Settled, truly in yurtish, nomad style

Hello everyone!!! Apologies for the long radio silence, we've been madly on the road and the internet hasn't been handy, but - finally, and in what style! - we are settled again and able to roam here once more (albeit for the next little while on a friend's computer up the driveway a little way)....We have come to Mulloon Creek Natural Farm; a couple of Saturdays ago we unpacked a yurt from a box and built it, et voila! Stunning views, a dam out the window to jump in on hot days, a cow to share the milking of, and a huge farm out the door for Cam to run around doing keyline design and holistic management and natural sequence farming, etc etc! One of the etc's being to teach permaculture and all of the above through the Mulloon Institute, which aims to go beyond teaching and sharing about sustainability practices (from an urban to broadacre scale) towards regeneration and restoration of damaged landscapes. Woohoo!

Meanwhile I shall be growing our new baby along with all the fruit, vegies, berries, nuts, herbs and spices that could be needed by the eight families who live on site; the farm is several thousand hectares straddling the Dividing Range and produces free-range organic and biodynamic pastured eggs and beef. All in all, I feel like I'm in Heaven! I promise to be back soon with some photos...

Spring fertility

Sneezing, itching, eyes streaming – wandering the garden like a small walking storm system, watering hankies, thinking how marvellous it is my body can intercept and register so well all this fertility of the plants!

Spring is sprung!

Here's Ro and Cam preparing the terrace beds ready for their spring planting. Many little seedlings are sprouting in trays in the greenhouse, corn and tomatoes and capsicums and pumpkins, cucumbers and many other delicious things....

Ro aerating the soil with the very fine Gundaroo tiller:

Putting straw out over the slashed green manure crop (oats and broad beans) to keep the carbon in the soil:




Ready to go!

Herb harvest

Cam and Yarrow collecting calendula flowers to dry for tea.

Spawning frogs

One of our lovely students has given us some eggs from her established pond to hatch frogs into ours. I've slopped them in among the water plants and fingers crossed they make it through to frog-hood!

Go well, wee froglets!

Yarrow puts foot in mouth

Fox-proof fencing to keep chickens safe

Cam did a design at the start of the year for a couple in Eltham who are mad-keen bottlers and preservers, whenever they go on trips they scour all the little local op shops for forgotten boxes of Fowler's preserving jars...

They wanted a large orchard plum-full of all sorts of delicious fruit, as well as vegies and chickens and drought-proofing for the whole place, fire-proofing etc. Ro and I came along for the day as Cam took his students from the permaculture diploma course at Eltham College to do some prac about fencing and irrigation at the property.


Here's Cam laying out a "skirt" of chicken wire at the bottom of the fence, which will be buried, so foxes can't dig under the fence into the orchard, where the chooks will be roaming and feasting on fallen fruit and insects, and dropping poo as fertiliser:



The top of the fence is angled out, and deliberately loose, so foxes can't climb over it:

The skirt being buried:

The students tacking the fence to the poles (orchard swales in background):

Meanwhile, Yarrow just adjusting the mirror and getting ready to drive us home at the end of the day: