Yipee its a bee

You know that instantaneous pleasure you get when you buy a new gadget? I got it yesterday when Adrian brought over a swarm of bees he found in a tree. He waited patiently for dusk and boxed them up.

Adrian will run an introduction to bee keeping course from my place in November. I've bought a hive box and get to have the bees :)

Hope they hang around to supply honey.

Three weeks later

The weirdest thing happened last weekend during Ben's Bday party. All of a sudden we heard this buzzing, like an aircraft taking off. The whole of the back garden, and our neighbours, filled up with bees! It was thick with them. We quickly got all the kids inside. At first I thought we must have annoyed them, but it turns out to have been a new swarm moving in. Thousands of them arrived and piled into our hive (see pics below). Following an inspection, we knew the initial colony had been weak and small. The new one must have kicked out the old queen. They're now building comb and making honey at a great rate :)

Three weeks later, we opened up the box and had a look at the honey flow and how the brood was developing...

Adrian's bee keeping intro course from Keith Rhodes on Vimeo.

Melbourne Permaculture Convergence 30 September to 2 October 2011

Missed the convergence? Here's some of the highlights from the sessions I attended:

Friday night

David Holmgren gave a dinner speech contemplating the ebbs and flows of the permaculture movement over the last three decades (Permaculture Melbourne is 30 yo). Despite being a co-founder of the movement, he feels like an observer, and can give a good helicopter perspective. Permaculture comes into vogue as recessions loom.

Saturday AM
Kerry Dawborn, author of 'Permaculture Pioneers' talked about themes she picked up while writing the book. Our world view and values in turn shape our world. Humans are like catapillars, only we munch our way through the environment. But can we, like the catapillar, go into our chrysalis and transform into a butterfly?
Environmental problems have complex causes, but the emergency band-aids we apply, are not solutions for the long term. Permaculture offers solutions involving deep change, but they're not easy.

Nathan Alexander talked about the importance of cities for human habitation and how they can be more sustainable as an organism. They're drivers of cultural change where ideas, innovation and technology can be exchanged.

Having researched historic cities which sustained themselves for centuries, Nathan offered some dimensions for a sustainable city. 10,000 to 1 million people, 30 dwellings per ha, around eight attached dwellings, 13m width, orientated for solar gain, mid-rise (3-4 storey). Activity centres in walking distance and good public transport. Infrastructure is often best delivered at the neighbourhood level. Street patterns should connect well and buildings should be capable of different uses – office, dwelling, warehouse, factory or shop.

Saturday PM
In the afternoon, we had site visits. I went to Flemmington community garden. It's run by Cultivating Communities, who manage over 100 plots just at this site. The plots are solely for residents in the public housing towers next door, funded by DHS. Next we visited the Merristem nursery, at the back of a private residence, close to Ceres.

Flemmington Community Garden

Meristem nursery

David Holmgren gave a talk about – well, a whole lota stuff - starting with the energy decent action plan he's been working on for Hepburn Shire. It's a challenge to plan for destructive events.
Boosting the community and household economy will boost our own resilience, as compared to the institutional or corporate economies. This analysis is similar to work by CLES in the UK. At the risk of being sexist, women going back to work has reduced the household economy. We increasingly outsource our childcare, meals (takeaway food) house cleaning and so on.

Also, in the household economy, we don't get so bogged down in regulation. Have you noticed how disasters like bush fires, result in an over regulation, so we can't use common sense solutions like earth ships. (Mind you, I've transgressed the odd plumbing and electrical regulation).

David pointed out that next time we have fires or floods, we should take the opportunity to promote it as a consequence of climate change. It shouldn't be a faux pas.

He has observed that in response to a disaster, 25% of people become super-empowered, 25% become incapacitated, and 50% of us muddle along. All the regulation brings the 25% super-empowered, back down to those who muddle along.

Criteria to assess whether a policy or action is good or not (in the face of disaster) could be:

• Does it relocalise jobs


• Does it allow mistakes, and provide feedback for future improvement


• Does it grow the household economy.

Sunday

Permaculture Design with Laurence Gaffney and Angelo Eliades.
Laurence reminded us to take pause as we observe natural systems, before leaping into design.

He's involved with mapping fauna and flora in the high country, to make the case for DSE to hold off on some of its back burning.

Each place is different and observation is a continuous and iterative process that takes time. Humans don't know much about ecosystems. We have a tendency toward 'doing', before understanding, and negative consequences are unknown.

Angelo reminded us not to fight against nature. Our role is to take care, not control, but we too easily revert to controlling our gardens. Nature decides the best place for things (weeds) and moves things around by itself. The end result is forests, so why not steward a forest instead, and include a few fruit trees.
Angelo's been busy building food forests. His blog is a great intro to permaculture. And source of advice.

Urban Agriculture
Kate Archdeacon gave a quick-fire run though of many urban agriculture initiatives, from variations of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) and many more ways of directly linking producers and consumers. She'll put her presentation on the VEIL web site under 'Presentations'.

Permablitz
Kat Lavers facilitated a lively discussion (for the end of conference slot) on what makes Permablitz tick. The 'Collective' (admin group) is functioning a treat and we talked about some of the tips and tricks to making it successful. First, stack the benefits, then remove the barriers. Most important, make it fun. Lastly, share the load with a buddy to sustain the effort.

Other Stuff

• Martin Pritchard from Friends of the Earth gave us the story behind the South Melbourne Commons, where the Convergence was held.


• Robyn Francis came from NSW to talk about the new Permaculture Australia body.


• I missed some great sessions on co-housing.

Many thanks to John, Sarah, Mal and others who organised the Convergence.

Permablitzing Elwood

Our client, Jane, was nesting. With two young children and a third on the way, she and husband, Claes, are definitely on a mission to build some food security and resilience into their lives. As the designers, Seila and I were very pleased to impart some permanent-culture. Jane had a good idea what she wanted, having been to a couple of blitz's: wicking vegie beds, an area for chooks in the front yard, to remove some ornamental trees and plant fruit trees. And that is basically what we did this second Sunday of September 2011 in Elwood.

        Ornamentals out, fruit trees in.

      Wick beds being made.
      They work like the plant pots with a reservoir for water at the bottom.

 Before the day; meetings were held, a base plan and design was drawn up, materials specified, how the blitz would run was discussed. The day was upon us. "Oh no - it's going to rain"... but luckily it held off. What I enjoy most about blitzes is the characters you meet. Young, old, male, female, Italian, Malaysian, Israeli, single, gay, married, divorced, tradies, professionals, retired, sad, happy, funny, peculiar, you name it. (I'm the sad peculiar one). We all had smiles. And then there was Cathy, who kept saying "Here, I love digging holes...". When your back's starting to ache, that was music to my ears. Many hands make light work, as they say.

                           Lunch

 I ran a quick workshop on how to chop a tree, and Seila ran the master-class on wick beds. Lessons for next time? If we had pre-cut the timber for the wick beds, we may not have run over time. It's also wise not to use power tools on the day.

                      Oops! Something doesn't fit

Thanks to the Permablitz Collective

A thought for the day
Did you know, there's 500 containers of e-waste arriving in Ghana every month.  Lots from Australia.  Have you thrown a TV, CTR or printer out on the nature strip in the last year?  We should be more thoughtful.  Manufacturers should take some responsibility also.

The First of May - Permaculture Day

Petra opened her Ashburton garden for the day, with support of the South Eastern Suburbs Group (http://www.sesuburbspermaculture.org.au/). She's got a great range of 50 fruit trees etc. Very intenstive. I helped do tours for a few of the 180 visitors.

Been busy grubbing up a tree root - lots and lots of digging around and chain sawing



And work on the Ashwood college pizza oven progresses...

That's Kevin and Seila, who've done most of the work, with help from many.


A new (old) wood heater, only uses timber left on suburban nature strips by tree loppers.



Picking olives with David Arnold in Violet Town.

Easter - pictures of autumn

Some things go well, some don't, but unless you experiment, I guess you'll never learn. These seedlings have grown too slowly and then got eaten by slugs. I was growing them to sell at the Murrambeena market.

Other things have done better. The cherry tomatoes just keep going and going, long after the bigger ones have finished. What happened here? This throw back is a half tomato, half capsicum. Tastes okay, but I think I prefer one or the other.

Pumkin harvest is done - I got about eight or nine like this.

Pizza oven at Ashwood College Permaculture Garden is coming on well.

Chooks (the brown one in front especially) wake us at 6.30 sunrise. They wait at the gate to come bursting out. A better use for seaweed than the garden...

