of wallabies and daily peckings of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan – who, having been briefly free-ranging, are now temporarily imprisoned in their bachelor coop again because they really were scratching up every single seedling.

In between these things, I’ve completed the album artwork and relevant blah-blah for my CD and sent it off for replication – it’s expected back in a couple of weeks, which is extremely exciting, and will be ready for sale at the Cygnet Festival!  Shortly I’ll be updating qvocal.com so that you can buy individual tracks or even the whole CD if you like.

We’re moving into the next phase of getting the house started – have contacted a couple of structural engineers that have been recommended as being rammed earth specialists. Sent out the initial email a couple of hours ago, and heard back from both within 20 minutes – impressed thus far! Will be interested to see how that develops.

Our lovely friends Graeme and Lynnette had us, Robin and Gerard, and Paulette and John around for a gorgeous barbeque the other night – they are about 80% of the way through their own house build, and the house is going to be – actually, already is – just gorgeous: the word “meticulous” springs to mind, and the painstaking collection of all manner of salvage that’s gone into the place is a constant delight to the eye.  Graeme has also secured us a breeding pair of geese, so it looks like our small family might be growing pretty soon! Yay!

Next week I’ll be off to Melbourne for the Newman Advent Festival, and then to Canberra for a flying Mumvisit.  We’ll see how much happens between now and then!

“Oh Chloe, we mustn’t forget, the tree fellers are coming up tomorrow.”
“But I t’ought dere were only two fellers!”

Haaaaaaaaaaaaar har har.

“Ideas in Action” is one of Allan the Tree Feller’s many nicknames for us (also: “trouble”, “worker”, “Back” (for me, obviously) etc).

We met Allan through his mate and sometime co-worker Josh, who was attending our chainsaw course.  Allan selectively fells and mills timber for a living.

They came up a couple of weeks ago to assess our site, and Allan’s offered us an excellent deal on felling the huge and rather dangerous trees in the clearing where our house will be going.  The first trees came down less than a week after their first visit; milling of the timber began yesterday. The prospect of not having to buy in timber for the house build – at all – is making us extremely happy.

But above and beyond that, to our great good fortune, Allan is turning out to be an extraordinary brains trust and source of contacts. He claims to have taken us under his wing because we’re so unfailingly good-humoured (which is mostly true, I guess, although less charitable folks might call our “good humour” wall-to-wall silliness!); we think it’s also got something to do with the wince factor of two townies like us up on the Hill, learning as fast as we can but still fundamentally clueless on many fronts!

The acquisition of a solar system was continuing to give me a pain (I’ll let you guess where) – the numbers just wouldn’t crunch down far enough to make even a minimal off-grid system affordable – but then Allan secured us a supply of ex-Telstra exchange batteries.  Problem solved.  Oh, and he reckons he can get panels in a similar sort of vein.  Problem really solved: just have to get my head around a regulator, an inverter / charger, cables, connectors and installation now.

Couldn’t find someone to insure the shed for love nor money.  Went round and round for weeks.  Allan gave me a name and number, and I rang yesterday; that’ll probably be sorted tomorrow.

Allan came up the other day, not to do anything that was useful for him, but rather just to help us move some of the more awkward bits and pieces around using his backhoe.  Among many other bits and pieces, he grabbed the two explosives containers out of our middle shed, meaning that we’re now free to convert that into a second room.

(Here’s a large digression on the second room. We don’t currently really know how long the whole permitting process for the house is going to take, and the actual build thereafter will no doubt take quite some time as well.  The winter of 2012 will not wait on us forever, so to cover our bases we’ve decided to make our current arrangement a lot more comfortable, in case we don’t yet have livable vaults up by the time the cold comes.

The things that are currently stored in the middle shed will be moved into the big shed.
We’ll then lay an insulated, tamped adobe floor, insulate and line the shed walls and put in a ceiling, replace the massive shed door with windows and a more person-sized door, and put in some kitchen units, basic plumbing and our first Rocket Mass Heater. Woohoo – finally an unbroken night’s sleep away from the dog!!! Not to mention: better positioning of beds in the container, storage space for clothes (four months of living out of a suitcase really is enough), storage space for food (one small cupboard for both food and cookware ain’t cutting it for us foodies), a place to sit down of an evening, and a wood heating solution that will keep us warm all day even if it only burns for a few hours of an evening!

The cool part is that, once we do start building the vaults, we’ll have even more flexibility: we can get WWOOFers in (and either continue sleeping in the container or move to a sleeping vault), or we can actually have guests other than those hardy souls who are prepared to brave the windy Hill in a tent. Once we’re completely out of the Sheds, they can remain fully self-contained WWOOFer and / or guest accommodation for ever after. Digression ends! Back to why Allan is a legend.)

Speaking of backhoes, we’ve been scratching our heads for months about what to do about Mavis the Deathtrap, the International 564 tractor which came with the place.  She’s beautiful but merciless, with a stupidly high centre of gravity, a flat front tyre and no rollcage.  Recipe for disaster, as C discovered by nearly tipping her the first time she ventured out!  We were wincing at the idea of taking a huge hit to the “seed fund” by having to buy a brand new, tiny tractor which would do about half of what we need (with the rest to be done by a serious excavator) – but Allan sourced us a 64HP Massey-Ferguson backhoe instead (which has a big front end loader and a small bucket in the rear) for about a third as much, which will do more like 80% of what we need (more or less everything except big dams).  He’s now talking about making us some forks for it, so that we can carry our delightful but awkwardly placed piles of salvage around the land without the anticipated hours of backbreaking labour.

While we were out inspecting the backhoe, Allan took us to meet his mate Wal.  Wal seems quite shy at first, but ask him the right question, and he opens up like a kind of horticulturally and apiaristically expert flower. “See that tree?” he said to me, pointing out a semi-full-grown Blue Gum. “That single tree will give a hive of bees enough forage to produce about 250kg of honey in a year.”  I boggled, and he went on, smiling gently: “That’s a fair few calories, eh? People underestimate the value of native trees in terms of their ability to produce food.”

We left Wal’s with a ute groaning with a bewildering range of cuttings, samples and actual plants.  He wants his stocks to go forth and multiply, but beyond that, Wal’s just the sort of guy who’ll give you the shirt off his back if he likes you.  We feel very privileged that he decided he liked us, and the same goes for Allan.

Here’s a quick late-night update on what we’ve been up to:

Monday night last we went up to Bonorong for a meeting and a night tour, and got to have up close and personal time with various wild friends including a baby wombat! Fascinatingly, the wee ones follow you around if you start walking – it’s unbelievably cute. We had extensive scrumps, and part of what made it so delightful was the very fact that it’s a time limited phenomenon: even handreared wombats with lots of human contact get to a certain point and “go wild”, making them very easy to rerelease into the wild.

I will say: coming home from Bonorong at 10pm was rather more exciting than one might like. WIth the warmer weather (something like late twenties today!!) driving is becoming something to avoid, as the wildlife seems to be gormlessly leaping out from behind every tree and bush these days.

What else has been going on?

Lots of playing and singing, not only at the top pub but also at various exhibition openings and the St James fair

Hanging out at Robyn and Gerard’s place with their ridiculously cute Russian Spitz doglets

Making a run for Teesy so that she’s relatively comfy and has a bit of space to roam about in if we have to be out. This became urgent due to the:

Chainsaw course completed over two days last week(!) – we’re now both eligible for a chainsaw licence, if you can believe that!! It was great fun and hugely informative, which is good because it was not exactly cheap!

More inroads made into finally acquiring a solar power system – now if I can just get close some sort of deal…!

Chin-scratching about ways to get a shower happening up here (anyone care to comment on the feasibility of a thermo-siphon-operated combination wetback and solar hot water thingamijig?)

Got five large bales of hay delivered by Ray (poor guy made three failed attempts and eventually had to be guided up in convoy by us!)

Christening the chipper / shredder – she works a treat. Tell you what, a huge amount of brush amounts to sod all in the way of chippings! At the moment, the procedure is that the chippings go in the chookhouses / runs, and then, once they’ve all been activated by chook poo, they get cycled out to one of the compost piles.

Better draught-proofing in the container done by C

Also by C – lots of tool organising in the shed (photos to follow… promise)

ALSO by C – drystone terraces with lots of organic matter trapped behind them, the idea being that this catches the rain instead of torrents powering down the Hill causing erosion.

Our insanely ambitious seed order came in, and today Chloe sowed the first seeds: clovers and comfrey next to a big hole that will be the duck pond.

Got various compost piles started – our humanure pile in the one bit of the Hacienda that’s actually worked, and also a goodly and growing pile of the Lotus Eater girls’ lovely organic waste, now layered with straw and with a view to getting a few windrows happening

Tiny bit of knitting here and there.

Volunteering at St James, where the vegies are really starting to get underway

Buying a chainsaw, a brushcutter, and with any luck a 24,000 litre water tank at a significant discount – byebye to another chunk of seed funding, hello to a chunk of infrastructure!

The big news(es) on the business front are:

C’s in the final design stages of the Pizza oven and Superadobe benches that we’ll be doing for St James. We may be able to get underway with that in a matter of weeks!

It’s now confirmed that we’ll be co-operating with Theresa from Nala Pakana on a weekend Adobe Floor workshop in November! Our first participant signed up today – w00t! Want to learn how to prepare, pour and finish an earthen floor, all in a single weekend?? Watch this space for details!

And possibly most exciting and in a similar vein, we’re going to be co-operating with Bonorong Nature Reserve to create a number of buildings and enclosures at their Sanctuary. Again, we’ll be running quite a few workshops there, so if you want to get involved, give us a shout – learn SUperadobe techniques AND support wildlife conservation – we love multiple outputs!

