Homeland
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With the bees sorted out, for now at least, all attention has moved on to the trees. I won’t put my services out there as an arborist – not by any near means – but [...] -
One thing we learnt through the whole bee saga was that hive beetles thrive in cold shady hives. So, we had a challenge on our [...] -
Yes, we are still around… In a previous post I described how we were processing a hive infected by hive beetles and promised a follow up. Well, here it is – a short [...] -
In the fall, due to some crookness, a very quick onset of a very cold winter and some other extenuating circumstances, we didn’t pack our beehives down. With a very wet [...] -
Spring is here in name only and as usual winter still reaches its long fingers deep into October. My perseverance is low. In winter I felt strong and bold, barely [...] -
A long, long time ago, in the month of June in the year of 2018 actually, I posted that we planted quite a lot of tagasaste tree-lets, in an attempt to increase the nitrogen [...] -
Although I haven’t been writing much – more about that later, maybe, one day – anyway, life in the aviary has been going on at full [...] -
Autumn is almost done. It approached rather suddenly and with my brother and his wife departing at the start of it I did not feel prepared to do justice to the harvest [...] -
Someone wise said you shouldn’t compare yourself to others’ facebook highlight reel. However, I’m getting very little time to write long blog stories nowadays, so [...] -
My wife has a deep-rooted aversion to cleaning the honey spinner; and she has an equally deep-rooted belief that I can’t do it thoroughly. I clean it, then it stands [...] -
No, this is not about a Latin jazz band or a little Salsa congunto, but it might have been… Why would I give an indigenous Australian grass parrot a Spanish name? Well, [...] -
My goodness, I wrote this in mid January… Anyway here it is. So the festive season and supposed summer holidays rushed by in a blur of cold and rainy weather, chores, [...] -
So we made in time. On the first day of Christmas… oops I mean on the first day of the school holidays, I put a change request in to shift my mid morning meeting even [...] -
It’s getting to the pointy end of the project. We really wanted to get this done so we can introduce the birds at the start of the school holidays. It’s slowly getting [...] -
The weekend was dedicated to waterworks. We’re using copper pipe because we don’t want plastic pipe inside the aviary where the birds can gnaw at it. And there’s a [...] -
The last n days (n a large integer number) seems to be blur of… mesh! Putting two layers of mesh on a 9m x 3m x 2.5m structure is no trivial task – especially around the [...] -
And so the saga continues. I don’t really know why I called it the P project. It’s actually the A project – a big spacious walk-in aviary for small parrot type birds. A [...] -
Well this isn’t strictly permaculture. But then, everything doesn’t necessarily have to be. The P stands for something else. But I guess repurposing a climbing frame may [...] -
IT IS A JUNGLE OUT THERE So with Martin taking a forced hiatus from garden work it falls to me to make sense of the overgrown jungle our vegetable garden has become. [...] -
Stop the press! Hold back the Tagasaste and Vegetable posts (yes I have at least two more in store) – the chicks have hatched! They literally hatched the day after my [...] -
So although I’ve taken a bit of a hiatus from the “urban farming” activities , obviously the birds and the bees have not been impartial to the coming of spring – even [...] -
As we are busy experiencing our first bout of winter rain, it seems a good time to reflect on the strangest summer we have had – with regards to rainfall, anyway, since we [...] -
Wednesday dawned a bit brighter and clearer than the previous smoke-hazed days. It was a bit more pleasant out while setting the irrigation and letting the ducks and chooks [...] -
After a hiatus of a couple of weeks, I’m battling to get back into the swing of things. It’s as if the dry heat and smoke haze have sapped up all the drive and energy. [...] -
I don’t typically write “a day in the life” type posts, but last Thursday may be worth highlighting in this manner. The day started off quite special with a quick surf [...] -
As I’m embarking on phase 3 of the battle against the kikuyu in the driveway orchard, in addition to the complicated terrain, two additional complications also set in. But [...] -
I guess it’s that time of the year when you just have to be really busy in the vegetable section of garden. Actually, I don’t mind working in the Homeland vegetable [...] -
Well, there is one way to get another harvest entry under “k”, and that is to use the alternate spelling! We inherited two little kumquat trees at Dreamland and this year [...] -
We don’t write about biodynamics much, because it is something we just do as part of our periodic activities, so it normally just gets done without any photos or stories. [...] -
For those who have been concerned that I may have been slipping on the driveway de-kikuyuing project – phase II – the battle for the middle ground, don’t worry, I’ve [...]
Dreamland
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I wrote about the fox-orchestrated devastation at Dreamland a while ago, and since then we had another fox decimation one night because someone was too tired and forgot to [...] -
In the last post on the aviary construction, I mentioned that we have the occasional wild cat and fox coming through here… In fact, there is a resident wild black cat on [...] -
Yeah, I know, I haven’t blogged for many months. We’ll explore that, as well as a few random observations in this [...] -
At the start of the process, olives are like juicy gems – so beautiful and full of potential. You savour the fresh air while you carefully pick the berries from the [...] -
I know, I’ve been pretty quiet on the blogging front lately. I can only blame the day job partly, but it, together with some other interesting developments have kept me off [...] -
With compliments to sir Elton John… so, now you know what my kids get me into, or me them, I’m not too sure who can be held responsible. With the still relatively new [...] -
We have grown used to the idea that when you keep chooks and ducks – especially together – weird things can happen. But this latest tragic event that happened at [...] -
There’s a new form of Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) course afoot! Launching on 20 November 2019, it’s called the “PDC Exchange”. It is a brand new concept [...] -
We’ve always had it in mind to use Dreamland as a permaculture demonstration and teaching site. The first step towards this was to host a Permie Get-Together – basically [...] -
No this isn’t about a Ryan Adams song, nor about a Kevin Rudolf or Breaking Benjamin song either, not that I have ever heard of either of the latter two… thank you, [...] -
We’ve been on quite a drive to provide a steady supply of greens for the chooks in a more sustainable way. We’re currently trailing these low triangular frames where the [...] -
A while ago I wrote that we needed some places of contemplation, especially at Dreamland where we have designed little areas especially for this purpose. So we had the [...] -
One of our goals is to reduce the amount of chicken feed we buy, not only to save money, but also to give the chooks a healthier diet. Even an organic medication-free feed [...] -
No this isn’t some weird nightmare… it was a real project to build and start using compost bins over at Dreamland too. Up to now, we have been carting all the compost [...] -
Last summer was a costly one for us, especially at Dreamland. We had a newly planted edible forest garden, with new grass and clover paths, and it was blazingly hot and dry. [...] -
As I’ve said in a previous post, living with widely free-ranging chooks and ducks is an interesting exercise, especially in a delicate urban forest garden. In part one we [...] -
Living with widely free-ranging chooks and ducks is an interesting exercise. It becomes especially challenging when you have a relatively large flock in a relatively young [...] -
An important part of community are the people who live right next to you. Well, we have been blessed by landing “by accident” (or is it destiny?) next to some amazing [...] -
For some bizarre reason we’re in the third phase of a lot of things – no-dig beds, paths and now chicken greens too. These phases don’t have anything to do with each [...] -
Supposedly as winter settles in, we should be getting less and less eggs, especially from a very young laying flock. When I wrote this initially we were getting between 5 and [...] -
A while ago I said “when the heat is over, I’m going to plant more clover”, primarily for the bees. We plant all the open areas and paths at Dreamland with a mixture of [...] -
In both the savannah forest garden and the vegetable market garden at Dreamland, our approach is to build up no-dig beds from the ground up. So at Dreamland, we don’t have [...] -
We’ve had a lot of rain last week, in addition to the previous big rain. In fact, we’ve now had four sunny days and our driveway still has so many puddles of water that [...] -
I guess every place has their “pet” pests that you just battle to live with. Through my permaculture studies I have learnt a lot about integrated pest management, and we [...] -
Since he started growing – and he got really big really fast – Barry has always been a conversation piece. He just has that stand-out type of character and physique that [...] -
I can’t believe only a month ago we were highly concerned about how long the super-dry hottest summer on record was stretching out. The tanks were all dry – all 120 000 [...] -
We’ve planted quite a few Feijoa bushes at Homeland, although they seem very slow in growing big enough to start bearing. However, just over the fence at Dreamland, [...] -
In our post about our first honey harvest I mentioned how great the first harvest of anything new is. But I think that is because most harvests come in some quantity. I mean [...] -
In a previous post I mentioned I’m busy with an interesting resource cycling exercise. So this is it. With our setup where we have big fixed fox-proof chicken coops, it’s [...] -
One of the mature trees we inherited at Dreamland is a beautiful bearing Quince tree. It doesn’t seem to have the bi-annual cycles that many of the other fruit trees have. [...]