Februrary Harvest, the pressure cooker and SLF

With a family of four, it can feel like all the effort growing fruit and vegies doesn't go very far to supplement our diet, especially as we're omnivors. I realised the other day though, that we are getting a good yield at the moment. In no particular order:

• Silverbeat
• capsicum
• chives
• warrigal greens
• tomatoes(*4 varieties)
• potatoes
• basil
• apples
• nectarines
• eggs
• plums
• pepinos
• corn
• herbs(*5+)
• celery
• chillies
• zuccini
• rhubarb
• Lettuce

Sure, some are more abundant an others, but I'm pretty pleased with this list. All from 30 to 40m2 at a guess. This pic shows but a few - can you ID them all?

Here's some of this year's tomatoes. Mostly heritage varieties. The dark red ones are Black Crim. As with the yellow ones, they're very meaty compared to those commercially grown.This pumkin was a bute. I used just half to make this full pressure cooker load of pumpkin soup, plus a tray load baked in the oven. (Think I'll get sick of pumpkin in the next few weeks).
I recently found the pressure cooker discarded on the nature strip. I had been thinking of getting one, so I couldn't believe my luck. The soup took just 15 minutes cooking time, so it's a great energy saver. Here's the recipe. It does a great goulash in 45 minutes instead of four hours also.

On another topic, yes, it was a great weekend (18/2/11) at the Sustainable Living Festival. The theme that came through for me though, is how much time we've lost talking about but not dealing with Climate Chaos. Now we need to get to zero emissions in 10 years! Beyond Zero Emissions suggests how it can be done. Not sure I have much hope though. This podcast by Clive Hamilton shows how the debate is not about the science. Those on the right of politics have taken a sceptic 'position' against what they percieve as the environmental/ left wing gang.

John McKenzie at the Permaculture Melbourne stall, SLF, 19/2/11. Thanks for organising it John!

The Bok Flock: Sustainable Living Festival

The Bok Flock: Sustainable Living Festival: "Hello! Today we took a wander through the Sustainable Living Festival weekend at Federation Square in Melbourne. Even the w..."

Permaculture Designs

Permaculture is a design system to live sustainably. That is, setting up your house and garden to create more energy than you use, and to live within nature's limit. I've done a handful of property designs for people since completing my Permaculture Design Course, as a hobby.

The design process starts with taking a brief from you. It needs to fit your vision, functional needs, aesthetics and budget. Next is an analysis of the property. Where are the special niches - where does the sun, shade, wind and rain coming from? How can you minimise your energy running the system. Once a plan is costed we can discuss and stage implementation.

If you'd be interested to have a chat about your place, send me a comment via this page. No cost to you except materials if you're closeby. This is my hobby and I want the experience. If you attend a couple of other Permablitzes, we can organise a working-bee to construct the design in a day.

Here's some designs I've done recently.

Chooks (Bantams) available to a good home

I offered to look after these three girls when a member of my local permaculture group moved to a flat a couple of months ago. They don't lay many eggs and I'd like to give them to a good home. Not sure how old they are, but they're very cute, healthy and people friendly. Being bantams, they're a bit smaller, and they take very little effort to look after. They eat less and poo less. Just lock them up at night. Available to collect in Ormond, as of 20/1/11. Call me on 0401 991 866.




The garden's going great guns after the rain and sun.

The Oat Growing Experiment

Back in chilly August, I dug over half the back lawn and planted oats and peas.
(See here) The peas didn't do to well, but the oats have done okay, among many weeds and subsequently planted potatoes.

Today, 3/1/2011, we had a go at harvesting the oats.

We started by cutting the heads of the oats. I spread them out on a sheet, stomped on them and scrunched them around. The next step should have been to sprinkle them into a bowl, allowing the wind to blow off the chaff. Trouble is, these oats have husks. I should have bought a husk-less variety if I wanted to do this by hand.
This photo shows what has to be removed to get to the rolled oat at the far right. The final husk (steps three and four before the end) is too hard to remove on-mass by hand.
In the very last step, I've rolled the oat with a roller, to make it look like what you get in muesli.

So I can easily grow my own cereal, but processing it ready for breakfast is a bit harder. Too hard by hand. But not all is lost. Oats are a great source of protein, fats and other nutrients. They'll make great fodder for the chooks, off-setting feed costs. I can just put the chooks in the chook tractor on top of the oats. The are very efficient at de-husking. More importantly, we've learnt what it takes to get our porridge.