First weekend of PDCs 1 & 2

We began our two parallel Permaculture Design Certificate's from here this weekend - woohoo! Two lovely groups of people, one lot doing the course on Saturdays, and the other on Sundays, over 12 weeks. Here they are all penned in the chookhouse, inspecting the deep litter compost system the ladies have going on for us:

Here are some remains of afternoon tea, a lovely sort of composition of pips and peel and tea bags that took my fancy as I went to clean them up:

Funny potato creature

Look at this funny little fellow:

He looks like a Bert to me!

Have pillow, will travel

A nomad mother necessarily has a nomad baby: little Ro is seven months old, yes, and has finally gotten a bed! He’s been sleeping on the floor beside us in tent and boat and bedrooms so far, and thanks to ebay and the delights of settling down for a year is the now the proud owner of his very own white cot: 

NB: In Samoa, Cam built this ingenious bed on the side of ours for easy feeding in the night, mainly so we didn’t have to blunder in and out of several mozzie nets all night long! I sewed an annexe into ours to fit over and tuck into his little sidecar bed. 

Just the other day I saw the same sort of thing for sale in the ABA catalogue for more than $400!! It’s definitely a lovely way to keep your snuggling space as a couple but have baby with you too.

A gratuitous shot of Ro on his first day, just because he's beautiful:

Produce report

Here is some kale, now in the headlights of the bulldozers, down the middle of what will be a path for the new beds. I had to take a photo – in my fancy they look like Egyptian fans for slave girls to wave over Cleopatra on a languid day…

…while feeding her grapes! They are delicious, sweet and slightly tart and taste like the deep colour purple, even if they are small and taken up by a lot of seed!

 

 

Tiger in the orchard!

You know you’re getting your eco-habitat right when you have top-of-the-rung predators lurking amongst the foliage: this tiger turned up the other morning, to the consternation of the faint-hearted chickens! 

And then an ibis! Who seemed very puzzled at finding itself in such a lovely jungle of fruit and no garbage in sight…

I felt quite like David Attenborough, stalking the wildlife through the orchard with my camera. 

Trendy brooding chooks

The chookies now have that staple of trendy 70s architecture: the split level. With Cam digging around in there and shoring up edges with salvaged sleepers we thought perhaps we’d ruffled a few feathers when we couldn’t find any eggs for a couple of days. Perhaps they were in the orchard instead…

Note the beautiful, dark humus
the chooks have already made.
Since dug out and put on the lower salad bed.

Now the chooks can scratch around to heart’s content – they like to scratch uphill so everything always ended up piled up against the bottom gate before, and the concrete footing of the top post was exposed. Now that it’s level, we’ve put in a good thick layer of straw (carbon) and chuck in our kitchen scraps each morning (nitrogen) and they can scratch around (aeration) and poo (more nitrogen) and as a reward eat the worms coming up for a bite a

t the scraps too. And over time they have turned and tossed and aerated and wet a lovely rich compost for us to shovel out and use on the garden. Thank you ladies!

And then we found the white hen was broody (again!) and on lifting her out of her box found all the eggs of all the girls from the last few days, neatly nudged from all the nesting boxes to keep warm under herself. She tucked straight into some grain and had a good drink – broody hens go for 21 days without eating or drinking, keeping their eggs a constant warmth – but of course sitting on unfertilised eggs there are no chickies tumbling out at the end and perhaps they will keep on sitting and sitting and sitting until…! And so out she must go, although I feel very rude to do it.

Colour book

This is a little book I made for Yarrow when I was wandering round our house in Samoa, big and pregnant, finding little things to do to get ready for my new baby...

I scavenged old magazines from all the other ladies (when you're overseas a new magazine is like gold and gets passed around and re-read, and re-read and passed around, until it's completely tatty and sucked dry of any juicy gossip!) and cut them up to make a colour book. Each page has a funny little non-poem from cut-out words which will make no sense at all to a small baby (or most right-minded adults!). Eg:

I borrowed a laminator from a school teacher friend to make it tropical-humidity proof. 

Here are details from some of the pages: