On being a bit silly about potential water-catchment

In the last 24 hours we've had just over 80mm of rain. Not exactly flood material (though the river is up, Pearl happily reported when she arrived home), but as anyone who's depended on tank and/or dam water will tell you, it's pretty great. Ducks are happy, snails are happy (grrr), garden's happy, newly-planted 800 shelter-belt trees are happy. And pretty much every conversation I've had in the last day or so has involved at least a little bit of "how good's the rain!?", and/or excited comparisons of mm's fallen into different friends' rain gauges around the traps. The excitement (and relief) around town is palpable, and kind of nice.

Olive and I took advantage of the situation by designating today a 'reading day', which comprised much lolling in the loft finishing various novels, eating scrambled duck eggs, drinking tea, and peeking out the window intermittently to admire the rain. 

loft-view of rainy rain over the valley

It also involved a couple of mad dashes outside in raincoats and gumboots to check on the situation with our overflowing duck dam.

One problem with living in a climate where it doesn't rain that often, is that sometimes when it rains quite a bit, you're not prepared. This of course, is very silly: the less rain you get, the more prepared you should be to catch the rain when it does fall. In some ways, we do OK with this. Our tank is slightly larger than the tank recommended by the quite handy tankulator site, for our tiny roof catchment. When I was researching tank size, I figured it'd be better to have a tank that's never completely full than a tank that ever overflows. So far, we've been lucky in that our tank is big enough to catch all the heavy rain that falls, so we can take advantage of it in dry spells.

The little duck dam (OK, OK... It's kind of more of a pond..) on the other hand, is way way way too small for the catchment it has. The duck dam receives water off the road, which is caught by our driveway and an under-the-road-culvert and delivered into the swale that runs through the orchard, which in turn runs into the dam. This is great, and it means we catch a lot of water when it rains even a little bit. But the dam isn't big enough to hold it all. After rain like we've had today, I suspect it's maybe only a third as big as it needs to be to take advantage of rainfall like this, let alone anything more substantial.

poor little overflowing duck dam (with rivulets of road-water and happy snail-foraging ducks) as seen from the loft

Part of the reason for this kind of significant and stupid oversight was the fact that the main purpose for the dam was to get the earth for our floor, and so that's what I was mostly thinking about when it was dug. I (foolishly) wasn't concentrating properly on the road, the culvert, the swale, and the amount of water all these things would deliver into our poor little dam. Not that I have a one track mind or anything...

I can't even tell you how frustrating it is to see a dam overflowing water that I know we'll desperately need in 2, 4 or 6 months time. Not to mention kind of stressful when the rain is rushing into the dam at such a rate that the spillway can't cope and water starts flowing over the dam wall. The obvious answer is, of course, to extend the dam, but that's easier said than done, mostly because it will involve a fair chunk of money and getting an excavator out to do it. But it will be done, sooner rather than later, especially given that people are saying it'll be a wet Spring... Though people also said that about Winter and it didn't really happen.

So I hope you, dear reader will learn from our mistake: carefully consider your catchment  before you build a dam or pond even  if you're simultaneously thinking about something exciting like an earth floor. Especially if there's a road involved. Those buggers catch a hell of a lot of water.

"We need to create farms that are aesthetically and aromatically romantic."

We've been on a 3-day road trip to Victoria and back. It was long. We got a little bit cranky at times and the kids went a bit stir crazy in the back seat. But it was so worth it. We travelled through some beautiful countryside, ate too many crackers and lemonade fruits, spent time with some old friends and their gorgeous kids, picnicked by a mountain top lake and toured Taranaki Farm with Joel Salatin. 

Joel Salatin addressing the crowd from within the portable pig pen

We first learned of Joel Salatin four or five years ago while reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and a couple of years ago I had the good fortune of hearing Joel speak in Sydney when he was brought to Australia by Milkwood.  I was captivated and moved by his charisma and smarts and wit and amazing oratory skills. What's interesting for me to reflect on is that, at that talk, two years ago I was listening purely as a consumer, albeit one attempting to consume "ethically". That night I ran into an old friend and we talked of our various plans to leave the city one day. I probably uttered the words "We're thinking we'll move to the far south coast in 3 to 5 years". Ha! Within a year we were here and living on our land. But even then as I uttered those words to my old friend, our future move was premised upon a yearning for a more self-sustaining way of life. Now we're here we're thinking differently, self-sustaining yes but now we know we also want to help feed our community. We hope that one day we will be able call ourselves farmers. 

