Working in a Permaculture Eco-Village

How a mixed use subdivision can build natural ecosystems, resilience does exist in diversity, a look at an intentional community.

This December I had the privilege to spend five days Wwoofing (willing workers on organic farms) with Max and Trudi Lindegger at Crystal Waters EcoVillage, one hour drive inland from the Sunshine Coast, Qld.



This is a real eco-village and intentional community, designed along permaculture principles in 1988. Max and partners started this eco-village, having done Bill Mollison's first permaculture course. He now lives there, doing design consulting, training and international development aid work. Otherwise Max is looking after his bees, a few cows, nut trees and seedlings which he sells at local markets.

Crystal Waters is in many respects, is a typical subdivision of a 259 ha cattle farm. Roads, dams and all other infrastructure were constructed.

What Max and his partners did, that most developers don't do, is spend 9 months observing the site, before committing design pen to paper. They observed the property through the seasons - how water moves, ecological niches, fauna and flora, soil, sun, wind and other external energies. A business plan documented the research and the potential products (fruits/ nuts, aquaculture, agroforestry, livestock) and how they'd fit into the 'system'.


Today Crystal Waters is home to around 250 people. A standard body corporate structure, is the formal mechanism which binds the community. All the infrastructure is maintained by the body corporate, with very little involvement of the local council. It is not close to a major town, and many people work from home. The local community economy is strong, with residents often employing each other. Some locally major businesses started from Crystal Waters, such as Green Harvest Organic Gardening Supplies, or Rammed Earth Constructions.

Houses are clustered in small groups, and most of the land is set aside for nature (permaculture zone 5). There is a kind of village centre, as you turn off the main road into Crystal Waters, with a community functions centre and eco-centre training facility. There is something on most nights of the week, though there's no expectation on residents to engage in activities.


A couple of streams run though the undulating property, and Max and others have planted thousands of indigenous trees, recreating in one area, a rain-forest. And by the sound of things, they've been very successful at re-creating nature. Literally, it is very noisy (in a beautiful way) with 26 frog species, 176 bird species, noisy cicadas, wallabies along the verges (they're not noisy), but no dogs or cats allowed!
For those of you interested in the town planning principle of encouraging mixed use, this eco-village takes the idea to a new height. People are living and working in diverse ways seamlessly with nature. Even the pastures have lots of species variety, with no herbicides used, there's lots of grasses, clover, fungus and other herbs. It's easy to see how this diversity, in nature and human culture, breeds resilience. If one herb is less successful, there is another which animals can graze and so on.

As a sustainable solution for human habitation, Crystal Waters is at one end of the spectrum, giving most back to nature. Clearly at around one hectare per person, it's not housing many people and nor does it intend to. At the other end, someone living in central Manhattan uses very few resources, and is arguably just as sustainable. Where do I want to be? Not sure. Crystal Waters is more beautiful, but perhaps not as exciting (in a human kind of way:)

A well designed system, doesn't need much maintenance. That was evident from Max's six cows (and one bull). They are lowland Angus, used for their meat, saving on the milking. They are cell grazed, meaning that a grid of electric fences is used to keep them in a segment of their paddock and every two days, they're moved into the next segment. It's a simple matter of lowering the electric wire and they move into the fresh cell. This way the clover and other grasses get eaten down once, and can recover before the cows are back. Soil compaction is also less. The paddock is full of pecan nut trees, and in-fact the cows as a by-product of the system. A mobile abattoir/butcher is used to kill the cows.

Max's best cash crop though, is his honey. It tastes quite unique because of the surrounding polen the bees forage. Most honey you buy is blended from many areas. As well as the bees, Max sells thousands of seedlings at local markets. They're popular because, being grown outside, they don't keel over as soon as you plant them.


My wwoofing jobs were mainly general maintenance stuff - pruning, mowing, planting seedlings. This December, it's been hot and humid, and we had some heavy tropical rain. I was glad to dive in the dam at lunch time. Thanks Max for sharing your experience.

See more at http://crystalwaters.org.au/

The rest of the holiday

Then we went off to Noosa for some traffic and culture shock, though also very pretty.

New Life

We're well into spring. Tomato seedlings and pumpkins are planted out. New puppy has arrived despite my protests (or is it an animated toy?)

And new chooks (or more correctly, Matha's old bantams)


Introducing the two - the puppy, Michael, was frightened of the chook!

Still time to protest Hazelwood brown coal power station (saturday 6 November)

Here's how the green manure experiment looks a couple of months later (See ealier post when I dug the lawn over). I got excited and put spuds in also.
[Postscript - this picture was taken 20/1/2011, just after the oats have been harvested and the not-so-green manure mowed and left on the ground to build soil.]

Chicken Slaughter

Life's not all good news. We (The family) were away on Saturday night (16/10/2010) at a wedding. I hadn't organised the neighbour to close and open the chook pen. I guess I thought we'd get away with it as we have many times before.

Anyway, all four birds are dead, killed by a fox. Three were taken, one was on the ground, head removed. Feathers everywhere. It would have been horrible for them.

I'm devistated,especially because of my stupidity - I could so easily have prevented this. Three of the birds had just started laying after breeding them up. The white Aracana, fluffy, was Ben's pet. She'd been a lovely mum to the chicks. She was clever, and she trusted us. We got her from a friend, probably 3-4 years ago.

Winter 2010 - garden developments

Well it's been a while, but I haven't forgotten my permaculture, despite it being a cold wet winter. Today (29/8/2010) I planted a persimmon and peach tree, bought at the Bentleigh Market. The roots of both were fairly pot-bound, so I worked the root ball hard to pull them apart and spread them in the hole. The Persimmon likes to be kept moist, so I've dug a moat, 1.5m dia 500 deep, with a poly pipe with lots of holes drilled in it. The moat is lined with paper on the bottom and outside edge and filled with compost. The heaped up soil in the centre also back filled the moat and the tree has been planted in the centre. The damp moat will draw the roots out and down. Thanks to Dan for demonstrating this method at a blitz in Waverley. Pruned a neighbours lemon trees - with a chain saw. It may be a couple of years before it fruits again, but from then on I'll have an endless supply - saving me growing my own tree. It was riddled with gall-wasp desease. The neighbour was happy. [Postscript - this is how the tree looks a few months later on 20/1/2011. Shows citrus trees don't mind being butchered.]
Built up a garden bed in the back - with a geotextile barrier at the bottom to stop adjacent trees roots invading the space. I've even dug over half the back lawn, and sowed peas and oats as a green manure. It will be interesting to see how it goes, or if all the birds get their first.
.. What else? I've been getting heaps of broccoli out of the front garden, since the working bee in autumn. I've moved the chooks into the front yard (No more chook shit on the back step. Yipee!) and light pruning of fruit trees. It's time to start planning for spring. Next job is to get the tomato seedlings going. Here's a home video tour of the plot - I must have too much time. So what have you been upto this winter?

Wwoofing with David Arnold in Violet Town

Sowing, growing, harvesting, killing, eviscerating (look it up if you don't know), milking, bottling, pickling, cooking, planting, pruning, chopping, (soil) building. I got to practice some of these verbs with David Arnold in the last week of May. It's time consuming, but beats being in the office.

I ate 90% from the property I was working on - goats milk and meat, vegies and home-made beer. I was wwoofing at David Arnold's 8ha permaculture property,
Murnong, in Violet town, two hours north of Melbourne up the Hume Hwy.

David built a passive solar mud brick house with big north facing windows and farm sheds attached. The concrete slab floor heats up beautifully in the sun and radiates after dark. We made jams, lived off soups, fed and milked goats. Unlike my home, there was nothing for the recycling bin!










We chopped a dozen cassurinas that needed thining. Those remaining will now kick on. The timber was cut into logs and branches mulched for compost and later use on the orchard. It was good practice cutting the scarf (wedge), back cut and controlling the fall.

David's got an extensive orchard and the trees are in great condition.
Love a persimmon.

Marg and the kids came up for the weekend and we had fun using some team work to harvest and weigh half a ton of pumpkins.

It was a great experience. Hard work and great fun. We had some good conversations about the woes of the world. Wwoofing's a great opportunity to learn about a different way. Thanks David.


PS There's two types of people in this world, those who poo in drinking water and those who don't. So now I'm back home, I've made a 'lovable loo' compost toilet. Just add saw-dust.

Here's a blog from a local permi who's made the move out of town.

Kinglake Ranges Food Futures Forum

Wow, great weekend conference at Kinglake - thanks to Daryl for organising it.

1. David Holmgren
David talked about his booklet on future scenarios of peak oil and climate change. In particular, the implications of an energy decent scenario that permaculture deals with.


David started with a reminder these topics are bl**dy complex, and to expect scientists to know what will happen when, is v unrealistic.

Opportunities for farmers?:
- obviously tree planting and sequestering carbon in soil.
-Urban agriculture and growing spuds, pumpkins and organic veg in peri-urban area close to the city.
- Dairy in high rainfall areas and goats elsewhere.

There will be a general reorganisation of land use, with the fat being cut out. Eg we won't grow so much sugar cane in qld, or cotton or aluminium production and so on.

2. Peter Andrews
Author of 'Beyond the Brink'. He talked about Natural Sequence Farming. How we need to learn to read the landscape and how water moves and carries nutrients. He talked about the daily water cycle that, thanks to the forests that used to exist in the first 150km from the coast, gave us a net 10% increase of water, instead of 40% loss in any given period. Forests on the coasts would draw moist air in from the sea. Via transpiration and evaporation (forming dew), water was trapped within the canopy and reused, resulting in 100% efficient use of water. It led to rain further inland and hence forest begot more. Humans have disrupted this process by chopping it down.







(Pic: Regrowth after fires)

Peter talked about other natural processes in the Australian landscape. Stepped diffusion, where a series of pools in a flood plane, and flood events create terraces. We just need to let the weeds to their corrective job.