Last Wednesday was Chloe’s birthday, and Susan very kindly threw open her house for about 14 hours for an At Home.  We had a stream of guests beginning at lunchtime and going through until about 11:30pm; C must have given the Earthbag talk / explanation / show ‘n’ tell about fifteen times (which is fine, she’s great at it and she loves it, and her audience was totally enthralled.) Much food and drink and merriment was had by all, we met lots of new lovely people, and interestingly not an instrument case was cracked in the evening despite many of the folk night folks being present – too much to talk about!

On Thursday we built a chookhouse, entirely out of salvage except the netting for the top.  Matters were somewhat complicated by the grinder wheel being unopenable (Neighbour John came to our rescue once again, but this time the problem actually presented him with a challenge, in contrast to the 20 seconds it took him to open the chuck on the drill the last time), but after a fair bit of hammering and sawing by hand, we had a gorgeous place for our new feathered friends to live.

Friday was the big day: early up to nip over to Margate, meet another lovely Susan, collect our new family members and some seed potatoes (Susan has a farm gate stall, just had to grab some), and drive back home via a neighbour from whom I bought a couple of bales of hay. I got back in time to get them settled, collect Neighbour Matt, and zip back down the Hill to Neighbour John’s place – he has been so extraordinarily generous as to provide us with a temporary dropping off point for our container, which was arriving that afternoon.  While C again stayed up the Hill in order to scream around like a small Northern Irish tornado, organising the big shed (a BIG job), Matt kept me company until the container arrived and was slid rather hair-raisingly off the back of the truck by the admittedly expert driver (it was a much more rough and ready approach than the careful crane-lifting we had in NL!). After that I took Matt into Cygnet to collect his genny from some mates, who sadly weren’t home – they had a really nice place, would have liked very much to meet them. For my trouble Matt showed me around his mates’ place (lovely shack featuring a gorgeous woodfired stove with a wetback), let me neb at his boat – a small, sleek-looking wooden number from the 1920s(!) – and then grabbed some cuttings from his mates’ (huge) bamboo stand (we’ve planted them in the runoff from the earthworm incubation bath in the hope that they’ll be well-fed and watered and grow up big and obnoxious), AND bought us a longneck of rather excellent stout.  And of course, the evening was Folk night, which as ever was delightful.

Saturday was a jarmy day until mid-afternoon, with a bit of errandrunning in the afternoon and a gorgeous dinner at the top pub (where the Folk Night is held), shouted for the regulars by the owners (and after a mere month we apparently count as regulars, which gives us a lovely feeling!).  Lots of musicmaking by all and sundry, including me – oh, and I finished C’s other pair of birthday socks

On Sunday John and Paulette came up to visit us for morning tea – it was a lovely surprise to see them! The day otherwise was spent doing a dump run, various other sortings, and getting food scraps from the Lotus Eaters.

Monday was volunteering day at St James – and the happy news is that we are indeed going to be doing an earthbuild with them!  Watch this space for more info Susan also very kindly let us borrow her trailer, which we promptly used to collect fertiliser and mushroom compost.

We had a bit of a shock when we opened the container for the first time: whoever repacked it basically threw things in completely willy-nilly, including a large number of breakable (and now broken) things and original canvases by C.  Will be interesting to see if our shipping insurance covers us for other people being appallingly, thoughtlessly sloppy with our most precious things.

Yesterday we wanted to get a really good run at finally building our compost pile – something that’s been getting steadily more urgent.  C had the idea that the terribly placed, mortally dangerous woodpile housing could better be repurposed as the central straw and carbon repository for the Humanure Hacienda.

We tried; we really did.  C emptied the last of the wood, we used the ute to pull the frame over onto its front…

and the bugger stuck fast.  We reckoned, belatedly, that it probably weighed more than a ton.  It took two car jacks, three logs, and equal parts profanity and prayer, just to get the bloody thing into a position where we could reasonably tow it with the ute.  And then it was not at all clear how we were going to manoeuvre it into place where we needed it, and even if that could be achieved, how we would then drag the thing upright again.  We struggled from 9am until 3pm, and finally, having at least got the thing out of the way, gave up.  One thing: the front of the shed looks amazingly less cluttered without the former woodpile, and we do feel safer with our wood stored in the lee of the sheds.

We went to Theresa’s for dinner that evening.  We met Theresa (who runs Nala Pakana in Charlotte Cove) on our third day in Cygnet, when we did the kitchen garden tour (one of the gardens on the tour was St James).  It was she who encouraged us to volunteer – thank you Theresa!!!  We had the most delightful afternoon / evening with her and her animals (chooks, indoor pusscats, puppydogs, geese and two delightful goats), and looking at her gorgeous garden and orchard, breathtaking views, and amazing tiny wooden house.  We talked about possumproofing, solar power, digging holes in rocky ground (the goss is: use a crowbar!), brushcutting (you can get brushcutters with different blades for different stuff!) fire safety (we really, really need a good plan and soon) WWOOFers and about a thousand other things.  As you may gather, Theresa is a font of information, has an amazing array of skills, and is in general a wise and beautiful person. We enjoyed a vegan feast, checked out her tipi and formed a plan to put in an Adobe floor for her (another gig!!!) and rolled home exhausted but happy with a huge bunch of various cuttings from her garden.

