Tag Archives: nature

A Busy Week

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Man what a busy week. After restarting blogging here and realizing that I was paralyzed by own my thought pattern I have found that the process of just getting into the blog has led to a burst in energy here doing the real stuff here in urban hippie land.

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We have a function here in a week or so and (more on that next week) add to that A. has finally run out of patience at not being able to get into the car port for the last 12 months.

I have so many projects where I have all the parts and have just been in a state of ennui it will be a while before I need purchase anything which is a great situation to be in.

This weekends projects have been to get the back yard into a safe state for non-urban hippy children and adults. Our kids are not helicopter parented and they know about nails in old pallets and to stay away from the stinging nettle. Not all kids have had that well a developed level of self-preservation J or have made as many mistakes …

So the back yard was cleared up and looking pretty swish. Unlike other times I have made sure that it has not been a quick cleanup. Where possible I have finished projects rather than just dumping the items in the area where the shed will be moved to as a hidey spot. If I couldn’t I have grouped them into projects to be worked on later.

A number of things done will be posted in the week to come. Such as extending a chicken run getting the front garden bed started but the big one was the side path and clearing up the 1.5 cubic meters of road base that I have had in the drive way for the last year or so and was threating to get me into trouble with the non-hippie wife.

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While cleaning up I found a large amount of snails and slugs and the girls have been very happy to help my getting rid of them 🙂

As you know I am great collector (read hoarder) of things and hold a great believe in the idea of not buying something new if you have something that will fill its place.

The side of the house in the coolest and least sunny part of the site. I store my mushroom logs there and have wasabi and other shade loving plants. It also provided access to the back of the house and it has been a bit of disaster with a lot of water coming down and a lot of weeds needing to be managed.

So the first order of the day was to get down some weed proof material. I could have purchased weed mat but I had a lot, and I mean a lot of the bags that I get my organic chicken food in. So why not utilize them? Why buy more stuff made from petro chemicals when I already have it here and have to purchase it for what I need?

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So I laid them in an overlapping pattern and then piled on the blue metal road base and when I ran out of bags grabbed dome the old ripped tent tunnel cover I had that was not water tight enough for a wicking bed and used that. By the end of the weekend the base is down and the rest of the phase will be to compact it and then a thin layer of sand, and then lay second had bricks that I have been collecting (and using for garden beds) finally as nature abhors a vacuum I will supper seed the brick gaps with a mixture of herb seeds, roman chamomile and lots of dandelion seeds mixed with sand. Those spots in high usage area’s will remain clear the rest will produce for the bees and for us. As I go through the phases I will explain each one and why I am doing it this way.

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Phase one is the road base, and it was chosen is for two reasons.

One. We have quite reactive soil and I have seen what it has done to concrete slabs in the back shed and the road base has a bit more flex in it. In a worst case scenario the bricks can be pulled up re-laid if they get too moved.

The second is embodied energy. While the breaking up and transporting the basalt for the road base is intensive it pales in comparison to the amount of energy for concrete. Don’t get me wrong we use concrete and will continue to. For some jobs it is the best and most effective product but where possible we limit its use.

I also got a wicking bed in a bath ready to go and this will hopefully be completed by the end of the week.

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Time to get some sleep… need to go to work to get a rest tomorrow.

Look after the earth and it will look after you.

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I have been at my parents place for the last two days. And as always we have eaten very well from their land. How many kids get to go to their Pa I want to pick my own apple and then get into it for morning tea, or eat grapes picked 30 seconds before from the vine.

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We at the most beautiful carrot so sweet they tasted as if they had been drizzled with honey, fresh beans, potatoes, parsnips and pumpkin. The only part of our meal that was not from food feet rather than food miles was the chicken that my parents picked up at Aldi.

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They harvests rain water, grey water, composts, worm farms, integrated vegetable patches, herbs, orchards and all on his 2.5 acres. He hits the local zone 5 and gets excess deciduous tree mulch and animal manure from the people he knows.

