Passage of time

Five years ago we bought this land.  Its been an amazing privelage to have our own piece of earth to care for, despite the incredible amount of work and responsibility that comes with that.  Most of that five years has been spent sharing our time between probably too many different things.  Most of that time has also been spent feeling overwhelmed with jobs that 'should have been done yesterday'.

Our front paddock and gully (in background) as it was 5 years ago.

Five years younger, and proud of our first efforts at fencing!

Gully as it was 5 years ago

We often feel like we are chasing our tail, dealing with weeds (particularly those that seed and spread on to our neighbours land - such as Ragwort), fencing and animal shelters, keeping the grass down (our current weather hasn't helped that!), improving our infrastructure (such as water collection, storage and troughs), and just caring for the animals that we have.  Lets not even mention building the house!  It makes you tired in a way that just a 'hard day's work' doesn't, that sort of emotional weight that is always there...

With a long list of jobs like this, its often hard to stop and enjoy life for what it is.  But its something we are working on! 

Looking at photos from the first year of owning our land we have realised that we have done SO much already.  Sure the house isn't built and there is always a million things that need doing.  We have a lifetime to enjoy our land, our family and animals, and quite frankly we are only human and can only do SO much.

Lots of regenerating trees in gullies.

The same gully as seen in the first photo, now with LOTs of natural regeneration as well as planted indigenous trees.

A garden that is starting to flourish

A handmade house that is slowly taking shape

So here's to 2011, wishing for a good year filled with

fun,joy and happiness, 

good rain and good sunshine

good company and good friendships

good growth and good harvests

more life and less death (I'll compromise for balance!)

less foxes and less weeds

and shorter to-do lists!

We have bees!

Last weekend we got our first hive of bees.  I've been keen to get bees for a number of years, both for honey and pollination of fruit and vegetables.  For some reason there aren't alot of bees around in our area - certainly not on our place, and I can't really see any reason why that would be the case.

The hive we bought came with bees, and is just the ordinary Langstroth hive, very common in Australia.  My ultimate goal is to have several hives, mostly top-bar hives (so the bees build natural comb attached to bars that you can individually move).  We will build these hives, but with all the work that is needed here on the farm and building the house - building bee hives never became a priority. 

At this stage we don't have plans to sell excess honey, we generally prefer to give away our excess produce, but it will all depend on how productive the bees are.  We plan on leaving them enough honey so that we aren't feeding them white sugar as a (poor) substitute for the food they have worked so hard to produce.  Many commercial beekeepers take most of the honey and feed them on sugar (or worse corn syrup from genetically modified corn), so it will be nice to have our own source of 'real' honey made from flowers!

Plus the bees are facinating to watch, I go and sit and watch them fly in and out, you could just sit there all day (obviously I don't have time to do that!).  The kids like them, and our 4 year old already knows so much about bees and how they live - she loves the queen...

Sourdough

Its been about 2 years since I first started making sourdough bread.  Since that day, I've made pretty much all the bread we eat, I think I may have bought 2 loaves in that time, if that.  For the last 18 months or so, I've also been baking our bread in a wood oven which has added a new degree of challenge and planning!

I'd love to say that I'm a great baker (I suppose I'm not too bad) but I've had many failures and flops in that time.  Between heavy loaves that didn't rise to over proved loaves that crumble up in the middle when cut!  There is something of an art to baking bread, you need to bake it at the RIGHT time, and usually the flops are when I try and bake it to suit me, eg the oven isn't hot enough yet and while its heating the bread over proves, or its late at  night and the bread hasn't risen enough and I give up and bake as is for the sake of getting some sleep!  One day I will be more organised though!

What I love about sourdough is that you don't need to buy yeast.  I have my own little community of yeasts and bacteria that I look after and use to make our bread.  All you need is flour, water and salt, nothing more! 

Lately I have been dabbling in making sourdough pancakes.  I was inspired by this blog post.  We have made them a couple of times, and they were are real hit, even with Brad, who was sceptical about makeing pancakes with sourdough (he makes lovely crepes which are dearly loved by our kids).

I want to experiment more with making sourdough 'stuff'.  I have heard of using the starter to make cakes and muffins.  Something to try, come winter.  Right now the plants are popping out of the ground, and its hard to stay indoors to bake!

building progress

Slow progress is being made on our house.  We had a big day last week with friends and family to help us to get 4m of concrete into our pier footings by wheelbarrow.  It was hard work, as the night before we got a heavy downpour, which turned the site into mud.  It didn't take too long to get done, and everything went smoothly.

We have since recieved the first load of our timber for the house, and have been working out how to manouvre it around (its very heavy!), and how we will get the posts and beams up into position.  Feeling more confident about this after a bit of a practice go.

we are pretty excited by our timber!

Although I am going to keep posting here about the house building progress, I have started another blog where I will go into more detail about each step of the way, as well as post informative articles and information on sustainable building, strawbale building etc.  I will be posting lots more photos on that blog of the whole process.