Today was another gorgeous day – Gerard, who we know from the folk club (and whose place the party was at the night Teesy got stuck under the caravan) came all the way up the Hill this morning to rehearse some songs for Friday with me – not the folk club, but a fundraiser for the local Green mayoral candidate, Liz.  He was vastly amused and delighted by all the massive piles of rubbish – er, sorry, salvage – and turns out to be a ceramicist, kilnbuilder and mosaic specialist, not to mention a dark horse with musical interests well beyond what you see him doing of a Friday at the top pub.  While C once again raced around digging holes, planting plants and getting possum protection in, we exchanged life stories, roared with laughter and sang songs ranging from soulful (Cohen’s “Hallelujah”) to really, really silly (Lehrer’s “Rickety Tickety Tin”).  Tough life I have, eh.

We looked up and four hours had zipped by, and we were scandalously late (as in HOURS late) for a long-overdue meeting at Michael and Joanne Gissing’s place.  Michael was the sound engineer on my beloved but alas, not-yet-released CD project of some years ago, the one which involved Riley Lee, Zen Meditations, Gregorian Chant and electroacoustics.  Shortly after I recorded the CD at his studio in Avalon, NSW, he and Joanne bought land in Cygnet and embarked on a tree change which incorporates chooks, ducks, sheep, cows, a wonderful kitchen garden and a strawbale home and recording studio with incredibly clever passive cooling and heating systems – and I’m sure there’s more, but it was a lot to take in!  We spent a long, fascinating afternoon with them, again talking shop, gathering info and swapping stories.

Today we were given more carrots by John, and from Joanne we received more cuttings and a dozen freerange eggs (incidentally, our own tally is up to 8 eggs from the Girls, and we harvested half a kilo of Swiss Brown mushrooms from the supposedly spent mushroom compost!).

The wildlife gets more astonishing each day – on the trip home from Theresa’s on Tuesday night, we saw a number of owls, a bandicoot, and actually had our first near-hoppity-miss – happily, having jumped out practically under our wheels, the wallaby in question hopped away unharmed. Today at Joanne and Michael’s, we saw falcons, a wedgetailed eagle, honeyeaters, parrots, swallows and any number of other birds, and on the way back up the Hill tonight, several possums (including one with a joey clinging to its back!), another owl, the usual immense cast of potaroos, and FOUR quolls in two different colour schemes.  It is such an honour to share our space with all this LIFE!

Our best effort at a lazy Sunday

Because we didn’t sleep an awful lot at Susan’s on Friday night (late night, cold restless dog, early start to get up the Hill and – as it turns out, rather futilely – Teesyproof the container ahead of our visit to Bonorong), we decided that Saturday to Sunday would be a day for sleeping in.  So that’s what we did.  We were barely out of bed and totally still in jarmies when neighbour Matt showed up with a stainless steel saucepan / steamer combo, a compressor, a bottle of beer and a Plan.

It took a while to get the plan happening, but here’s a selection of what we did, a lot of which we had enormous help with from Matt:

* Unloaded from the ute: the Bonorong poo (and some horse poo we picked up on the road to Hobart for 50c a bag ) and the WELDER we had also picked up along the way – not as impulse a purchase as it sounds, we’d been mulling over some previously acquired info for a couple of weeks before we took the plunge.

* knocked down the entirely nonsensical front wall of the middle shed – the one inside the actual shed door, made of a wooden frame with various polystyrene signs nailed to it.  The signs will be excellent as makeshift insulation between the container ceiling and the colorbond roof.

* removed and reorganised about 10 tonnes of crap, mostly from the big shed (to the left of the middle shed, mostly full of caravan, which in turn is to the left of the container)

* reinflated the tyres of the van using the compressor that Matt had brought.

* Installed the ute’s towball, hooked the caravan up to it and towed the bloody nuisance thing out of the middle shed.  It’s now parked conveniently for Matt to collect at his leisure – he mentioned plans to make it into guest quarters for his brother, who’s planning a visit sometime soon.  We couldn’t be more pleased, and Matt seems fairly pleased and all.

* installed five rather excellent and very sturdy shelves in the middle shed. The materials for this were scrounged from sheds and scrap metal piles all over the joint – Adam, the previous owner, seems to have collected about sixteen shops’ worth of shop fittings, a few of which could quite handily get turned into our new storage area.  What with the new, swinging door, a second access point in the form of the large middle shed door, the shelves, and the fact that the space is now trebledin all dimensions, that space is a thousand times pleasanter and more useful, and we are extremely pleased with ourselves.  Having got to a relatively late start, it was getting dark by the time we were doing shelving, but because we were running the genny for power tools anyway, we were able to press into service one of the floodlights that Adam left behind – worked a treat!

Volunteering @ St James’s (finally!)