Happy, healthy milking cows enjoying their "salad bar"

Oscar, making some new friends on the farm

The trip to Taranaki was an attempt to see a beyond-organic, regenerative farm in action and to be inspired, once again, by the beautiful oratory of Mr Salatin. We weren't alone in our desires: there were hundreds of people on the tour and such an eclectic mix too. There were hipsters and old-school farming types, non-believers wearing Coke t-shirts, members of a Christian sect, Muslims, elderly people, Jewish people, young wannabe farmers and so many kids. It was a joy to behold this mixed mob traipsing around the farm. 

Happy cows in foreground, portable milking shed in background

Our first stop was the portable milking shed where Joel talked about the limitations of capital-intensive industrial agriculture. The average age of farmers in the U.S and Australia is around the age of sixty. One reason for the ageing demographic is the massive cost associated with the massive amounts of infrastructure required of the modern industrial farm. As young farmers cannot afford to get in, old farmers cannot get out and as Joel says this indicates a system in decline. The approach at Taranaki is to make use of portable, low-cost infrastructure such as this portable milking shed. As the cows are moved frequently, the milking shed can go with them. And as the cows are moved onto fresh pastures regularly they are happier and healthier and there is less stress associated with a milking shed that comes to them. The milk from Taranaki is raw milk and as you'd probably know it's illegal to sell raw milk for human consumption in Australia so it is sold as bath milk. Joel, in his usual acerbic style said, "We now have a government that decides it's ok to feed your children cocoa puffs, twinkies and Mountain Dew but that raw milk is injurious to your health". 

Piggies, doing their piggy thing

Next stop were the pigs in their temporary enclosure. The pigs have no permanent home but are moved around the farm wherever they are required to do their Piggy pigerator thing. They're enclosed in electric fencing for a period of time while they break up the ground, creating periodic disturbance and allowing the seed bank stored within the ground to come alive and help increase the biodiversity (and hence fertility) of the pastures. It was pretty special to see them up close breaking the ground with their noses and to see in practice what Joel encourages, which is to learn our lessons from nature. He points out that the pigs are just being pigs but in the process replace potentially tens of thousands of dollars worth of machinery. Their ongoing portability means that there's no piggy stench and I can attest to the "aesthetically and aromatically romantic" pig enclosure, as well as the rest of the farm. Few flies, no bad smells. It's all about creating a farming system that is portable, carbon-centric, solar-driven and perennially based. This is the farming of the future. 

Beyond "free range" chickens

Chickens in, around and under their tractor

The next stop was the beyond free range pasture raised chicken and their portable chicken tractors. The chickens follow the cows, as in nature birds follow herbivores, so the chickens are moved in to clean up after the cows thus creating a loop that mimics nature. The chicken are protected by Maremma dogs, however it was pointed out that regenerating the land also helps prevent against fox attack. You see, the creation of extra ponds and dams helps a vibrant diversity of life to flourish across the farm. This extra life means the foxes are less interested in eating chickens as they have many other food sources. 

We also met the beautiful herd of beef cows who are moved (with the help of electric fencing) often across the fields. While the farm has permanently fenced pastures these don't prescribe where the cows go or for how long. It's all about the grass. The state of the grass dictates where and when the cows move. This constant cow movement and the requisite grass increase and decreases ensures more and more carbon is sequestered into the ground. This grass farming is the most efficient way of storing carbon in the soil, more effective than planting trees or growing herbivorous crops.  

And we met the broiler chickens in their portable enclosures. They also get moved around the fields. They have short but happy lives. We ate their brethren for lunch and they were delicious. 

It's all about "vertically stacking" the farm with a variety of animal activity. This ensures a regular income stream but also allows a farmer to set up systems that more closely mimic the natural world hence limiting the need for costly infrastructure, costly chemicals and costly pharmaceuticals that harm us, the earth and the animals involved. 

