Gallifrey Forest Farm

Cats and Permaculture

2015/01/12 Danielle 0

Cats are often – almost always, in fact – regarded by gardeners and permaculture practitioners as nuisances at best. Words like vicious and useless are applied, cats are describes as being inclined to torture and kill small animals and birds if they can get access to them. I don’t understand where this animosity comes from. Cats are no more nasty or cruel than any other predator. Feral dogs will hunt animals, run them down and worry them to death. Chickens will peck a smaller bird, like a pigeon, or a small animal to death and then eat it if it […]

existentialism

2014/10/21 Danielle 0

This is a nerdy post – because I am, fundamentally, a nerd. A plant-loving dirty-finger-nailed wannabe farmer nerd, but a nerd nonetheless. Or geek. Whichever the fashionable term is at the moment. Also, it’s kinda long. Sorry about that. I believe that technology – computers, robots, spaceships and space travel – are awesome. I’m also aware that technology is a spectrum, ranging from more efficient shovels to bicycles, the idea of surgeons washing their hands before surgery through to vaccines against cancer-causing viruses, sailing ships to electric cars to rockets that can take a human to the moon and back […]

Honey processing by hand

2014/10/09 Danielle 0

Honey doesn’t need a lot of processing, but there is the small matter of separating the honey from the wax of the comb. Normally, you’d just take the entire frame out of the hive, run a hot knife over it to take the caps off the cells, and then use a honey extractor to spin the honey out of the comb. We haven’t yet managed to acquire one of these, so any honey extraction we do is done the hard way: by hand. We’ve been meaning to harvest some honey form our hive for a few months now, but it’s […]

stay tuned

2014/09/30 Danielle 0

Well, it’s been almost a year since my last post. This time, I promise, I will start posting more regularly. It’s been a year a frustrations on this project. The drafting company took literally a year to get our drawings back to us, even though the only thing they had to design was the roof. By comparison, the engineer got the final drawings back to us in a week.Unfortunately, after two months of negotiation and being very patient, the builder finally came back to us with a quote – which we simply can’t afford. Our beautiful pod-house design would cost […]

update 2013-10-11

2013/10/11 Danielle 0

Sorry for the long hiatus, everyone. Life got super busy (not that it isn’t now, but still). Draft #3 of the houseplans are finished, and I think it’s all good this time. We’ll go over them with a fine-toothed comb and make sure, but I think we’re good. Of course, that still means we have two weeks or slightly less to find a builder and get the bank on board, or we’ll be trying to start building in December when all the builders in WA seem to take 2 months off. At any rate, it’ll be soon. I’ve started university […]