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25.01.2022 What a cracker of a day :) Sun shining, warm autumn weather, gardens growing, trees enjoying being planted in the soil.

25.01.2022 Trying a different way to make the scrambled eggs this morning. Took 4 besser/cinder blocks and cut the end out of one to allow the rocket stove action to work. Made great eggs, boiled water in 10 mins, and only used a handful of small sticks to get it done! While not as instant as using the little gas bottle (shown in the background), it uses small sticks only to make a great heat. Next on the side project list is a besser block oven that can sit on top - stay tuned :)

25.01.2022 All 5 garden beds are now in and looking great! Yesterday was a perfect weather day for planting out bed 4 for the first time - and with so many helpers it was done in no time :)

23.01.2022 Greenhouse / shadehouse is pretty much complete. It's been a big couple of weeks getting this done. We decided to dig out the beautiful 30cm deep topsoil under the whole area to save for future garden beds, and refill and raise the floor with the spare clay subsoil from around the cob building. Finished off with weedmat and some crusher dust, this should be an excellent place to pump out the seedlings into the future. Benches are left over timber and sheet metal from the cob roof (been lying in the paddock for a while...) and have a gentle slope down to one end which will enable the catching of any surplus water for the coming dry times surely ahead.

23.01.2022 Our kitchen garden now has all five 8m x 1.2m beds planted out. This view from the first planted bed, shows how we've interplanted everything in a lovely kaleidoscope of shapes, heights, and textures - which will hopefully confuse unwanted insects in their hunt for a meal too. In another weeks time we'll be pulling out most of the first bed and replanting, continuing the cycle down the hill every 2 weeks. All beds are shaped on contour too to maximise water infiltration from these lovely little bursts of rain we've been getting every once in a while.

22.01.2022 Tired of sifting manually, I finally invented this automatic, solar powered, cement mixer sifting machine. It takes a 60 second per shovel job and turns it into 4 seconds!

22.01.2022 Video 1 of the water infrastructure being installed on the farm. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hrrszuw6_MM

21.01.2022 Forth video concludes the earth moving machines efforts, and shows some raking and rain efforts on the landscape. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M88anvMxodI

21.01.2022 Food forests. We are starting ours ontop of our swale (which also operates as dam overflow management) The mound is approximatey 60cm high and made of top soil which was shaped during our initial earthworks on the farm. The area on the swale had been left to go back to grass (never enough hours in the day). A quick scything and wipper snipper action and the area was ready for newspaper and much coverings to help slow down the grass regrowth. We'll do an update of the planting...s and their status over the coming while, but for now a nice 40m stretch is in and planted. After initial waterings to get things going, this system shoudn't require any watering due to the principle that swales are tree planting systems - rehydrating the landscape to store water in the ground where the trees will need it.

19.01.2022 The current layout of our earthworks. The big machines have left but there is plenty of tidy up to complete. Have been getting the rake and shovel out over the last 4 weeks to form up the main swales, and also building mini-swales along Middle Dam Valley to slow water runoff and start building a good area for on-contour food forests. Plenty more to do still...

18.01.2022 Water: Check Buildings: Check Gardens: Underway Over the last couple of days we have taken an overgrown log storage area near the cob building and transformed it into our first gardening area. More to come as the garden progresses.

16.01.2022 Passive solar heating. What it means is that on these very chilly winter mornings we can enjoy the first rays of the sun exactly where it's needed - on our walls and on our cold toes! Our cob buildings eves are 1.4m wide to allow sun to soak into the large thermal mass that cob can carry all winter days long, while in summer the walls are entirely in shade - meaning that they don't get hot and the coolness of the earth is our air conditioning. Carefully managing the air flow ...(closing windows before the cool breeze starts in the afternoons) means that internal temperatures are regulated easily too. Sketchup is a great free tool which we used to design our building, and it has a super easy inbuilt tool to show sun angles and the corresponding shade at any time of day over the whole year. Gotta love the winter sun :)

15.01.2022 With the foundations of the cob building complete, it is time to get moving on the walls: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9qTAOK6pzk

15.01.2022 Work on our cob farm building commenced 2 months ago, which is the next step for the farm. The following video shows the work to date on the foundations for the cob building. Enjoy. https://youtu.be/Jp6m4UXdKco

15.01.2022 During the big dry my mates Troy and Angus are putting earthworks in at Troys place. I came out to help and fly the drone around. We had some fun with the process (although I didn't crash this time... means I wasn't flying hard enough), and Angus has put together an amazing edit. Enjoy!

