Happy first days of spring!

We're really enjoying and revelling in how aware of the weather and season changes we are up here on our little block of land. Part of it has to do with the fact that we're outside a lot, on account of our little house being so small, and all its amenities (and prime fun-and-beautiful bits) being not-inside.



What better way to spend an early spring day (Ok - several days) than dragging a mattress into the middle of a paddock and setting up camp.

This morning, for example, the second day of spring, we were awake with the sun, and not long afterwards (just time enough for hearty cuddles in bed and some reading of our current favourite book, Farm Anatomy) we were outside, cooking breakfast on the barbecue and surveying the clouds, wind and frost levels. Yes, it's the second day of spring, and we're still having regular, heavy frosts. While some people in the Bega Valley can get frosts as late as November, we're lucky here in that the frosts only settle in the bottom of our valley, not near our house or veggie garden or orchard. This is a bonus, because it means we can get started on planting our spring and summer-growing food plants pretty soon, without fear of them being apprehended by frost.


Frosts at the very bottom of the valley, making friends with a blossom tree and some blackberries

One of the fantastic things about moving up here at this time of year is that we arrived just in time for some serious food-planting adventures, which, let's face it, is a big part of why we moved to this block of land in the first place. So it's exciting for us, but also nerve-wracking, because this, hopefully, will be our forever-house, so we really want to get things right. We're already planning the menus for home-grown feasts for birthdays 40, 50 and 60, so we need to make sure that the things we plant get a good start so they can serve us (and our friends!) well.

Nothing like some bulbs to let you know spring-time's a-comin'

Our bare-rooted fruit trees have been the biggest deal for us thus far, and are being tended with lots of loving care and worm juice. The Orchard has been planted along a swale/diversion drain above our house, which, when it rains, captures water from the road, and diverts it (slowly! - no erosion here) down to our little top dam, soaking the soil along the way and watering our collection of fruit trees. There will also be an olive grove and a nut grove added to this collection of food trees, in a similar kind of road-water-collecting arrangement, but that will have to wait…



Peach blossoms: freakin' beautiful









Due to the fact that it hasn't really rained since our workshop, we're watering our beloved fruit trees by hand, using water carted up from our bottom dam. The same is being done for the first 50 of our 800 Landcare grant shelter-belt/wildlife corridor trees, which we also planted this week. We're saving our pennies for a water pump to get water up from the bottom dam (spring-fed and therefore full) to our top dam (rain fed and therefore not so full), which we will then use for gravity-irrigating our fruit and Landcare trees and veggies. This will be an exciting day, but for now we're content with 5 x 20L drums filled up by hand and then carted up the hill in our car.





We also use these water-carrying adventures to harvest, dry and distribute the abundance of azolla we have growing happily on the bottom dam. We're using it mostly as a mulch and putting a little bit in the compost and worm farm, and she's working a treat.

The phase one veggie garden has also been receiving a bit of azolla love, and has been quite a pleasant revelation. I'd been a little apprehensive about how the soil would be in the area designated for the veggie beds we are going to use this spring/summer, as it hadn't received much (OK, any) attention, and basically consisted of a bit of earth right in front of the house that had been used to store all our building crap for the last 4 months. I expected it to be dry and compacted. In a rare moment of forethought, though, I had, during the frenzy of our strawbale building workshop, instructed someone to start putting loose straw and broken bales "kind of over there - I think that's where the veggie bed will be". This small mountain of straw had received no further attention, other than some food scraps and the daily emptying of our night-time wee bucket (essential in a very high sleeping loft like ours). This neglected pile of building waste has been the saving grace of the veggie patch! What a treat to kick back some of the straw to discover that a. the soil wasn't compacted at all, b. worms are diggin' it, and c. the soil is super-moist, even though it hasn't been watered since the build, when it got drowned in all the rain we had. Yee har! I spent a day and half going over it all with our friends' Gundaroo Tiller (which is totally ace, but I'm not going to write about its virtues because Milkwood already did it here), then spread about 10cm of manure/azolla/compost/worm castings, then covered the lot in another 10cm of straw (there's a bit of that stuff lying around here). We're slowly planting into it (a little rhubarb here, some comfrey there) and dreaming about a couple of months' time when it's (hopefully) crankin' out some quality food-stuffs.


New rhubarb leaves unfurl, watiting for next year's apple forage harvest

Even though we're spoiled with the abundance of egads-awesome home-grown and organic foodstuffs available at markets and given to us by generous friends and neighbours (this morning we had scrambled duck eggs from our friend Christa!), we're still itching for a bit of our own home-grown food, and we're watching with excitement and anticipation as our fruit trees bloom, our seedlings sprout and our dreams take shape here as spring unfurls around us.

