January 2016 – Gallifrey Forest Farm

new additions to the menagerie

2016/01/27 Danielle 0

We didn’t do any of the traditional things on the Australia Day public holiday yesterday. No fireworks, no picnic, no BBQ, no beach trip. Instead we bought some new baby chickens, and almost burned the house down. Turns out, when the dough in the bread machine overflows, it ends up directly on the element. Which is fine, unless the element is on, to cook the bread. At that point, you get charcoal inside the bread machine. We did not in fact start a fire, but it was unhappily close – and it took all afternoon to air the smoke out […]

if not you..

2016/01/18 Danielle 0

This weekend just passed, I attended an event called GenghisCon. It’s a small science fiction / speculative fantasy & gaming convention, which runs every year in Perth. It’s run every year for the last 15 years, which is a pretty impressive run for something which gets no funding or support from any corporate or government body. Every year the committee (elected at the previous convention) does fundraising to make sure there’s enough money to pay for the venue and insurance, and organises a program of events to run at the convention, including discussion panels (on anything and everything from how to […]

productivity

2016/01/08 Danielle 0

One of ethics of permaculture is ‘right livelihood’, which is a boiled down abstraction of the idea that people should be able to make a living – being environmentally conscious doesn’t necessarily mean giving up on commerce. Which is good news for those of us with a mortgage. I want to be ethical in my interactions with the rest of the world, even the financial ones, but I also want my bills to get paid. On that front, although this property is home now, and a test bed for a great many ideas and experiments (such as my dino-chook project […]

summer holiday tree planting

2016/01/05 Danielle 0

This has been a lovely, idle, summer holiday. To be honest, you could replace ‘idle’ with ‘utterly slack’, and not be far off. I’ve read books, gone to the beach (twice already this year, which is impressive given that it’s an hour’s drive each way), played with my cats, and barely checked my email. It’s been wonderfully relaxing. The regular household chores have continued to be done though – pot plants watered, kitty litter cleaned, the chickens and the guinea fowl fed. The guinea fowl are hardly keets any more at all, they’re almost completely feathered out. We did put […]