Hello everybody!

As you can guess, it’s been a busy time with our little girl and our blog has been getting neglected.

Willow is now 4 months old (where did the time go?) and we are still in the shed with the house a long way off.  Never mind … we’re comfortable and Willow loves the shiny silver walls in the shed.

Our plans for the house are in with council but of course now we are thinking of changing them which will make the approval process take a lot longer.  The aim is to have a house by the time Willow is in Primary School.  It is a joke but could possibly become reality.

Rob has been working hard as usual, his business has really taken off, he’s a doting dad and somehow he still finds time to chop wood, mow and basically keep the place running.  Thanks Rob!!

There is plenty of work to be done lately, and more and more of it has been actual paying work for the IT services business that we run.

Meg and I were sitting at our computers tonight while I worked on a couple of laptops and the high end workstation and part time server that I’m building.

It looked a little out of proportion to have four laptops and a workstation with 24 inch LCD lined up together, sharing our satellite internet as well as a 3G connection while we ran some maintenance and connected to the new wireless printer in the “foil” lined shed we call home. (Cue the conspiracy theory jokes about tin foil hats extrapolated…)

But there in the middle was a sign of the rewards. A bottle of Bremerton’s 2003 Old Adam Shiraz from the Langhorne Creek region of South Australia – a gift from a client for a job well done to be shared amongst friends.

Work hard, play hard. Life is for the living!

With only about 10 weeks to go it seems like a good time to mention that the permanent population of the Journey will be increasing by one.  While Rob has been busy growing the vegies in the garden, I’ve been working on growing him a little helper.

The little bump in my belly, which initially looked like a beer belly, has been steadily growing in size and now looks like I’ve stuffed a watermelon up my shirt.  Maverick/Willow (as we currently call it - we originally named the embryo Wolfgang/Fernando) is getting more and more active as the weeks have passed making the idea of a Mini-Mader a lot more real.

We decided not to find out if it’s a boy or a girl but decided to have a surprise - and it’s not like there is a room to paint a particular colour as it will only be having a section of the shed which is the lovely unisex shade of silver.

As in most things we are pretty clueless to what we need to do or have prepared but figure we will learn as things progress like in everything else we do.  Through reading books and talking to friends and family who have had babies we have learned to expect the unexpected because no two pregnancies or babies are the same.  So thanks everyone for this support and also for all the new and second hand bits and pieces that have been given to us.

It has been a bit hotter lately and I’m obviously concerned about snakes about the place.

Most weekends now involve at least an hour on Penfold (the ride on mower) as I try and keep the grass down and the ground visible for when we are walking around.

Of particular importance is the vegetable garden, as the pond in the middle provides a water source and the variety of lizards and small animals provide a potential meal for the snakes.

Tonight Meg rang as she arrived home to find a brown snake on the concrete outside the roller door of the shed, “looking for a way in”.

After advising Meg to keep an eye on it, I quickly packed up and headed home.

Arriving home in a cloud of dust, I saw Meg standing under the pergola at the end of the shed. The snake had left and she had been following it to where it disappeared, under some rocks on the corner of the concrete slab.

After making sure that it wasn’t still visible and turning a large rock over, we revealed what looked suspiciously like a snake hole…

Meg wasn’t all that fussed though, and we’ll just look carefully when we enter the shed and try to ensure that we don’t have mice. As well as this, Meg taped up a small gap at the bottom of the roller door of the shed.

While this excitement was going on, the very small, male mistletoe bird was twittering around us, landing on the car antenna and also on one of the small blue gums next to where we park.

I grabbed the camera and the 100-400mm lens and snapped him a few times in the approaching twilight.

Before packing the camera away again, I thought I’d capture the new flock of sheep that we have grazing in the paddock. Hopefully they’ll eat their way through our bushfire risk in the next month or so and won’t keep me too awake at night.

Check out more in the gallery.

So we’ve been planning to build a house for a while now, setting deadlines and breaking them before setting them again.

When we moved up here we wanted to soak ourselves in the environment, learn the seasons and use this knowledge to build a suitable home on the property.

Of course, it seems pretty simple to say “I’m going to build a house” when I have limited experience, but I’ve never had a huge amount of experience in anything that I’ve done before throwing myself into it. Learning fast and also from my mistakes before things turn ugly makes life interesting to say the least – but I’ve done a fair bit of research on housing and think that we are making all of the right compromises for us.

Some of the main features we have planned are:

• Orientation – having a north facing house so that winter sun enters the windows for warmth and the summer sun is blocked by eaves.
• Materials – using rendered straw bale infill walls with have huge insulation properties (an approximate “R” rating of 9).
• Using a slab for thermal mass and (combined with the walls) bushfire protection.
• Open plan living without internal walls downstairs.
• Outdoor living – we currently spend a lot of time outside and want to continue this with large decking and indoor/outdoor spaces. This means that some of the decking will be sheltered from the weather and used as a year round living area.