 

A driveway and a duck dam

Today a collection of "big noisy cars" came and dug around on our land. The main objective was the delivery and streamrolling of a slightly embarrassing amount of gravel, obtained from 'the pit' at Bermagui. After the week of rain that coincided with our strawbale building workshop, we realised that our dreams of a dirt driveway were... well... unrealistic. We have always been keen to try to limit the embodied energy of our little house-building exercise, and have done a reasonably good job of achieving that. And hey - very locally-sourced gravel isn't really huge on energy consumption, but it did come out of the ground and it is pretty much a non-renewable resource. So the decision to smother our super-slippery clay driveway in gravel was not taken lightly. But we did make the decision, and we did get the gravel, and we're going to live with our decision, knowing that it was basically the only way we could get our driveway to function as a driveway.
Item number 2 on today's agenda was the digging out of a pad for our water tank, which is being delivered on monday. We're pretty excited. The reason the pad had to be dug, rather than just levelled, is that the inlet on our water tank is 2.3m high, and the end of our gutter is only 2.4m high and the tank needs a 10cm 'pad' to sit on. Do the maths (I know - it's hard...), and you'll realise that something needed adjusting. Cue Moonie and his little bobcat and the job's done in about 5 minutes.



While all this driveway and tank-pad action was going on we were also enjoying watching some excavation on the other side of the house. This excavation was, for me, far more exciting than the driveway bizzo. This excavation resulted in the cutest little dam in the world, which is going to be our duck dam,

The diversion drain captures water off the road, carries it along the contour and into our new duck dam
(yellow shipping container in the background now contains all our worldly possessions!)

and a huge pile of clay which is going to be our earth floor (and probably our cob oven and a few other things as well). I LOVED watching our floor coming out of the ground not ten metres away from where it's going to be laid in our home.

Nothing more lovely than a big pile of floor on a sunny Autumn day!

And all our little visitors quite liked the action as well. We're having quite the love-in at the moment, after moving out of our rental house last week, and into the home of our quite lovely and special new friends Vickie, Max, Evan and Taylor, who have graciously offered us a space in their lives and their home for a few weeks between our last ever rental house (yay!) and our first ever hand-made by ourselves and our friends house (double yay!). Today they all joined us on the land to have a peek at the big machinery, bringing muffins and fruit and happy faces and testing out our clay by making sweet little flower-cups.

All in all it was a pretty satisfactory half-day, which made us very appreciative of the fact that we don't really have to do a lot of digging by hand. I can't even imagine digging even a little duck dam in the clay with just a shovel, so I quite enjoyed watching Moonie and his mate scooting around in their bobcats and little steamrollers and bigger excavator/front-end-loader-type things, moving our earth around to make way for water-harvesting and duck-growing.

rainin' and rainin'

I've probably mentioned this fact before - I love sewing for people I love! - but I had to mention it again given the gorgeous set of tops I just had the pleasure of whipping up for one of my loveliest friends, Niki. Is she not a beautiful P&E model?

Her request for 3 tops and a bolero came one day when I was lamenting not having enough cash to buy the new Sal Kimber album. How gracious of Niki to buy tops from me in order that I could purchase some music! The creative cycle is truly a beautiful thing...

The tops were to be comfy, but smart, and vaguely related to the colours dusty pink, blue and green. This was pretty fun, as I love colour-themed requests, especially since organising my teatowels and fabric remnants. I am an absolute sucker for anything arranged by colour, especially op-shops. The colour-coded op-shop seems to be a bit of a regional thing, in my experience, the most spectacular ones I've seen being in Cooma and Wagga Wagga. A few weeks back, I had a pretty awesome few rainy days of sick leave, after injuring my shoulder, so couldn't go on with any 'big' jobs (ie. house-building related). I just had to snuggle down and colour-code my fabric. How dreadful, I know.

So the tops were easy.

The bolero, on the other hand, was to go with a frock she already owned. Niki had sent me the belt, as a reference, but I was all in a tizz about the colouring.

The dress, as you can see, is bloody spectacular, so I was really feeling the pressure to get it right. What to do when in such a tizz? Defer to your muse, I say. Pearlie (my muse) is extraordinary at picking out combos. Combos of colours, combos of accessories, combos of food. Whatever - she rocks them all. Including Niki's bolero's dusty salmon wool/bright turquoise bias binding combo, which I believe to be marvellous.