Today we were up bright and early to a beautiful sunny day, and FINALLY made it to a volunteering session at the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden at St James’s primary school in Cygnet.  It was a fun, challenging half-day of (supervising) watering, weeding, spraying seaweed solution (and a smattering of garlic spray because of an invasion of aphids), checking the worm farm, planting, repotting seedlings, starting two sprout cultures, etc etc.  Teesy came along and behaved herself beautifully in the face of a press of dozens of pre-teen boys and girls, even warming to Kate and Cameron’s lovely chocolate staffy/kelpie bitch (Kte and Cameron were also first-time volunteers today, and almost as new in the region as us!).  It was hard but very satifying work, and naturally Chloe struck up a conversation with Nicky, the volunteer co-ordinator, Roy the Kitchen co-ordinator, and Theresa, another sustainability bod and long-time volunteer with the program, about building them a cob pizza oven – using hyperadobe techniques and with us volunteering OzEarth’s time and expertise.  The brainstorming session branched into talk of adjacent cob benches, and getting the children involved in designing and realising mosaics for those and the outside of the oven.

Now, the oven is something St James’s garden / kitchen team has been looking into for a while and they may have other avenues lined up, so it’s not by any means a done deal, but we do hope that we end up being the ones to take on the project: it would be incredibly exciting if we could get the whole school community, and actually the Cygnet community in general, involved in the whole process.

New arrivals

While doing the “multiple outputs” thing of going to the laundrette and the post office (insanely ambitious seed order has been SENT!) Susan came to find us in order to tell us that our worms have arrived.  We ordered two sorts: earthworms and composting worms. 2000 of each (in egg form).

Other prospective new arrivals: in a Freecycle-induced rush of blood to the head, we are about to become the proud mothers of five bantams: three roosters and two hens.  We think we’ll offer one of the roosters to John down the Hill, because he recently lost his magnificent rooster and seems quite sad (as does his remaining hen, who followed us around pathetically the last time I was there to visit); so we should end up with at least two of each.  It will be SUCH a homecoming to finally have chooks again!

Pooooooooooo, fixing the road, and gathering soil

We spent this afternoon making homes for the worms. We had already (on that not-so-lazy Sunday in fact) retrieved a bath from the big shed and put it up on blocks to prepare for the composting worms, and have pressed an old fridge into service for the Earthworms (who apparently are sensitive to cold when they’re wee, so we thought an insulated space would be good).

Making bedding and food for our new critters was vastly aided by the timely acquisition of previously mentioned horse poo and Bonorong RooPoo.  We also used the woody last of the Huonville Trailerload of compost which we picked up three weeks ago when we planted the fruit trees, and a fair portion of a bale of hay very kindly donated by Paulette from near the base of the Hill.

For the earthworms, of course, we also needed, well, earth.  Our soil at the top of the Hill here is, presently, very compacted, very clay-heavy, with a fine to non-existent layer of topsoil and a LOT of stones, ranging in size from gravel to something far heavier than Chloe and I can lift between us.

We decided to try and kill two birds with one stone by going down to the most scarily rutted bit of our road, carving a few channels in it, letting the water run out as much as possible, and putting some of the excess earth in some bags to take back up.  It seems to have gone well – our digging work was accompanied by the babbling of temporary brooks as the water drained away.  The soil we got is lovely, and even had some already-resident earthworms – a welcome addition!

So as of this evening, the worms-to-be are all safely ensconced, and we hope they’re warm enough – there’s very little wind tonight and the stars look so close that you could touch one if you got onto your tiptoes – What I’m coming to read as sufficient conditions for a nippy sort of night.

With the rest of the poo and another chunk of hay, we took the opportunity to top-dress our valiant little fruit trees, some of which are starting to leaf up marvellously (the lemon tree even seems to be trying to bloom, which is amazing!).  Each of our possum-proof cages now has a generous berm of poo and a mulch of straw.  We hope that this will kickstart soil-building around the trees, and that the mulch will help to retain moisture at their roots.

Massive organic waste stream coming our way

Our ears have been frantically to the ground over these last weeks, hoping to get wind of some free sources of organic matter for the soil-building which we need to get into in a big way if we want any kind of summer vegie garden this year.  Most sources of poo seem to be being sold rather than given away, and in the sorts of quantities we need the stuff in, it’s not going to be affordable for us to be buying poo by the bag.

Today, during the morning tea break between sessions at St James, we had a breakthrough courtesy of the lovely folks at the Lotus Eaters Cafe.  We, being us, chanced our collective arm, and are incredibly grateful that they’ve agreed that we can collect their green waste a few times a week.  We’re told that it’s a fair whack of waste, which is just what we had hoped to hear. All their food is organic, which means that we can trust their waste stream.  Incidentally, I understand that they have discovered this blog courtesy of a Google Alert which tells them whenever they’re mentioned anywhere on the web – cool trick, and if any of you Lotus Eaters folks are reading this: we love your work.