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Wild harvests as they can.

Builds from recycled and reused objects raiding the local pallet pile before it gets burned.

They bottle, dry, salt, pickle and freeze produce.

He leaves fruit for native wild life and  today we saw multiple native species on his block, bees are everywhere as are other beneficial insects.

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He raises pasture chicken for meat and eggs, ducks and some very happy looking sheep.

Keeps his own seeds and rarely if at all uses sprays.

Nothing gets wasted. This is how my parents have lived they eat well and pass on good values to their grandchildren. If you were to ask my father does he practice permaculture he would shake his head I just do what I do.

He has lawns, he has monoculture beds as well as the integrated ones and heaven help me if I ask him to keep those weeds I love to eat nope, they go to the chickens and sheep son. And you feed them to our grandkids …

I have heard from a number of permies that David Holmgren has often said that many people who think they are practicing permaculture are not and many who do not know what permaculture is are.

I am amazed at what they can grow and with so little. We are talking the biggest tubs of basil you have ever seen, kilos of fruit and berries any type of veggie you can imagine. Pretty much they put it in the ground it grows. They are blessed with great soil I will admit the rich red volcanic soil helps a lot but the main thing that helps is that my parents have worked on this land for the last 40 years. They have looked after it, mulched it fertilized it it you name it they have helped it.

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And now even though they are getting on, they and are healthy but slowing down a bit, the land looks after them producing all they could need and want.

We came home to Melbourne with enough grapes and apples to take to work and feed the kids for a week, carrots parsnips, beetroot, lemons, mint and a full sized shopping bag of fresh basil for me to make pesto tomorrow!

It certainly inspires me every time I go up there to get into my garden and make it better for my family.

There is something in this for us all. If you look after the little bit of earth you have in the same way my parents look after their patch we might all just get by.

Post 100

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Should be some kind of enlightened post at post 100 but I have been drinking homebrew with my neighbors for the last 5 hours so barely able to type…

I did just wander out and it is warm, ridiculously warm for close to midnight in March “global what?” as our probable future prime minister would say …

See you all tomorrow.

A Year of Blogging as NOTANURBANHIPPIE

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So a year ago today I started this blog. In that time I have put through 91 blog posts or roughly one every 4 days but that is not entirely accurate as I have had a lot on and have not blogged much in the last couple of months. I have noticed that a lot of the blogs I follow have been a bit quiet of late not just this one. I am not sure if it is cyclical being high summer here and winter in the northern hemisphere and people have other things to do in high summer and less in winter or if people have just got on with their own lives or something entirely differently. Either way I have missed the tales of many of these people’s journeys and look forward to them continuing their tales in the future and hearing what they have to say.

What I have noticed is that despite not blogging I am often thinking of a blog. Doing this blog has and does impact the way I look at the world and not in a bad way.

 I have not really changed my views of the world or of the fact that if I am not blogging about it, I am getting out there and living the dream. And my desire is to still live that sustainable dream I have and teach my children to enjoy life as they go.

I am still tracking along on the sustainable path and still interested in everything I can learn but like all parents with children I find the path gets a bit bogged down with life J The back yard is both a mess and yet more productive than a year ago so that cannot be a bad thing.

I have already booked a course in April on sustainable building with the folks at Milkwood Permaculture  , I am a part of a community garden, Andrea is working on here bees and the kids love to get out in the back yard and enjoy life. Sabrina even has a bee suite and joins her mother in bee keeping. Yes life is good.

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As I have said I do enjoy the blogging as such I will continue and it is with this in mind that I have decided to try to replicate the first month of blogging and put up a blog up each day for March.

Just to get myself moving along as much as anything else.

Look forward to any comments and hope you all enjoy.

Making it a bit easier – Laying Boxs on the easy

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Like it or not we all lead very busy lives and the amount time we can get things done in impacts on what else we can get done.

Time should be treated as, as much of a resource as water, soil or anything else required to live your life. And it is very much a non renewable resource, once gone it will not be back. The effective use of that time is what allows us to enjoy the sit down and the time spent with kids, family and friends.

