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.