Taranaki Farm has been designed as a keyline system to ensure the increased hydration of the land. This is another way that they are increasing the resilience of their farm. As Joel pointed out, nature isn't always kind so "it's up to us to build resilience into the landscape" in order to better withstand extremes of heat and cold and floods and droughts. 

We concluded with Joel wishing us all well in our food producing endeavours and echoing Wendell Berry's statement "Eating is an agricultural act" when he reminded the consumer in us all that "Everyday we get to vote three times on whether we want a land-healing or a land-degrading food system" and with that we feasted on farm fresh pasture raised chicken and local sausages, hand made bread and home made icy-poles. Good times. We left with our hearts and tummies full.

As we drove away we felt so happy as we considered how the "vertically stacked", portable, carbon-centric, solar-driven, perennially based regenerative farming system is so possible for any size farm, it's an entirely adaptable model. Our brains are busy ticking over what we might be able to do with our little 7 acres. We drove and we drove, finally collapsing into bed in Albury. Then today we drove some more....

As we drove down Brown mountain and saw the Bega valley spreading out before us we smiled and commented on how beautiful it is. We've just driven through many many hundreds of kilometres of country and while much of it was very lovely, it also helped us to see that this place we've chosen to live in is really quite spectacular. How lucky we are. 

Yep it's been awhile...

It's been busy round these parts of late. 

We've been to the circus, we've spent some much needed time with a very special friend and her gorgeous little one, we've had quite a bit of vomiting, we've had helpful and happy visitors, we've had extraordinarily busy times at work, we've had rain, we've had cubby building, we've had pergola building, we've had stair carving, we've had solar system installing. The busyness combined with our total absence of electricity has meant slow times for our blog.  The busyness has also meant we've kept a pretty poor photo record. Luckily Olive has maintained the photo record with her precious impressions of herself and life around her. 

Now I'm here it's hard to know where to begin…

My dad couriered our solar system down from Sydney a couple of weeks back. A lovely and generous act. We had a local electrician booked into install it and we were feeling excited. Then, on the eve before installation it started to rain and it just kept raining. Then it got really windy, so it was really rainy and really windy which are not optimal conditions for solar panel installation. Of course the irony for us was that the last big rain we had was back in April during our straw bale building workshop. And so one does wonder about the confluence of rain and building projects but anyway, we weren't too fussed about the delay given we've been living without electricity for more than two months, another week or so made little difference. For the most part we were happy for that rain, we had all our fruit trees and new Spring plantings to think of. Also our duck dam was turning into a puddle. I have to admit, that on the rainy rainy day I spent quite some time in our loft eating biscuits and watching the water rushing into the dam. Living here on our land during the rain was good. It helped us to see how much more we can do to develop better water management systems on our little piece of hill. Yes, more dams and more tanks but also more swales to slow the movement of water in the ground. For it is said that the most efficient way to store water is in the ground. So yes we have been adhering, in a very committed fashion, to permaculture principle number 1 - Observe and interact. 

Rain on the hills, rain in the valley

Little orchard duck dam filling up.. Yippee

Just before the big rain, Annie's dad Alf came down for a couple of days to help us with our pergola. The pergola project was stalled, mainly on account of neither Annie or I knowing how to get it moving. Yes we built a house but we were totally daunted by the pergola project. We need the pergola area to provide some extra undercover area, for while we are finding the size of our tiny straw bale pretty fine we do get a bit tested on very rainy or very cold days as the kids start to bounce off the walls and there's really no room for that sort of shenanigan. So now we have an almost-finished pergola and it feels good. We've planted pumpkins and Scarlet runner beans to trail up the sides and over the top to provide a quick-fix shade solution for this Summer but we're on the lookout for a longer term solution for Summer shade and Winter sun - grapes probably, kiwi-fruit maybe.Have you got any suggestions?

a bit of pergola, looking north-east

After Alf had departed and after we had our uninstalled solar array dropped off, we were lucky enough to enjoy the company of Genn and Jeff from Boise, Idaho. It's a long story as to how we came to have Genn and Jeff to stay, needless to say we were very glad to share this time with them.  Unfortunately, in the flurry of activity photos seem to have been forgotten. However you can find them over here. My dad also came back for a visit so we had a very busy week here on our block. Many meals were cooked, many dishes washed, many beers drunk and many jobs completed thanks to the fine efforts of this trio. The finest of efforts was reserved for a seemingly thankless task of carving a staircase out of the batter wall behind the house. The ground had gone hard and crusty and we feared we would never get it done but thanks to Peps, Genn and Jeff we now have a super-handsome staircase that will lead us to a very gorgeous old gate through which we will enter the orchard, bee, duck and top dam precinct. 

Staircase, looking hot

After a week of hard labour, Peps declared the need for a wash so I fired up the fire bath for him on a mild and sunny afternoon. As he lay there in the Spring sun he declared "Some people would pay thousands for this!" Indeed they would. We have still not tired of the fire bath novelty. It is a glorious way to wile away an hour.

And amidst all this stair carving, eating, playing, cooking, laughing, yelling, drilling, digging was Bruno calmly and competently installing our little custom made off grid solar system. It took three days to install but now it is done. We were nervous but now we are thrilled, but that is a story for another time. 

Pump up the Dam: A P&E fundraising sale

Our little farm is steep arrangement. The fall from the very top to the very bottom is almost 100m.
At the very bottom of our land we are extremely blessed to have a reasonably big, spring-fed dam, which is currently overflowing, even though it hasn't rained properly for months. Just behind the house, near the top of our block, we have a small, very sweet little duck pond. This pond is fed, via a diversion drain running through our orchard, with rain that is mostly harvested from the road. On account of aforementioned hardly-any-rain, this little dam is approaching empty, so our plans to use it to gravity-feed water to our veggie garden and fruit trees has been thwarted.

At present, we are driving down the hill, hand-filling 20L barrels of water (we have 5 of them), then driving back up to water our garden. We do this daily, and while our early-morning water-carrying adventures are mostly lovely, it's kind of unsustainable, especially since our garden is growing by the day. Clearly, we are in need of a pump, which is why, as soon as we have our solar-power-system set up, I will be making skirts and boleros and such in order to raise a little bit of money towards our impending kind-of-large purchase of some water-carrying infrastructure so we can get our water from here

Luscious, spring-fed, overflowing dam, with a pyjama-ed Pearlie collecting water and azolla in a pre-7am water-carrying adventure (barrels to the right)

to here

Top dam: not as full as she could be, but still looking quite pretty in the morning sun

without driving our car and/or busting our backs in the process.

If you would like to support our pump-buying, and get yourself a sweet, custom-made and probably kind of underpriced P&E skirt into the bargain, read on and pre-order your package NOW! Tell your friends! Or, even better, get them a gift certificate for their birthday/Jesus' birthday (useful also for dudes who would like to participate and are disappointed that I don't make dude-clothes)! And I suppose it would also be useful for you to 'like' this on facebook (though I find making this request inherently embarrassing and I do apologise).

Package 1: A custom-made P&E skirt, made using vintage/reclaimed fabrics and fixtures, sewed in our little strawbale house and powered by 100% solar energy! This will set you back $70 (RRP $90)
Package 2: Aforementioned custom skirt PLUS a jar of our hand-made, hand-picked preserves and a little package of super-azolla, so you can start your own azolla farm. $90
Package 3: A P&E lovely skirt AND a custom bolero (matching, or not). This lot'll be $100 (RRP $130)
Package 4: The works (ie. packages 1,2 and 3 combined) PLUS a little hand-made something extra, as a surprise treat. This is for the hey big spenders amongst you. $130

This is a fab-o opportunity to a) get some lean-priced P&E in your life and b) support a little family on a little baby farm who are trying to do some good by growing some good. So if you feel like doing either or both of these things please do send me an email so I can put you in my sewing book. Don't forget to let me know what package you'd like (or if you'd like your skirt in gift-certificate form).

PLEASE NOTE: The number of packages is NOT unlimited. We need to raise $1300 for the pump and associated pipes and fixtures, so once I reach this number I won't accept any more orders. I learned that capping can be useful in my last skirt sale, which saw me make 40 skirts in  month. Kind of hectic.

Looking forward to sewing for y'all!

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.