3. Gwyn Jones
Gwyn showed how a King Lake blueberry farm was able to largely recover from the bush fires. They pruned back hard, provided water, seaweed solution for the roots, reinocculated the soil (bugs in bottles) added compost and coal. This helped kick start the soil biology. Hard decisions about where to start first had to be made, with 9000 bushes. Recovery was helped by having good soil with humus, beforehand.

Glyn described the balance required between calcium, magnesium and potassium and sodium, and some tricks to getting it right. Also suggested using paramagnetic rock or rock dust. He gave us a list of weeds which show the fertility of soil.

He finished on a reminder to 'think before you put more-on' or you become one. We need to experiment and question things.

4. Kirsten Larson
Kirsten's from the Victorian Innovation Eco Lab (VIEL) and she talked about the issues around food security (quality). 60% of our burden of illness is due to diet. Yet there's no money in farming. Compounded by 84% of farmers having been affected by climate change. Eg in future, we'll have 85% less water for irrigation. Drought lifted the price of vegies and fruit 30-40% and bread 17%.

Food is 28% of the average victorian's green house gass emissions.
Fossil fuels are 30% of costs in agriculture, versus 1-2% ave for most other industries.

Need pathways to have the discussion with mainstream society, for example by talking about Food Sensitive Urban Design (FSUD).


(Pic: Temporary village in Kinglake)


5. Sherry Strong
Sherry's a dietician with a great voice! Gee i wish I could wake up singing like that. Really good presentation on what the stuff in supermarkets is doing to us. All that refined and processed "food" which shuts off signals to stop eating and hence is addictive. And why wouldn't we treat our bodies like a finely tuned race car and put decent (real) fuel in them? We'll suffer less anger, hyperactivity, mood swings, health etc etc.

6. Daryl Brooke - CSA
Daryl's developed a business model for a Community Supported Agriculture scheme, in the Nillumbik/ Kinglake region. He's starting small and plans to grow to 50 farmers and 1000 customers, within a 30km radius. His role is distribution. Each customer will commit to an annual cost and wears the risk of 'a bad year on the farm'. Daryl's $ take is transparent and each customer is supplied by one farmer so they can meet and build trust. The scheme supports farmers and they should get a good income. The land area required per farmer is modest at 1ha or more. Consumers and farmers can use the network to distribute other value added products like jams or honey, or to share knowledge and equipment.

Tree felling

Now this wasn't an easy decision. This tree, about 4 metres from Lucy's bed room in the back garden, was 11 metres high and starting to die. An aborist friend had recommended it go, and it was shading the new solar panels. On the other hand, it was providing a service, by shading and cooling the back of the house and verandah. On balance, it had to go....


And here's the replacement, a black mulberry tree, planted 7 August 2010. I dug a moat, lined it with paper and filled with compost and a dripper pipe.

Autumn Working Bee (& solar electricity)

Here's the vegi patch is a little over a month later on 26/4, than below


Many thanks to Ali, Bev and Martha who joined me, Marg, Ben and Lucy to fix up garden beds and plant seedlings on 14/3/10. We also relocated a pond and it's ready and waiting for frog spawn.



We planted lots of lettuce, brocolli, carrots and corriander. I planted the seeds into polystyrene grocers boxes a month before.


Here's Marg filling the new pond with tank water pumped from the rear garden


The next day, I had a 1.5kw solar panel system installed, having paid for them back in November. Unfortunatley, they put 6 of the 8 panels on the South side of the house! And they broke lots of roof tiles. That'll teach me not to head off to work and leave them to it. I got the installer back to at least put three of the six on the north side.

A lovely array, but facing south!

(Postscript - I did finally get the contractor back to put the panels on the north. Now I'm having the battle to get the smart meter and payments for excess electricity generated).

Sustainable Living Festival

Ahhh - feel the love. Late Feburary 2010 I helped out on the Permaculture Melbourne stall at the sustainable living festival. There was some great talks. I had a good chat to David Holmgren, Permaculture co-originator. He argues we're going to need all our back yards for urban agriculture, and we may regret Gov policies to build multi-level residential. Especially as half our houses are empty at any one time. I guess I agree to an extent, but Melbourne is also one of the worlds lowest density most sprawling cities. He's got a new booklet on peak oil and climate change, online at: www.futurescenarios.org/. A very thought stimulating read.

Frank Fisher hosted a good workshop on how we have the power to think as groups. Apparently there are some 750,000 NGO's in Australia alone, who'd have more impact together (this must include every gathering of more than one person).

I did a wee presentation with Mal on Permaculture.

Where are we up to today?

This is the what the front garden looks like on 15/2/2010 (tilt head to right). Summer's tough. Water disappears in my sandy soil, despite the constant building with compost. Tomatoes haven't done well, nor much else. It's been a bit disheartening, but that's life on the faaarrrm.


Is that a telly tubby or a spud? I think it's winking. What's it worth on Ebay (actually, I have to credit the spud to Tom's dad, but why spoil a good story)


Chooks aren't our only food producing live-stock. These worms are very busy making the source of all life. Is what they do for a living more valuable than what I do?


Help! Pumpkins are taking over the world (or at least the washing line area) but so far not producing that much. One good one anyway.


Always space for jumping