The plan is for a loft design with high pitched gable and the second floor in the roof space for better summer heat dissipation, better use of space, cost effectiveness and a unique cottage feel. The design also means that the house can be built by a minimum number of people and is something that Meg and I can accomplish together, with a little help from friends and the occasional tradie.

Last January’s deadline for submitting plans to council died a quiet death and the deadline was reborn mid-year.

Having a third wind a month or so again, I obtained the paperwork from the council and have started going through it. This means learning new terms, having to expand TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) that are used everywhere and generally starting to manage the project.

So the check lists have started in earnest now. Meg has contacted the company that will do the soil testing and I’m contacting some earth movers for advice and vague costing.

It is a little strange that the project has costs associated with it that are dependent on the cost of the building, but the cost of the building is a variable thing. For example, materials costs may fluctuate, some parts of the build may use tradespeople or not. I think that the variability in this figure could be 50% of the cost of the build.

We’ll keep our eyes open for pitfalls, but expect that we’ll fall into a few anyway. But then isn’t that all part of the fun?

With a history like mine, it had to happen one day. I finally crashed the mower.

While it wasn’t a crash to rival the motorbike crashes in my past, it was enough to call the end to the day’s play on our ride-on that Meg named “Penfold”.

All I was doing was cruising around near the shed, trying to reduce the snake and fire risk a little when the front left wheel clipped the stump of a long dead tree that had been cut off only inches from the ground.

The left wheel caught the stump and a crack signalled a problem as the steering went light. Further investigation showed that the steering pivot joint had snapped.

After removing the pivot and checking out the operation, I managed to bodge it back together for the ride back to the shed.

At least it wasn’t a rollover (again)…

We’ve had a few colds starts lately, but this morning we were up well before first light for a trip and really experienced the cold of winter.

The strange thing was that the shower didn’t really bother us. Showering outside can be cold, but with no wind blowing the warmth of the hot water stays around longer.

The shock came when I went to Meg’s car and the back door opened after significant force with a CRACK! The ice splintered and fell to the ground as I looked and saw ice covering the windows and thick on the windscreen.

Figuring that hot water was a bad idea, I got a bucket of tap water and poured it over just before we left. Unfortunately that froze as well and the ice on the windscreen was even thicker.

I reversed with the door open so that I would miss the tree and then drove forward, hoping that the windscreen would start to defrost with the friction of the motion. Obviously this was a stupid idea as I drove a little off of the driveway on the way to the gate and stopped before running into a tree.

We stopped at the main dirt road and I scratched off a porthole sized area of ice with my fingernails while the car idled, struggling to warm up and get the heater going.

With some warmth inside the car, sheets of ice moved across the windscreen as I cornered before it was all over and the ice was gone.

It is great to be reminded of the elements of the earth and I’m glad that we have technology of some sort to deal with them…

So much has been happening lately and we’ve been busy on weekends with trips to Adelaide, building the garden shed and concreting the floor, maintaining firewood supplies and just getting on with life.

But now a question that has been nagging me since summer has become more important. How do we expand the vegetable garden?

The vegetable garden started in March 2007 in the weeks following our move to Clare and into the caravan. As the soil was so hard and compacted, we started with the no dig garden idea with pea straw bales as the garden bed boundaries.

With bulk pea straw bales delivered to us at between $2.50 and $3 each, we’ve spent over $600 so far in garden bed surrounds, soil conditioning and mulch.

Luckily we’ve had a friendly dairy farmer that didn’t mind us collecting about ten trailer loads of cow manure which gave us a good start.

But we are at the crossroads; we have used all of the cow manure and need the dairy farmer to deliver a truckload, the pea straw bales are nearly finished and I find myself trying to conserve them rather than use them and then there is the time.

Creating the no dig garden beds takes time. With the layering, first of cardboard or newspaper and then combinations of manure and straw it takes more than an hour to make a four metre by one metre bed. This depends on temperature, your fitness and of course, the motivation.

Recently I have been thinking about growing more vegies so that we always have a meal in the garden. It tastes so much better, is much healthier, costs less and once established, doesn’t take that long to manage.

Various solutions have come to mind but last week I was sorting out a neighbour’s computer and thought to ask him for a hand. Everybody wins – he gets some IT work and I get a bit of dirt turned over…

Today he came over and brought his 12 foot cultivator behind his tractor – the perfect tool for the highly compacted soil.

I’d marked out an area with some pots, buckets and the watering can along the line of the water pipes that run on top of the ground from the tanks down to the shed. This would form one boundary with the road as another.

The cultivator quickly found the rocks that I’d warned would be there, but didn’t even flinch. What would have taken a lot of sweat and effort was rolled out the way in one pass.