Grass, grass and more grass!

We have been having excellent growing weather this spring.  Lots of rain, followed by warm weather, then rain again and so on.  This means that the grass is really growing (far too quickly for our small herd of grazers).  At this rate you wont see the animals (let alone the kids) as the grass will be taller!

In time our herd will grow, and diversify, but for now we have to manage the overabundance of grass.  The scythes have been getting a good workout, and my technique is improving so much.  Its amazing how easy it can be to cut grass with a scythe, its almost effortless (although I wouldn't try and mow a few acres at a time!).  Its more like fun than work.

This year we will try and dry and store some of the cut grass as loose leaf hay.  We don't have a huge need for hay in the winter - our weather is mild enough that we don't have to keep animals housed, and the grass still grows a bit during the winter.  This year its all about experimenting with technique and dryness of the grass, I think next year we will be more serious about it.

The vegetable seedlings in the garden have been growing strongly.  We have fenced off another part of the garden to keep out the goats and chooks.  Much better now.

On a sad note, we have been having some trouble with foxes lately.  A few of our 'friends' have now been lost.  Disappointing and frustrating, as the attacks have happened during the day, and while we have been home.  Broad daylight, with a dog and active children running around....  The fox is bold. 

And we're off!

We are now officially started on the house!  Two days of earthworks (with another day, at least, to go), has seen the house site levelled, drainage put in, and lots of shaping of the land up from the house. 

Day one was a very busy day, with Brad helping out with getting the levels right.  It was quite a sunny day, and we all got a little sunburnt (well atually, just the adults, the kids somehow managed to avoid it). 

 Holes are marked and will be drilled ready for concreting in the stirrups shown in the last post.  That will be an interesting day, with lots of 'I owe yous' to our helpers who will help us barrow about 3 cubic meters of concrete into 20 holes.  Should be fun! 

Our little boy LOVED all the digging - he could have sat there all day watching!

The waiting game

We seem to be getting lots of practice at waiting at the moment.  We recently got our permits sorted out to start building our house (which was an almost 5 month process), and now we are waiting for our excavator operator, so we can't do much, other than plan how we will get the first few stages done.  Its frustrating, but I suppose the 'up' side, is that when it comes to actually do something we will be very much ready to do it.

We have done one thing, and that is make the stirrups to hold up the posts.  These are pretty heavy duty (to comply with engineering specs).  Brad helped a local guy (another owner builder) who happens to be a boiler-maker for the day to make them.

We are also waiting on the timber - its being milled up for us by a mill that specialises in recycled, salvaged and reclaimed timber.  We are pretty excited about the timber, and we are eagerly awaiting the first delivery, so we can start cutting, drilling and preparing it to put up.

I thought I would give more detail about the house we are building, as its a bit unique, and we have done lots of research, planning and looking at houses, to come up with the design principles we have used.  The house we are building is a round strawbale house.  Some of the features are as follows:

• Strawbale external walls for insulation, and mudbrick internal walls for thermal mass (ie the evening out of the internal temperature).  The house is on a slab for thermal mass as well.
• North facing sun room (south facing for those in the northern hemisphere), which will act as a winter warmer and a summer cooler, depending on which windows are opened.
• Laundry/mud-room/bulk pantry, for washing vegetables from the garden, storing preserves, making wine/beer and some food preparation.  This is the first room you enter from the back door.  This is on the south side of the house.
• Large circular living space, with kitchen and lounge room. Bedrooms and bathroom come off this circular area.
• Composting toilet, and reedbed greywater treatment system, to reduce water used by the house.
• Combustion cooking stove, for cooking, room heating and water heating.
• Small windows (except on the north side) to reduce heat loss in winter, and heat gain in summer.

The house is built to be the right size for us, there are no spare rooms for visitors (when you live out in these parts, visitors are few and far between anyway), the bigger the house, the more it costs to heat/cool and the more cleaning there is to do!  We wont be connecting mains electricity (we are so happy with our solar power system - one of the best decisions we have made).  The main focus of the house is the central living area, thats where we spend our time together, or we are outside anyway.  We wanted a house that would stay cool in summer as we don't 'do' air conditioning. We wanted a house that would do minimal harm to the environment to build, would last a very long time and would be a pleasure to live in.  Its round because we like to be different, and according to Brad its no harder to build than a square house!!!

Meanwhile the apple blossom is out, the bees are working overtime on it.  Spring time always rekindles my desire to get a hive established here.  For quite a number of reasons, firstly to supply us with our own honey, but also as a 'conservation' hive.  There is plenty of information around about the decline of bees, and how commercial beekeeping is a possible reason for this.  I am keen to get into 'natural beekeeping' using a top-bar hive.  I'm just waiting for the right time to build one and then waiting for a swarm to 'turn up'.