 

Some Pepe Progress

This week we are lucky enough to have Pearl's dad, John (aka 'Pepe' or 'Peps') staying with us, toiling dutifully on our little house during the day, and washing our dishes and patting Cuddles the cat by the fire in the evening. It's been quite phenomenal to have him contributing to our home (again - he was at our workshop, too). I LOVE seeing the way different people work on things, what they're good at, how they face challenges and think through problems, and I LOVE that our home is being made by so many different hands!

Peps is quite the perfectionist. He likes taking his time, doing things properly and thinking things through thoroughly before he undertakes a particular task. I'm a little lacking in all of these fields, so I quite enjoy having a bit of the 'thorough' (as opposed to the 'gung ho') vibe on the worksite. It's also been amazingly calming for me, knowing that things are happening on our land during the day, when I'm at work. Most of the time I'm at work I'm more than a little bit antsy, unable to stop thinking about all the things that aren't getting done on the house while I'm spending my time writing grant applications and thinking up creative ways to get kids involved in re-using crap from the tip.
So what exactly has our Peps been up to?
He thoroughly cleaned out all the loose straw and clay and general crap that had accumulated inside our little house over the last 9 weeks (I can't believe it's only been 9 weeks!). It was important to do this so that there was no potential for decomposition under the earth floor, which could potentially lead to 'sinking' sections of the floor, which would contribute to cracking. This was a pretty immense job and, in true Pepe style, he went above and beyond the initial call of duty, excavating some of the accumulated inside clay seeking out little hidden pockets of buried straw. Yeah!

The Peps hard at work mattocking out potentially pesky straw

When this was done, he single-handedly wheelbarrowed in all of the gravel for the base layer for our rammed earth floor. No easy feat given that gravel, I have learned, is a pain in the arse to shovel. So we were more than a bit grateful for help in this regard. The gravel under the floor acts to stop any moisture that may seep in under the footings from creeping, via what's known as 'capillary action', up to the rammed earth. Because of the large air gaps left between the gravel pieces, moisture is unable to capillary up, which it could potentially do if it was just earth on earth, creating a damp floor - not really the look we're going for.

Morning sunshine on the under-floor drainage gravel

Then, he dug a lovely trench to drain any water that may collect in front of our water tank. This will have a bucket drain attached to it (yes, I will post a picture when it's done - very interesting if you're a drainage dork).

Neat drain - Pepe style

Our plan is to drain this water into a little pond in the veggie garden, which will provide habitat for frogs and lizards and birds and give us a spot to grow things like lemongrass, which dig being next to water.
Then he pointed out the totally spectacular sunset (we hadn't seen it because we were all huddled in front of the fire and/or busy cooking dinner and/or attending to children).

Quite outrageous day-before-solstice sunset

Then he did a spot of rendering, and today he lovingly de-nailed all the second-hand warehouse floorboards we scored for our loft. If it was up to me, I'd probably just skip this step. De-nailing? I know it's probably a good idea, but I just don't have the time or the patience to do a job like that.
So thank goodness for the Peps and his attention-to-detail ways!

long live the queen

Not really, but we are super-grateful that Australia hasn't gotten over its colonial status enough to drop the queen's birthday long weekend (though a spot of sorry day or invasion day public holiday would be pretty nice too). We're revelling in the fact that we have 3 days to work on our little house, and have called a working bee to celebrate! But that's for tomorrow...

Today, Pearlie cooked and I hung out with the kids and sewed up some matching pyjama/tree-climbing pants for Olive, Taylor and Taylor's doll, Isabella.

These came about after Tay admired Pearlie's almost-falling-apart pair of 70s purple floral PJ pants that I made for her from an awesomely decorated sheet. I promised that as soon as I found a suitable sheet, I'd make some for the girls too. The sheet came along quite soon thereafter (that tends to happen when you're a compulsive op-shopper/fabric hoarder). Fortuitously, it was orange-themed (these girls love their orange) so we were all set to go. I would encourage you all to have a go at making some sheet PJ bottoms. They're fun and beautiful and pretty good for beginners who want to learn how to copy an item of clothing they already own. If you're interested in a tutorial, leave a comment and I'll post some instructions.

After the pants were all done, Oski, Evan and I headed up to the land to try to sort out the major erosion issue that cropped up after the spillway on our dam kind of failed in the rain we had at the beginning of this week. Well, truth be told, the spillway would have been fine had it not been for the fact that a section of the dam wall was actually lower than the spillway. This is not the way it's supposed to be, and what it meant was that as the dam filled (yay!) it actually started to flow over the dam wall, washing out quite a large gully as it went (definitely not yay). Before I worked out what had happened, I thought a wombat had burrowed into the dam wall (that's what it looked like!) but then I had a look at how everything was arranged and realised what had happened. So the first job was to fill in the wombat hole, then build up the dam wall.

 Tomorrow I'll dig out the spillway so it's the right height.
While we were up there I realised, with no small degree of horror, that our water tank was leaking! Just a little drip, coming from where the tap is attached. Unfortunately our giant shifting spanner was too small but a trip to the nursery we got the tank from soon fixed that - the dude there lent me his big wrench!

It was a pretty glorious, productive day (my favourite!) and to celebrate, we all went to look at the house we're about to start minding.

Yep, it's a crazy beautiful old tiny farm cottage nestled at the bottom of Mumbulla Mountain, with outrageous, panoramic views of the surrounding countryside. We're excited.

bring on the rain

How funny to think that only 4 weeks ago we were coming to the end of our strawbale-building workshop, having spent almost a whole week wishing and hoping for the rain to stop falling. It's funny because now, we're thinking "bring on the rain!". We now have a driveway and a water tank and an almost-finished drain out the back of the little house and a sweet little duck dam just waiting for some water and some ducks. We're feeling ready. Ready-er than we have been since the bulldozer first made a cut on the grassy slope, only a couple of months ago. Exciting times! When we were building we'd lie in bed feeling anxious as the rain fell down but we knew that when our water tank was in place we'd be overjoyed to hear the rain. That day is now, and will be forever more, as we will soon be entirely reliant on the rain for our water. 

The water tank we chose was plastic. It was a huge decision for us, with months spent weighing up embodied energy, life expectancy, health issues, maintenance and that ever-present factor: cost. Having read Milkwood's characteristically thorough account of their very own deliberation, we knew that stainless steel was probably our ideal choice (though I was quite uneasy about the embodied energy). 

But the cost, aside from anything else, made them totally out of the question for us. Next up, plastic vs corrugated iron. We were leaning towards corrugated iron mostly because we like the look of it, and we were quite into the idea of having a tank that matched our roof. But they're quite a bit more expensive, and they're lined with plastic anyway, so the quality of our water wouldn't really be any different. They're also a bit trickier to install, and need a more engineered base, rather than just a sand pad, which is what the plastic tank sits on. Having a seriously limited budget, we were very concerned about not being able to finish the place at all, so were perhaps a little more swayed by cost than we would have liked. So we ended up getting plastic, with a view to getting a small stainless steel, for drinking water, if and when our budget allows. We also have a few very large glass water containers (some variety of flagon, perhaps?), so may rig up some kind of water-catchment that runs directly into these, and we'll be getting a charcoal and ceramic water filter, for what it's worth.

Those strawbales sure are handy buggers...

Our plastic tank came on the back of a truck, late in the day. It was much bigger than I had expected (3.7 metre diameter) and much bigger than the 3 metre sand pad our friend Brett and I had lovingly prepared. But the truck-driver happily helped us expand the pad, and within half an hour or so we were ready to unload. All 500kg of it. See the strawbale at the end of the truck? That's to stop the thing rolling right off the end and bulldozing our little house. It was kind of scary!! We rolled it to the end of the truck, spun it round a bit then just pushed it off the back of the truck onto the sand. Seemed kind of crazy/precarious/dangerous to me, but apparently that's the way it's done.

It doesn't look so enormous now that it's in place, but there is definitely a sense that it's quite big compared to our little house. And yes, it is bigger than the tank recommended by the ATA's tankolator website, but we figured it was better to have too big than too small. I don't want no overflow coming out of that tank.

