2wks off and a permaculture course

The garden photos are inspired by the permaculture course I'm doing over the next 2 weeks.

Since uni days (98-01) I've been interested in Permaculture and wanted to do a course. I kept thinking I'd wait til i buy my own house so I can design the yard and additions to house using permaculture principles. But at this rate who knows when that will be and I want to get stuck into this longterm interest even though I don't know the opportunites that will come to be able to use the skills & knowledge more fully.

Permaculture Design Certificate
72 hours
Molesworth, Tasmania
22 Jan - 4 Feb

I think we might be doing our own design doing the course, so if you have some land (ANY size) with house, then let me know and maybe i could convert your property in to a food producing, sustainable permaculture property - designed for minimal work - a system that looks after itself as much as possible!

15 minute potato box

Get a wooden box from the tip shop, put compost, potting mix, sheep poo in the bottom. Plant some potatoes - seed potatoes from a shop or ones from the kitchen that are starting to sprout. put about a 20-30cm layer of straw or leaves or other mulch. Keep adding more straw/mulch around around the stem of the potatoes as they grow up, until the box is full of straw and the plants have grown out of the box. Water regularly. Potatoes will grow off the stems off the plants in the mulch and hopefully you'll have have a box full of potatoes! Harvest when tops of plants start to die off (and stop watering at this point)
That's what i'm hoping for anyway- I'll let you know how it goes.

high hopes for apricots

the apricot tree in the backyard.

Owen loaned me the netting. So none for you this year, birds! All for me! well us humans anyway

curly yellow zucchini

in my garden

we ate this one already

Reduce, Reuse and Freecycle

Have you heard of Freecycle? All over the world there are Freecycle groups. A freecycle group is an email group for a local area and people send messages offering items for free and other people in the group reply to that person saying they want it. I recently posted messages for a friend who wanted to give away some furniture because she was moving. I also got a Discman yesterday. The people who receive the item pick it up from the person's place. You can also post messages asking for stuff. The only rule is that everything has to be free. The Hobart Freecycle group has 1084 members so it's pumping along with heaps of messages each day (so i keep it going to my Yahoo account instead of my main gmail account!)

www.freecycle.org

follow links to your local area

It's such a great community activity.

Buy less stuff, there's enough stuff around already.