14.01.2022 We've been utilizing the undercover area of the solar shack as a temporary greenhouse. As you can see from the picture, it's over capacity with lovely growing young plants. As the greenhouse will be the engine room of our farm's plantings, we're currently working on a major upgrade. Using timber managed from our onsite forest, we're building a 3.6 x 6m new and improved greenhouse. Work is still underway, but it is coming along very nicely. :)

14.01.2022 Very happy to report that we are at capacity - thank you to everyone who has done rain dances over the last weeks and months, and thank you to the Indian Dipole for moving on. We implemented our earthwork project in August of 2018 with the amazing Angus Bucketman (he is the perfect mix of expert, talent, and artist), and we are now the proud owners of completely full dams and swales. It's hard to estimate the exact volume of water collected over our footprint, but it would ha...ve to surpass 8 millions litres currently (on our 4 acres of earthworks). A good 500,000 of that is currently sitting in swales and will be enjoying its slow journey over the next week into the soil - the best place to store water! More water to come tomorrow, but our land is ready to deal with it. Slow it, passively sink it, keep it as high in the landscape as you can. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8vNDxs38ls

09.01.2022 A little side project Bucketman and I put together this week.

09.01.2022 Been planting many trees, which is good. Today lots of pioneery trees along the top bank and down by big dam. And then I realised that inoculated clover seed looks like sprinkles....

09.01.2022 I love the swale universe. I imagine whole little worlds of bugs and critters living for whole generations in this dense cover. Thrive little critters! May our understoreys be your canopy. Live long and prosper.

09.01.2022 Our 8m long "Bed 1" gets an upgrade with bamboo supports holding up our new netting. Beds 2 & 3 are now entirely planted out and all are growing well with the gravity fed water from Top Dam and the beautiful autumn weather we've been getting here on the Mid North Coast. Two more beds to come over the next week or so to keep our 2 week planting cycle continuing.

07.01.2022 Video 3 provided by Angus Bucketman with some awesome information about our swales. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8vNDxs38ls

07.01.2022 Kat has put a big 2 days building our 4th 8m garden bed by herself - such a great result! First the area for the bed is lazer leveled to ensure that the bed acts as a mini swale during rain events. Then grass is aerated with a broad fork. Comfrey, blood and bone, cow manure, compost, and spare topsoil is all mixed and mounded up. Then wet newspaper covers everything up to prevent grass and weeds coming up. A layer of mulch straw on top, paths covered with aged grass clippings.... Every 2 weeks these will be planted out, with 5 beds in total planned for this area. Thanks Kat!

06.01.2022 Making very good progress now with the cob building, with the walls and the roof pretty much done. I thought I'd share a video of the progress to date, I hope you enjoy: https://youtu.be/LrBlDCqv5lk

04.01.2022 Video 2 of the water infrastructure being installed on the farm. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFAIEQePgHY

04.01.2022 Rose shows us how to mix cob in a cement mixer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSwmj6gYsC8&t=3s

04.01.2022 Good rain today! We hope that many of you got this lovely rain that has been falling for the last 24 hours. We've got full dams and swales again - with the happy knowledge that we're charging the landscape as much as we can when it does rain. The beginnings of our food forest will be enjoying this water soaking in over the next couple of days, same goes for our kitchen garden beds which have all been built on contour to enjoy some swale soaking action too.

03.01.2022 I can't recommend these guys enough if you're looking for earthworks around your farm.