None of this, of course, solves the immediate problem of what to plant the summer veg into, but we’ll crack that soon, too – watch this space.

Yesterday was AMAZING.

Bonorong Wildlife Sanctuary hosts over 60,000 visitors a year at their lovely site near Brighton, 15 minutes or so north of Hobart. There, they showcase various rescued wildlife that is either as happy in captivity as in the wild, or too injured to be reintroduced to the wild, or both.  They run educational programs, but one of their most impressive achievements is their work rescuing native animals. Almost all the wildlife needing rescuing (they get between 3 and 7 callouts a day on average) has fallen victim to some anthroposophic ill or other (traffic primarily, dog / cat attack, toxoplasmosis from ingesting cat poo, getting caught in fishing line, etc). For a couple of years now, Bonorong has been the official after hours emergency number for Parks and Wildlife Tasmania. They train, co-ordinate and provide phone support and coaching to a large and growing group of volunteer rescuers and a smaller but highly committed group of volunteer wildlife carers. The wildlife rescue programme costs 100,000 dollars per year, and astonishingly, they run it with no government money at all.

And the cool bit: since last Saturday, we are among those volunteers!

When Chloe was doing the Visa Activation / recce here earlier in the year, she visited the Sanctuary and was enormously impressed and inspired by what she saw.  She spoke with staff members about getting involved, and finally Saturday was our opportunity to take a first step along that road. In fact, Chloe had A Feeling about Bonorong, and I’ve learned not to underestimate those.

So we went to the training session and it was, in a word, inspirational.  Greg talked for three hours with nary a PowerPoint slide, and had everyone in the room absolutely riveted.  We learned how to handle joeys of all kinds, echidnas, possums, macropods, lizards, and the list went on.  The information was simple, entertainingly delivered and really comprehensive.

Along the way, Chloe and I started brainstorming about ways that we could help.  We will be going out and helping rescue animals as the need arises; but we also thought that we might be able to help with caring, particularly for birds (a special interest of Chloe’s and also of mine); and then we thought that we could contribute to fundraising (with knitted items, free singing gigs, children’s books / illustrations, paintings etc) and possibly admin (because I am a spelling, grammar and procedures Nazi, hear me roar).

So we went up afterwards and started to mention some of this stuff to Greg, and he was happy enough but very pressed with other people wanting his attention.  We approached him a second time…

And a magical thing happened.  Chloe mentioned (apropos of something or other) that we were going to be starting a natural building school, and blow me down if Greg didn’t ask: “Have you guys heard of Cal-Earth?”

Well, yeah, a bit.

That sparked off a hugely exciting discussion.  Early days to say what form/s our collaboration will eventually take, but it’s pretty clear to me that, once again, Chloe’s Feeling was right on the money.

Teesy the Destroyer

O where are my mummies?
I don’t like this ute.
Bite open the window
And gatecrash – I’m cute!

O where are my mummies???
They under this van?
O halp, now I’m trapped here
All cold, sore and wan…

A whole birthday fruitcake!
Don’t mind if I do.
Tomorrow I’ll cover
the whole house with spew.

(The third episode above was what we came home to after Bonorong on Saturday. Teesy seemed quite green but not especially emotionally distressed – the problem seems really to have been much more one of inappropriate diet than separation anxiety. So I guess that’s an improvement…?)

On Friday night we went to Hobart (or “town” as it’s known locally) and attended the exhibition opening of “Future Queer”, the seventh annual queer art exhibition in Hobart.

It was a really mixed bag: some very beautiful paintings, some highly ironic (a painting of “homo milk” reminiscent of Warhol), some hilarious, some quite frankly naff. There was a rather quirky “collective piece” involving a constellation of planets, an abstract sculpture of recycled and found materials which I was totally mesmerised by (a shallow, pitted, cracked cast iron bowl, nestled within it a swirl of skeletal wood and carved stone, set off by vignettes of gorgeously intricate woven copper wire). Perhaps we’re biased, but Shelly and Eirlysa’s contributions were definitely among the strongest. Me and Mine, Eirlysa’s painting, is a tiny, delicate piece, intricate with a hundred kinds of symbolism but joyfully (and rather sexily!) addressing the need for the legalisation of gay marriage. Michelle’s pieces, Gens Universa (a silver and scrimshaw pin) and Love for Love’s Sake (a pendant in silver with perspex insets) are again, beaufifully intricate pieces, perfectly balanced both in themselves and against one another. Both pieces boast a serpentine, spiralling asymmetry that just works, and both the delicate scrimshaw of the pin and the Gothically romantic, perspex-protected black and white photos of the pendant are complimented admirably by their settings.

The crowd was an artwork in itself. Everyone was extremely animated and had made themselves especially beautiful in a number of wonderfully outspoken styles. No fashion victims here (or at least, none in the main stream!): Beautiful 1930′s ladies’ suits stood next to hotpants over psychedelic tights (how the girl didn’t freeze is anybody’s guess); flannies and Mohawks next to purple velour dinner jackets over lime green lacy shirts.

