I'll be on the radio

I'll be talking about Fairtrade and Fair Trade Fortnight on the Radio Africa program on Edge Radio 99.3FM, this Sunday 18th Feb, 6-7pm. Can someone tape it for me or give me feedback on how it went?


Stay tuned for more about
Fair Trade Fortnight 07
28th April - 13th May

An energetic committee is organising some exciting events in Hobart to promote Fairtrade - so more people buy it and more people sell it. We will have a coffee farmer from Costa Rica coming to speak right here in Hobart. Click here for previous posts about Fairtrade & here. Contact me if interested in helping out or wanting to receive info about the events closer to the dates. Or check out the website.

Back in the city

I have finished the Permaculture course & now have a Permaculture Design Certificate. Yay! It's quite satisfying to have completed this course seeing as I had wanted to do it for 6 or so years now. I learnt more than i realised and have been thinking that maybe i didn't really know what Permaculture was before i did the course. I didn't know what i didn't know. There was so much interesting stuff in the course. One of them was how land that seems dry and barren can be turned into lush & productive areas - by adding swales & dams & forests & plants to build soil according to the contours & shape of the land. Our teacher is doing work in deserts in Jordan, in the Dead Sea Valley.
Most water that falls around us just gets washed into the storm water drains, or on acreages just runs off the land without being used that much. One important concept in Permaculture is to slow down water and use it as many times as possible before it runs off a property (the same goes for any other resource). Another is the importance of building soil - using the right plants & mulch to do this. Some plants can be living mulches for other plants (e.g a ground cover around a tree drops leaves & traps bugs & animals that break down into the soil)

These photos are of the quick compost that we made - day1 to day 12 (we needed a couple more days to finish it).

Permaculture is about observing creation and and connecting many different disciplines and making the best of all the ideas work together to look after themselves and make the land better rather than degrading it. For examples, forests build soil and provide food for animals and look after itself without any help from humans. We can copy this natural pattern and but select our own combination of species that (especially ones we want to eat - fruit & nuts) and species that help other trees to grow (nitrogen-fixing), forests contain talls trees, understory trees, bushes, climbing plants. These are called Food Forests. This is just one of the good ideas used in permaculture.

I hope to have more opportunities to do some Permaculture Designs and make them happen on the ground.

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.