We joked as the driver left us, that he'd be in the pub in Cooma that night exclaiming "Those bloody hippies in Bega - got a tank bigger than the bloody house!". Almost true. But we figure when (if?) we get our stainless steel tank, we can cut a door in it and it'll make a handy spare bedroom for guests.

Cost of the tank was $1700 (delivered) for a 22 500 litre tank.

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.

First coat of render finished - happy permaculture day!

First thing this morning I headed up to the land, determined to finish the first coat of render. It's been pretty slow going these last couple of weeks (since our divine working party dispersed). While it's been fun, the 4 of us on weekends, me late at night by myself, and me and Olive on a Friday night working by moon- and lantern-light, I was feeling a bit "is this ever going to be over?". But over it is - I feel confident that layers 2 and 3 will be quicker and easier, though I'm not sure what this is based on...

Of course, I'd left the tricky bits til last. Frank, in his haste to get away, didn't give us any very clear instructions on how to get the render to stick to the underside of the window and door frames. You know those beautiful curved frames you see in strawbale books? Not so easy to come by. Luckily, we only had 4 windows and a door to do, and by the time I'd gotten to the final window, I was pretty good at it, developing my own loose-straw with clay-slip-suspended-in-a-mesh-hammock-attached-with-foil-clips method. 

mesh hammock attached, awaiting render

Render seemed reasonably obliging and stuck to this contraption with only a small amount falling off.

render almost done

As always, I enjoyed every minute in our little house, and was especially excited to observe the passage of the sun over the morning hours, watching closely to see just how much solar gain we'd be getting this winter. I was pretty happy, as it crawled across the walls and floor for the whole time I was there. 

We're counting on this sun to heat up the walls and floor (our thermal mass) so that as the temperature drops in the afternoon, the heat is released into the house, keeping us warm in the night time. I was slightly apprehensive about how the house would perform in this respect, since the orientation was forced from solar north to more of a north-north-east aspect thanks to our friend the massive submerged boulder. But it seems like it's going to be OK. Yay!

As if finishing the first coat and watching the sun crawl around our little house wasn't enough to make today awesome, it's also National Permaculture Day, and we were very lucky to be able to tour a few totally inspiring houses in our area. 

I felt invigorated and excited as I looked through these properties, picking and choosing the bits that could be applied to our place, learning about ducks and sheep, and  feeling liberated by our friend Cam's approach to weeds in his food forest. Interestingly, I was actually calmed by seeing the 'big picture' that we're working towards, rather than just the 'to do' list that I've been struggling with since we started this crazy project. 

view from the top of John Champagne's

It was awesome to take a step back and visit people who, like us, started with just a couple of paddocks of weeds and grass, and built for themselves a home and a garden that are sustaining and fulfilling and brimming with joy and beauty.

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Olive, Pearl and Oscar taking in the goodness (and the diversion drain!) at John Champagne's place

Exciting thoughts and plans resulting from today:

1. sheep are probably better than goats - rams are not nearly as offensive as man-goats, so we can have plenty of ewes getting knocked up without having to send them on sex-holidays or worrying about insemination

2. we need to harvest more water off the road! this means planning a drain across the driveway to get that road-water into our diversion drain, which leads straight into the soon-to-be-built top dam.

3. cool-cupboards are cool! On the south side of the house, make a cool, shaded fernery-type garden. Then, make a big underground pipe that carries the cool fernery air into the bottom of a well-insulated cupboard (I'm thinking a dead fridge). At the top of the cupboard, have another pipe outletting the warm air. Convection currents will keep the air circulating and cool.

4. make the duck house in the middle of the dam, island-style, to keep them safe from foxes.

5. kikuyu doesn't actually need to be eradicated at all costs. 

Sara and Cam's swale-y food forest

I'd been expending quite a bit of energy stressing about all the weeds on our place, so was absolutely and joyfully liberated by Cam's approach, which he adapted from Jackie French - spend your time and energy planting, rather than pulling stuff out. If you focus on growing the plants you want, keeping them happy and healthy with things like mulch, worm juice, friends (as in a biodiverse food forest) and compost, they'll thrive, and eventually the weeds won't matter, and/or they'll be shaded out.

And here's what I learnt yesterday: borage flowers look beautiful on an orange cake.

Tige's borage and orange birthday cake