This Sustainable House

On Monday 21st a new WWOOFer ( Willing Workers On Organic Farms) arrived to help me with a few tasks. So far she has been exceedingly helpful with providing feedback on a course of study (pregnancy testing in cattle), assisting with animal husbandry, fencing and a few odd jobs.

Whilst she is here, a little more than a month or so, we will also finish the chicken dome, acquire a couple of new cows (perhaps) and fence a couple of new paddocks.

For more information on the WWOOF scheme, please go to the links page.

This weekend we were blessed with the most incredible weather and it seemed a shame to waste it. It’ll be very cold all too soon!

So this weekend was spent pottering, doing a few homey things such as planting seeds, chopping wood and building strawberry towers. In fact, the strawberry towers are what this post is all about…

So what is a strawberry tower? Well in this case it is a length of PVC drain pipe (100mm diameter x 1400mn length) with a series of small holes drilled in the side (24 in all). The bottom of the tower is capped, the cap having drain holes drilled in it, and the top is hung by chain from the verandah fascia.

The strawberry crowns are planted in the holes, into enriched potting mix, and are watered by a central ‘weep’ line down the centre. The top section, where the chain joins the pipe, is then filled with clean straw to minimise evaporative losses.

The concept is that the strawberries grow against the clean PVC outer, allowing one to just pick and eat. They are also at an easy height for picking without bending, are kept free of the ground and therefore snails and slugs, and take up very little floor space (the strawberries are growing in the vertical space like a vine). In fact there is still room beneath for a pot of herbs, say mint, which cab collect the drainage water from the tower.

This concept of ’stacking’ is very important in all permaculture designs as it allows us to significantly increase the yield from all available space. For example, if I planted the strawberries in the garden (using the same area of about 30cm diameter) then I’d have room for 5 plants yielding about 1.75Kg of strawberries (~7 punnets). However by planting the strawberries in the vertical plane I have managed to squeeze in 24 plants which should yield about 8.4kg of strawberries (~33 punnets) AND a herb crop such as mint from the pot underneath. All up this is an increase of yield of over 400% which is just phenomenal.

A fact sheet detailing the design/construction of these pots will be available on the Green Phoenix Permaculture website in the next few weeks, so if you are interested in creating some strawberry towers then head over to there.

HOME is an ode to the planet’s beauty and its delicate harmony. Through the landscapes of 54 countries captured from above, Yann Arthus-Bertrand takes us on an unique journey all around the planet, to contemplate it and to understand it. But HOME is more than a documentary with a message, it is a magnificent movie in its own right. Every breathtaking shot shows the Earth – our Earth – as we have never seen it before. Every image shows the Earth’s treasures we are destroying and all the wonders we can still preserve. “From the sky, there’s less need for explanations”. Our vision becomes more immediate, intuitive and emotional. HOME has an impact on anyone who sees it. It awakens in us the awareness that is needed to change the way we see the world.

This is, quite possibly, one of the most powerful documentaries ever created… it is essential viewing for every human being.

Watch the trailer below

To watch the whole movie go to http://www.youtube.com/homeproject.

Food. There’s plenty of it around, and we all love to eat it. So why should anyone need to defend it?

Because most of what we’re consuming today is not food, and how we’re consuming it — in the car, in front of the TV, and increasingly alone — is not really eating. Instead of food, we’re consuming “edible foodlike substances” — no longer the products of nature but of food science. Many of them come packaged with health claims that should be our first clue they are anything but healthy. In the so-called Western diet, food has been replaced by nutrients, and common sense by confusion. The result is what Michael Pollan calls the American paradox: The more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become.

But if real food — the sort of food our great grandmothers would recognize as food — stands in need of defense, from whom does it need defending? From the food industry on one side and nutritional science on the other. Both stand to gain much from widespread confusion about what to eat, a question that for most of human history people have been able to answer without expert help. Yet the professionalization of eating has failed to make Americans healthier. Thirty years of official nutritional advice has only made us sicker and fatter while ruining countless numbers of meals.

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Do you purchase Free Range Eggs?

Why do you buy them? Is it because they;Free range chickens merrily picking their way over lush green grassy slopes

* taste better?

* are more nutritious?

* have a better ‘energy’?

* the chickens are more humanely housed?

All the above are reasons that many people shell out the additional sheckles for Free Range eggs but the sad truth is that there is little protection for consumers. This article, on the Green Phoenix Permaculture website, looks at the ‘definitions’ of Free Range Eggs, focussing on the housing requirements within the standards, and considers the question “Can bought eggs ever be considered Free Range?”

Check out the article here.

Recently I picked up a copy of Michael Pollan’s book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” A book I have been meaning to read for some time.

This book examines the basis of the industrial food system in the US. A system which is not only prelevant in that country, but most of the western world.

It demonstrates the precarious reliance of our entire food network on a few crops, notably corn and soya beans, and the incredible success the food marketing machine has had in overcoming the ‘fixed stomach’ of it’s consumers. This concept revolves around the fact that no matter how abundant food is, there is only so much we can eat. However, even given this biological imperative, the system has encouraged us to eat more calories than necessary. This has lead to the improbable state where over 1 BILLION people suffer from over-nutrition, eclipsing the 800 MILLION suffering from malnutrition. (UN 2000) Certainly not a state that I was previously aware of.
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Well it has been two weeks since I put the Camembert experiment aside to age, and today all three cheeses where covered in a thick white mould.

The first thing one notices about the cheeses is the fact that they have slumped a bit, indicating that there was a little too much moisture in the curds. I think it was a case of not cutting the curds small enough. The next batch, which will probably be made tomorrow, will have the curds cut a little finer.

But apart from the aesthetics, what’s it like???????

Well upon cutting the cheese one is definitely met with the correct consistency, colour and odour. The interior of the cheese has that lovely gooey, off-white that is so familiar with Camembert. The flavour is mild, though I expect that’ll change with a little more aging, but delicious!

In short, I think the very first attempt at cheese making has produced an edible product… Who’d have thunk it!