building – Gallifrey Forest Farm

Spring Planting

2016/08/21 Danielle 0

It’s been a busy weekend. As well as finishing off a literature review around implementing dehesa style agroforestry in Australia, for my uni course (once the paper is marked and returned, I’ll put it up here in the Resources section), I’ve planted 17 trees. The bare root trees from Heritage Fruit Trees arrived, so there’s been a lot of digging and planting happening. Five more apple trees for the orchard, five pears and two nashi pears planted in a new little pear grove, and another five stone fruit trees for Zone 1 behind the house. Zone 1 includes the […]

aesthetics vs utility

2015/11/17 Danielle 0

One of the things which many, many permaculture practitioners seem to struggle with is a particular type of hoarding. I have this problem myself. You hold on to things because they might be useful, and because the idea of simply throwing them away is distasteful. After all, we know where “away” is in this context – it’s the mid-ocean garbage patch, or the local waterways, or at best the local landfill. I can throw away biodegradable things without a moment of guilt, because I know that they’ll just rot down and return to the soil. But those things tend to […]

Nesting

2015/08/10 Danielle 0

The house is so very, very close to being done. It’s a matter of weeks until we can move in, and while there’s a certain amount of argh-can-we-afford-all-this stress, it’s also a deeply satisfying feeling. It’s hard to rein in all the plans and projects. We’ve made a pact that we’re not going to buy any furniture except for a rug or two (the floor of the new house is tiled throughout, because I like tiles and hate the ground-in filth that accumulates in wall-to-wall carpets – rugs can be taken outside and beaten, or washed, or at worst replaced) […]

The Pointy End

2015/07/23 Danielle 0

People say that building a house is one of the hardest things you’ll ever do. No one said it directly to me, mind you, but in theory people say this to other people as some sort of warning of the amount of stress and effort to expect. And the people they say it to (or don’t actually say it to) listen and agree and don’t fully comprehend what it means. I thought I did, but .. with hindsight, I was in the same boat as John Snow (i.e. I knew nothing). It’s taken three years to get to the pointy […]

miscellany – end of May 2013

2013/06/04 Danielle 0

It’s the end of May already – and past the end, by now. This year is going so fast. So, some updates: The house planning & building is going, although ever so slowly. We’ve almost finished sorting out a small mortgage extension to cover getting the first water tank in, the second big shed up, and the full engineering plans drawn up. It may sound like an odd selection of things to prioritise, but those are the things we can get money for from the bank without having a builder, and getting a builder is still proving tricky. The water […]