I harp on about how every dollar is time out of your life the less you have to spend the less you have to make the more time you have to enjoy yourself. Pretty simple equation.

I try to tackle the regular jobs that need to be done as efficiently as I can. Getting the setup of this helps out a lot and I was reminded of this morning when I needed to clean out the chickens laying box’s before work.

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For a lot of years I had an old 44 gallon drum that I used to use as a chicken laying box in my chicken run. It was something I inherited from my sister with her chickens when she moved north. It sort of worked as the rest of my chicken run was from recycled hard waste. It kept the chickens out of the way and provided them with a space to lay in. The problem with it was that to clean it out was a pain. It meant that I had to reach all the way in and drag out the old straw. The task was messy and unpleasant as you ended covered in dust and chicken manure. It was also time consuming and the combination meant it happened a little less often than would be optimal.

The other big problem was that it was dark and had lots of nooks and crannies could easily lead to lice and other pests not being cleared out of the laying box allowing for reinfestation.  

When I mentioned this process clean out process to a girl at work she said her dad of Sicilian decent just used large plastic pots as laying boxes. Easy to clean easy to handle and can be washed out and left to dry in the sun giving the nasties a good dose of UV to kill them off.

I had no spare large pots but I did have some large plastic barrels used for importing olives that I had picked up.

So I cleared out the old 44 gallon drum out of the shed and cut the plastic barrel in half and washed it out thoroughly and viola as below I had laying box’s setup. A board at the front to stop the chicken kicking out the straw and it was finished.

Where as before the clean out took 15-20 minutes of messy work the clean out now takes 30 seconds dump the contents into the compost bin.

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Give them a quick squirt out with water if required and dry. emptie out and ready for straw

Fill with straw and done. Maybe two minutes on average and can be done in my work clothes without any worry of getting messed up.

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Mine are on the ground as my birds seem to prefer not to roost but you could easily put them on a shelf up a bit higher if you wanted to as they weigh next to nothing.

I am going to be sharing a few ideas on my chicken run. Partially because i promised it when i started this blog but also my friend Libby from libby cooks is building a new chicken run so it seems like an opportune time to post on the subject.

Of Mallow and Strawberries

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On Sunday I went and did the excellent Adam Grubb of Very Edible Gardens edible weed walk.

I am interested in foraging and already do some foraging eating nettles and wild fennel, converting sticky weed into bio fertilizer, getting into wild foraged elder and other trees. I have known about dock and dandelion and have eaten them before but wanted to improve my knowledge of the food options that we underestimate and are so widely available. Being self-sufficient is a part of what I am looking at and this is just one small part of the puzzle.

I won’t go into details as to individual plants in this post as this is an area that you are best to go and do a course with or/and get mentored and learn this important skill safely. I have done a courses with Ballarart Permaculture Guild and now with Adam and feel a level of comfort with what I know and don’t know (and have posted on things like nettles) but even then I use a field guide to check things out I am 100% sure of it.

Adam said at the start that you will look at the average plot of grass and weeds a bit differently after the course and yes this is certainly the case and last night I spotted about 5 different edible weeds in my back yard that there was good mallow plant up near the strawberries. So while the 3 year old got stuck into picking the strawberries I picked a handful of mallow buds or mallow cheese as they are known.

They have a nice crunchy texture and taste not unlike edame. So Sabrina and I brought in the strawberries to share and after seeing me eat the mallow she asked to to try it and low and behold she loved them eating them over the strawberries (she can be a strange child at times 🙂 )but she did then clean up the strawberries when the mallow was all done 🙂

Our rule is that you don’t have to eat a meal but you do have to try it and I am glad that this is now coming out in my daughter being willing to try anything.

So go out and learnt some new skills and learn to forage (and do it safely) and if like me you have a family then you might just manage to influence that next generation to something just a bit more sustainable.

So you bought nothing new in October … Big Deal?