Niki was pretty chuffed too, which is always a bonus.

While we were in Sydney hand-delivering Niki's tops (a special service reserved for only my most special clients, sorry) Bega was a recipient of some pretty phenomenal rain, which managed to wreak havoc all over our pretty shire. Being massive proponents of the 1st permaculture principle of Observe and Interact, we were super-keen to see how our land was handling the big wet. Pearl, Oski and I (Olive was at school) trotted up at the first opportunity, and were pretty excited by what we saw.

Firstly, the dam was absolutely chockers. Awesome. BUT it was overflowing, and showing off a pretty dreadful spillway which had some significant potential for erosion. Spillways, as we learned in Harvesting Water the Permaculture Way (yep: we get into some seriously sexy night-time viewing down here) should follow the contour of the land for quite some way, so that any overflowing water is captured and carried along the land slowly and gently, so as not to create any erosion and to ensure the land receives the maximum possible benefit from the rain. Our dam, in contrast seems to

a. spill right over the dam wall, taking our beehive with it (the only time I've been happy that the bloody bee lure didn't work) and then

b. create a kind of mini-river over the side, evacuating all our azolla and making a lovely azolla-bog in the gully below the dam wall.

Not the best outcome, at all, but interesting to see. We're not that upset about the dam's performance, given that, come spring, we'll be draining it and excavating it to remove silt, increase our water-storage capacity and create a gorgeous swimming hole. And at least we know it doesn't leak.

Speaking of excavations, they were pretty much supposed to be done by now, given that our workshop is in LESS THAN FIVE WEEKS but have been delayed on account of aforementioned rain. Slightly stressful, though Pearl has been wonderful with her "Babe, it's the weather. There's nothing we can do about it so don't worry" and things do seem to be clearing. All going well, Moonie the bobcat/bulldozer/front-end loader driver and self-declared "Excavation Advisor" will be up at our place bright and early on Tuesday to gouge out great quantities of hillside. The feeling is... well... kind of huge.

PS. As I write this, I am enjoying, quite immensely, the sound of the new Decemberists album, which I received in the mail today. It's a double live cd and, well, let's just say Pearl and I are dancing/panting/exclaiming "Yeah Colin!" as we go about our evening chores. Fun times.

PPS. Post-major rain event, the far South Coast this early Autumn is a truly spectacular place to be and all going well we should have some beautiful building weather for our April straw bale workshop. The prospect of toiling away on our hillside, with so many loved ones, on bright, crisp Autumn days excites us big time.

Last time we went up to the land (for a gorgeous picnic of local lamb and vegetables, delectably roasted by the roasting queen, Pearl) we were a little concerned by the extreme growth of the floating plant on our dam. It had basically doubled its empire in the space of 2 days, which was a little scary given that we didn't know what it was.

In the back of my mind were several thoughts concerning the identity of the plant, most of which involved fears of noxious plant status and/or toxic algal blooms. I took a little sample home, and got to studying my trusty Robbo, who revealed the plant to be Azolla filliculoides, an apparently cosmopolitan floating fern.

Cool! But is it a pest? Its quick growth on our dam indicated that it could well be, so I consulted the interweb and found an awesome gardening site, extolling the virtues of Azolla spp. as a "super plant". Could it be? A super plant already growing on our land? It fixes nitrogen! It takes up nutrient from the water to actually prevent algal bloom! It provides habitat and food for tons of little water-dwelling creatures! You can use it as a green manure (as people in China have been doing for eons between their rice crops)! It inhibits the capacity for mosquito breeding in your water! And its frenetic growth is seasonal, so it dies back in the cooler months.

Still, it was a U.S. website, so I was still wary of little Azolla's status in the Bega Valley. Enter the friendly weeds lady from council, who I emailed this morning (yes, working at council certainly has its perks in the know-how department). She sent me an awesome fact sheet, confirming all of Azolla's super-plant credentials and confirmed that she's A-OK to grow to her heart's content. Woo hoo!!!

Boy, did my mind start to race, concocting many ideas of what to do with our little water-borne gold mine. The most exciting, in my mind, is to use it in the pond at the end of our phytoremediation wetland, which is going to treat all our kitchen, laundry and bathroom water instead of having to get a stinky (and quite frankly kinda weird) septic system.... Ah but that for another post. For now I'm pretty much just thrilled to bits by the auspicious surprises that life chucks up at ya when you're just sitting around eating yer lamb.