To be there was fascinating: in one way joyful to see such a concentration and celebration of queer diversity, in another way intimidating (to be surrounded by such an animated crowd and to know nobody), and in another way a bit ghastly – we wondered afterwards what proportion of this beautiful, animated crowd was at all bothered about the things that make up the majority of our life’s concerns these days – trying to get the soil building started, the garden planted, our heat and shelter sorted, infrastructure bought, connections made with likeminded folks so that we can help each other… all in aid of moving away from dependency on oil and towards resilience in the face of certain change.

Warning – slightly preachy bit follows…

The fact that these things are our focus now in fact as well as in theory, means that we’re confronted daily with some pretty weird juxtapositions, and for me, the opening threw them into quite sharp relief. I went into the toilet at one stage and got a major shock when I looked at myself in the mirror: there I was in my glad rags, and yet my face would not have looked terribly out of place in a coalmine. This is what you get when you’re sleeping in a container heated by a rather ashy woodstove. Mortified, I scrubbed myself clean using paper towel and really harsh soap, and walked out looking like a fresh-cooked lobster – still, better than the alternative!

What most in the developed world would characterise as “normal” seems increasingly like a sort of fever-dream to me. While we were in the Netherlands, it was really easy to go with the flow of having everything – hot and cold water, heat, light, power, transport, telephone, internet, waste and sewage disposal, consumer goods, even soil – on tap. Up here, so far, every one of those things presents a challenge. We have water, but we have to fetch it. It’s hot if we boil a kettle. We have heat if we gather (or buy) wood, build and light and maintain a fire, or if we fetch in and burn LPG. We have light if we burn candles, or remember to hook the solar lights up to their panels; a candle typically lasts about two hours, and the solar lights last about the same: we have three of them. We have power if we fire up the genny, which we don’t unless we’re using power tools; otherwise, we have to go into Cygnet to charge phones and computers. Telephone we have outdoors only; if we’re lucky we can receive an incoming call if we put our phones in the window. Internet depends on battery power, and the dongle runs out after about an hour and a half if not hooked up to a computer (which in turn compromises the computer’s battery life). We seem to accumulate two plastic shopping bags of waste per week that we can’t process here on the Hill: mostly plastics. Glass we are keeping for bottle walls, cardboard and paper are being composted or used as kindling, green waste and our own waste (and soon the dog’s waste) we collect for composting. Some consumer goods are to be had in Cygnet (a 20 km round trip, some of it over extremely rough tracks), but most are further afield and almost none are accessable other than by car. Soil we may be able to glean from the surrounding bush to some extent, but typically the topsoil up here is about an inch thick, so importing soil (or things that will become soil) is vital, and it’s no longer a case of nipping down the local Hoogvliet on a bike for 30 litres of potting mix at 1 euro per 10l bag.

This, by the way, is not a whinge – no, honestly! It is excellent to know that we typically refill 9 litres of water bottles three to four times a day, and that covers spongebaths, washing up, cleaning, drinking water, cooking and the essential hot water bottles. It’s wonderful to learn that you use a lot less LPG to boil water if you store your kettles permanently on the wood stove so that they’re always preheated. It’s extremely interesting to note that even a slow-combustion stove needs six armloads of wood per night to keep us warm under current conditions – that’s a lot of wood, and seems pretty wasteful to us. Equally, being able to observe what makes for good solar light longevity (and not) is an education ahead of getting a proper solar rig. We LOVE being in control of our waste streams, and in particular we’re very excited by the idea of closing the nutrient loop that is so horrifyingly open in a conventional sewage treatment system. As to the necessity of importing certain things, at least to start with: I’ve always been a combiner of errands, but what was previously motivated more or less by laziness is now necessity if we don’t want to be going through three figures’ worth of diesel a week.

When it’s a matter of turning a tap or flicking a switch or swiping a card and hopping on a train, and eventually paying a bill, more often than not automatically, the quantities of oil or gas you’re going through just aren’t real. The romantic environmentalist in me may not like our continuing high dependency on oil, but it does feel salutory to be dealing with the realities. I’d be fascinated to know whether we are now, in general, using fewer non-renewable resources than we were in Holland: possibly not. I’d say the major change to this point is in our awareness of what we use even for the day-to-day basics. The other difference is that we know that our consumption of non-renewables will steadily decline. Every day here, we take another step on the journey of using less and less, and using more and more renewably.

On Monday and Tuesday we did a two day Mental Health First Aid course. It was quite fascinating, and pretty confronting.

Today we fired up the genny, charged all the computers and the internet dongle, ran the engine in, and (most importantly) cranked up the power toolage!

A grinder liberated a window from its far too large frame; a jigsaw cut one thing up and then fell to bits (ho-hum, back to drawing board there); a driver drill, once we’d got John from down the Hill to unlock the chuck key (very impressive wielding of a shifter, handygrips and ManStrength was involved. We are jealous of ManStrength and wish we could buy it in tablet form), did more driving than drilling, but even that was a big help.