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So we finished buy nothing new in October a few days ago and it was an interesting experience.

In some ways enlightening in a lot of ways quite scary.

Yes we ended up using our exemptions. Andrea got all her bee equipment and I ended up getting a roll of bird netting other than that there were a few items we purchased that fell out of the exemption but not many but they are listed below.

  • Plastic cups for the kids
  • New sandals for the kids for the hot weather we had
  • Potting mix for seedlings

I found it easy once I got into the rhythm of it and found that I actually enjoyed the way it made me sit back and think about things. I can be a bit (LOT) driven to get things done and sometimes rather than finding something I already have I will like most people rush forward to bunnings or another store to get the items to get the job done to rush around some more. I very quickly realized all that the time spent charging around to get the items was greater than the time saved and I got more done by not running off to buy things ‘to save time’.

One of the main examples of this was pots. October is a major seedling time in our part of the world leading into summer September/October is the busiest time for us. As I couldn’t buy any trays or pots this year I had to go looking and find the ones I had and find new ways to grow things.

When I went looking a just kept finding plastic pots, in the back yard, in my shed, under my house. I am not only setup for this year but next and onward. I also trialed using old toilet rolls and other small cardboard items as seedling posts which has worked out brilliantly and will be repeated every year. I may or may not have done these without the buy nothing new month but it brought it into clarity and made me try things.

Equally we have tended to buy a lot of plastic box’s to store stuff and use the cardboard box’s as either weed suppressant in the back yard or it goes into recycling. Using them to store things while cleaning up the spare room (read old storage room/son’s new room) has been good we have looked at the boxes now as a resource for reuse. And as we have bought nothing new these are from work or family or friends. We now look at boxes and go ‘ooh that is a good one for this or that’. I also stored things in boxes freeing up the plastic boxes for better uses.  It is quite ridiculous what we waste in this society and what can be reused.

While I enjoyed it and so did A. She found it a little harder particularly with the children but she admitted it was good to not go looking in shops for stuff. In time I think she would have got into the rhythm of second hand stores but at the end of the day the buy nothing new month is a short time we have enough that we don’t really need to buy things for a month in this rich society.

I have built both my garden shed and the chicken run out second hand materials found as hard waste. It took time as you are not working with standard materials and this will seem odd to many when you can just duck down to the store and buy a tin shed and put it up pretty quickly. In a lot of countries what I have built from is better than what many people have to build their homes.

I saw a show on a refugee camp and one of the things that really struck me was the bucket repairer.  A plastic bucket here in Australia cost me about 40 seconds of earning time. If they break most people here would just throw them out. But this guy reworked them and repaired them and kept parts to repair another. Given the embodied energy in the item yet again the third world through necessity is doing what the rest of us should be doing by default.

This is not for everyone and it will be a long time before most Australians are forced to do it by cost (and I hope we never really get there as by that stage the already dire situation for the guy repairing buckets is going to be terminal) but it is something we should be doing as we have the greatest impact on the planet through our profligate and stupidly wasteful ways.

Perhaps a better way for us in the first world is to use our wealth to purchase items that last longer and are more ethical and really show the value of that embodied energy and resources. We purchased handmade Italian leather boots some time ago. Yes they were expensive but they have lasted through our daughter and now our son and looking like they will last should the plan of a third come to fruition and then go to friends or family. Put your value into that embodied energy and allow those not so wealthy in the world to do what they need to do to get by.

At the end I was a bit surprised that we didn’t rush out and buy stuff. We didn’t seem to need to. Yes A. bought some clothes but that more to do with a giant growing baby and a wedding we had to attend than just shopping withdrawal symptoms.

So where to from here?

I enjoyed it and would like to do this for a quarter next time and see how it goes but it will require careful negotiation at the end of the day I am in a family and a relationship and forcing your own views on people is just being a zealot and that does not help change anything.