He went over the ground a number of times, each digging deeper and creating bigger furrows, breaking up what looks to be a nice loam.

The area in which I can now plant is more than four times bigger than I had, but the soil won’t be anywhere near as good as in the no dig garden beds so I will continue to use both.

The idea is to plant broad beans over a large area of the freshly cultivated soil and plough them in after harvest in late September or early October. This will add nitrogen to the soil via the beans as well as plenty of organic matter when they are turned in with the disc plough. Some would call this a green mulch crop, but we should get kilos and kilos of broad beans to eat, give away and save for planting next year.

With the soil conditioned a little, we can start to produce much larger crops of the staples that we eat. I’m always reminded of last year when we had heaps and heaps of silverbeet, but didn’t eat that much – only grow what you like to eat!

So the major crops that will be grown in this newly turned soil will probably be corn, beans, zucchini, pumpkins and potatoes over summer, with other summer crops such as tomatoes, capsicum, and chillies grown in the no dig beds.

I know, I think too much about this but after digging some potatoes and carrots for lunch on Sunday I did a brief calculation of our potato requirements; one plant provides enough for about two meals for the two of us so I need about 150 plants per year. With this ballpark figure and the new area, it should just take some planting, watering and harvest time. Shouldn’t it?

Mmmm… A big bowl of freshly steamed potatoes and carrots with chopped mint, a little butter and sour cream for lunch on Sunday. It provided the motivation as well as the energy to get more things done in the afternoon.

So here we are with it all ahead of us and the plan in place. Now I just have to go through the steps of the plan and reap the rewards.

It has always seemed strange to me that “experts” know (or can guess) how much or a certain resource we have in this finite world.

Maybe it is the combination of marketing and lobby groups hitting media deadlines and stressed out editors, but some of the claims in the same vein as “Australia has more than 100 years of coal left” make me wonder how these figures are determined. Are they fact or fiction? Science or marketing?

I stumbled over some video today that was published in 2002. That is a while ago considering the way in which video is produced and distributed today, but it brought out some very simple concepts relating to the way in which the world is run today and how the policy makers fail to understand the basics of their planning.

The modern world seems to be sold on the concept of growth, or sustainable growth as the newer version of the model works. But how can growth continue indefinitely in a finite system?

Rather than me rehash the story, why not watch them yourself? Please question the concepts as you should be questioning the numbers presented to you about the sustainable economic, resources and population growth in the world today.

(There are eight parts to the presentation.)

Winter is here in full force which gives me a great excuse to sit and tend a fire.

We have three regular fires; the combustion heater inside the shed, the cob oven that Meg built and the bonfire site. Occasionally we burn off the light pruning of gums that is mainly leaves to reduce the summer bushfire risk, but this isn’t very often.

Friends dropping in is a great excuse for a bonfire and camp oven, and the latest recipe turned out a treat. An incredibly simple recipe of sausages, potato, sweet potato, carrot, onion and a large tin of tomatoes transformed into a hearty meal by the fire.

Meg’s been cooking up a storm in the cob oven as well and has discovered the simplicity of chicken drumsticks with soy and honey. The smoky roast potatoes and garlic in local extra virgin olive oil are hard to resist and we plan to branch out with more roasts soon.

A daily ritual in winter is lighting the combustion heater in the shed, and while it is nice and warm with the insulation installed over summer we seem to be burning a reasonable stack of firewood.

On cold nights, it has been getting down below five degrees so far, with much cooler to come in the coming months and I find that Meg and I are filling a wheelbarrow full from the wood shed every two or three days. At this rate, we seem to be going through a trailer load of firewood every couple of weeks, which means that I must find dry days without anything else on to cut seasoned firewood from the property.

I find cutting firewood quite enjoyable if I have the time to spend – there is a bit of a Zen like quality to the monotony of the physical work and the sound of the Stihl on full throttle – but there are only so many easy to get to and well seasoned trees that are either still standing or have fallen so that they lay off of the ground. (The best firewood is old and dry and hasn’t been transformed by white ants.)

The plan last year was to cut green wood and stack it to season for this year to provide for out firewood needs, but the wood hasn’t seasoned as fast as I’d hoped and we are using much more than I’d prepared anyway.

I’m dealing with this in a few ways; I’ve cut a lot of green wood for future seasons and I’m travelling more of the property to find the “ready to burn” wood.

We’ll never be able to burn all of the dead wood on the property because I doubt we’ll be able to get to eighty percent of the available resource due to the steep hillsides and gullies and the groves of bluegum that block an available path. This means that there will always be habitat for natives and (unfortunately) introduced fauna and our property will slowly return to the original state.

In the meantime while we wait for the bush to return and watch the development of our land, I’ll still plan and react to our firewood needs as I can, driving the 4WD and trailer where I can, cutting, splitting and stacking firewood for warmth and comfort.