We (well, mostly Chloe) have now installed a window and a door in the front of the container. The draughts have thereby been reduced by about 80%, which boggles the mind since there are still significant gaps in the structure. THe most exciting bits are that getting in and out is no longer a huge hassle, and that the window will admit morning light

Tomorrow’s plan: get the solar panels for our lovely wee solar lights mounted permanently on the roof so that we can charge the lights from within the container, from first till last light (today we forgot to start them charging until about 2pm, so they all gave out within about three hours. C has made a virtue of necessity and lit a whole lot of candles instead; the effect is gorgeous, particularly reflected in the new window!). The other Big Rock is to tackle the Stupidest Sliding Door in the Universe issue. Can’t wait!

We’ve been contacting people about last minute Heritage Apples (the bare root stock is almost all away and should by rights have been planted weeks ago), and research is in progress into old breed chooks – and we note that some locals in Gardner’s Bay (very close to us) have a Permaculture site incorporating MINI-PIGS!!! Neighbour Matt dropped in today, as ever full of tips for cheap trees (25 bucks for a chestnut tree – cheers, don’t mind if we do!) and other good stuff. Having scrounged around for all the deadfall we could gather, we’ve decided that, as a one-off, we’re going to buy some wood from Matt, just to tide us over until our chainsaw course next month. After we’ve done that, we really will never want for firewood again.

On Friday we are going to see an Exhibition Opening – Michelle (Susan’s daughter) and Eirlysa her partner are both having (absolutely gorgeous) work shown, so we’re off to mortify them by being overly enthusiastic.

Then, on Saturday, we are training at Bonarong Wildlife Sanctuary to be rescuers of wee hoppity animals. In our Copious Free Time, you understand.

We are thinking about christening this place “Starfire Farm”, partly because the night sky is so breathtaking here, but also because of the powerful female energy in the historical symbolism of Starfire – much as we are envious of ManStrength, we are rather fond of strong female energy around here!

There have been various calls for photos from our dear readers. One evening when our batteries will go the distance, C promises to upload all the photos we’ve been accumulating since getting here!

Lots of love to all
xox H

The genny is in; we had a brief bad moment upon being told that only really tiny stupid little stick welders would work with as few Amp hours as our genny outputs, but actually it looks like a different brand of welder will do the thing just fine.

On our travels we also acquired a big metal drum for free (and the guy says we can go back as often as we like) which will be a perfect big rocket mass heater; and a whole lot of tyres from the bottom servo, which we will certainly use for building, but also, in the shorter term, for potato towers. Warwick, your man at the bottom servo, also lent us his ramps for unloading the genny, and let us leave various dead batteries with him.

We took a uteload of some of the more scary superannuated flammable poisonous stuff from the shed and around the place down the Hill to the tip today. There’s still quite some dubious stuff lying around – what are we to do, for example, with a dozen 10 litre containers full of carpet shampoo of unknown composition and vintage?? (Not a rhetorical question, that, by the way – suggestions are welcome.)

On the way back we stopped to refresh the wood supply, which was becoming a bit impoverished. It meant I got to see a bit more of the land (good grief, but there is indeed rather a lot of it!). I reckon we’ve more or less picked up what there is to pick up along the stretch of road we covered – bring on that chainsaw course (next month!) so that we can actually tackle some of the larger logs that are lying around!

The Folk Club on Friday evenings continues to be lovely – I actually went sort of prepared last night, and jammed through some traditional Irish stuff and a smattering of Steeleye Span. Next week is Open Mike, and I have a couple of ideas about what I’m going to do.

I’ve definitely got a spot in the Cygnet festival, next January. It was kind of them to let me be involved, given that I really missed the submissions deadline. Watch this space for details – it may be that, as well as performing, I do some kind of workshop(!)

Susan of Cobweb Designs and her family continue to be incredibly generous and lovely, our go-to people for information and in any time of strife (as in the case of some recent bank hassles, hopefully soon to be resolved).

We have discovered another fantastic source of local plants, both food plants and a large range of natives, at really good prices, and run by the delightful Mireille (who is originally from French Switzerland) and her partner whose name I am ashamed to say I have forgotten.

Chloe’s building a drystone wall out of the pale golden Permian Mudstone that’s lying around up here, to give the orchard a bit of wind protection. It is rather attractive! She’s also busily planting and possumproofing all manner of new plants – primarily grapes and soft fruit, but we’ve also got ourselves a fig and a couple of herbs (Vietnamese Mint and Horseradish, among others).

The trees we planted earlier are all getting ready to leaf up – we may even get blossoms! This is very exciting for us. It will feel like a major triumph to have the orchard up and running – the first in a series of steps that will transform this place into a garden paradise

Tomorrow – after visiting a special double-sized Cygnet Market – we christen the genny. We’re going to tackle the container, installing a front window and a non-sliding side door out to the caravan shed, to make it a bit lighter and a bit less draughty.

After that, a dog run and various other bits and pieces!