What I can do is to work on myself and fixing that up first. I am not sure if I will ever get to the point of my neighbor who would not spend by his own accounting more than 10% of his wage on new stuff and I will most certainly never ever get to the guy who repairs buckets but as I play peekaboo and chasey with my son in between writing this post I am reminded that is what I personally have many reasons to try.

Fresh Batch made with a different yeast

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Well another late night bottling up a batch of elderflower brew. This one made with ale yeast.

Not bad on first taste perhaps a bit dry and I am not sure if I left it a day or two to long brewing or if it is the yeast type. Might make up another smaller batch and keep the brewing down to about 4 days.

Having said that still very drinkable 🙂 and off course had to clean up a glass… wouldn’t want a part bottle now would we 🙂

This will be my last full batch for a while I have 30 liters of the stuff. Will freeze and dry some elderflowers instead and leave the rest of the flowers to become elderberries for elderberry port and tincture. After the bugs of this year going to stock up on anything to help the old immune systems over next winter.

Have a great week all and remember wishing for the weekend is wishing away a week of your life go out and live the week. 🙂

The Olla Bed

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About a year ago I built an Olla bed. For those of you not familiar olla are a low tech unglazed earthen ware containers used to provide water directly to the roots of a plant.

A much better article than I could ever write is found at

http://permaculturenews.org/2010/09/16/ollas-unglazed-clay-pots-for-garden-irrigation/

With summer just around the corner (despite the sudden cold snap) I thought I had better give a report on how it is doing.

My Olla are not so pretty being made of some old clay pipe I had access to and some pot bases. I Sanded them to remove any glaze and used silicon to bind it all together. Over the last summer they lasted really well requiring a single fill up of the three olla to last the week.

I also incorporated a mini worm farm into the bed that helps to keep up the worms in the beds and compost it.

As you can see the beds are thriving. Last summer almost all of our salad vegetables came from this one bath tub. I was sick and tired of plastic packets of salad vegetables costing me a fortune and going bad after about two days.

The bed requires very little work to keep the plants maintained and as you are feeding directly to the roots of the plant the amount of weeds has been very minimal. I have used seedlings for the most part planting them around the Olla and this seems to work best for me, the developed roots seem to find the water without much trouble. Direct seeds seem to go the way of the weeds and not do as well.

This year I will be adding some herbs and more leafy greens to the mix and seeing how much I can push the system and how long the reservoirs will last with the bed fully loaded.

In the next week or two I will drop a post on the build process I went through.

Spring is here

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Well spring is well and truly here. In the last week we have had some wild old weather her in Victoria to the point where I emptied out the new mini hot house of seeds in case it got knocked over.

But today well today was a spring day. Lovely warm and sunny. Mother Nature living it up. Trees are blossoming, bees are at the flowers, seeds I planted only last weekend are charging out of the growing mix already. The broad beans are 1.5 meters high and even the first of the self sown tomatoes is up and at it.

We have had a big weekend. We had considered going to a few houses today for sustainability day but we decided to work on our own place. Sometimes you need to seek inspiration sometimes you need to get stuff done.

We have started the spring clean of the house and are doing a permi/5s on the house. Over the last 3 years of having the kids we have allowed the place to get a bit out of hand as we get less and less space and this means that it has become less user friendly. This is now being addressed.

The primary focus for me apart from the house has been getting seeds in grow tray and garden beds, preparing beds and planting seedlings and tree’s. This is that short window where you can get the garden into shape for the growing season. So I am bit busy.

So far I have put a dozen types of plants in seed trays have another 6 – 7 to go and just ordered another 12 from green harvest so the back yard will be prolific. Not sure how many plants we have but I will do a stock take at some point of what we have in the garden.

The weekend was not all work yesterday and today we paused as the kids ran around in the back yard having a ball and have enjoyed some press pesto, as good a taste of spring as there can be.

I have tomorrow off from work and a bit to do a spare tank to setup and plumb in, logs to inoculate, blue stone to purchase and 2 meters of road base to be moved around for the base of retaining walls and other projects.

So off to bed I go and wish you all the best of the spring get out there and enjoy it.