We finally met up in March!

The first meeting in March was nothing short of fantastic. It went from 2:30pm to 5pm.
We watched an half an hour video on permaculture in the tropics presented
by Bill Mollison, who coined the word permaculture. After the afternoon
tea, we had a quick tour round my little urban yard to see the little
projects that my husband, Matthew and I have put in place using
permaculture principles.

We then went on to my favorite, compost making and a simple
system we use to sift the compost. I'm also very proud to share that
Tara, one of the attendees, has made a round of beautiful compost since.

Amazing Spicy Pineapple Zucchini Bread

I simply can't get enough of this bread - it keeps and keeps and keeps and it's completely dairy free. Bake two in one go and keep the other one in the freezer ...so here you go


3 eggs
1 cup oil(olive oil or veg oil)
1 cup sugar
2 tsps vanilla
2 cups coarsely shredded unpeeled zucchini
1 can well drained crushed pineapple
3 cups wholegrain flour sifted
2 tsps baking powder (or 1 tsp baking soda and 1 tsp cream of tartar)
1 tsp salf
2 tsps mustard seeds
2 tsps ground cinnamon
3/4 tsp ground nutmeg
1 cup each chopped walnuts and currants(or raisins)

HERE'S HOW YOU DO IT....
In a large bowl, beat eggs until froth
Add oil, sugar and vanilla , continue beating until mixture is thick and foamy.
Stir in zucchini and pineapple

In a separate bowl, sift in flour, baking powder, salt, cinnamon and nutmeg.
Add walnuts, currants(or raisins) and mustard seeds into the bowl.

Add the dry mixture into the zucchini pineapple mixture.
Spoon into 2 greased 9x5 inch loaf pan.
Bake at 180 celcius for 45 minutes.


Icing- add the juice and rind of one lemon into 1/2 cup of icing sugar. Put it on just before serving.

The MOST amazing thing about this bread is that it CAN be kept in the freezer for up to 3 months and still maintain the flavor and moisture - infact the taste improved!!! Deli -cious-mo

Sheet Mulching

A few years back when we were just starting to learn about Permaculture, we discovered the concept of sheet mulching and very close planting. The idea is, don't dig. Digging damages soil and soil life.

Planting your plants close together mimicks nature and helps to reduce moisture loss and creates little microclimates where plants get protection from each other.

Have you seen the movie "The March of the Penguins"? When the penguins huddled together in the extreme cold they usually survived, but the moment they stray out on their own they die. Like the penguins, plants do better when grouped with other plants, rather than planted in their own mini deserts where they dry out or get burned by too much sun.

Here are some pictures of what we did, before and after things started to grow.

First, we lay out some old newspaper.

Then we covered it with pea straw to reduce moisture loss and suppress unwanted plants (weeds). In this we planted various a range of herbs and other plants making sure that we plant through the newspaper and into the soil below.


Heres what it looked like about 3 months later...


Much nicer than grass don't you think?

We later put Ponga log (tree fern) edging around it as you can see, and added gravel to the path. The gravel actually absorbs warmth from the sun during the day and releases it at night helping to regulate the temperature in this area and meant we have now had some limited success growing herbs like basil. Previously, they died rather quickly.

This is a reasonable approach to starting a garden, although we've tried other methods with better success which we'll share later.

Eco - footprints, carbon footprint?

Two big buzzwords in the media at the moment are eco-footprint and carbon-footprint.

But they are just buzzwords with no real meaning for most people. Take the eco-footprint. We have this idea that ideally we should be consuming resources no bigger than the plot of land we own. Sounds sensible? But it misses the point.

We should not be consuming everything in a set area. Instead, we should be looking to "close
the loop". Every input that comes into our home is usually consumed and then exits usually as waste. We need to be looking to use those inputs more efficiently and where it might normally be a waste, instead it's fed back into our homes as another input.

For example, all those vegetable wastes can become food for the chickens, or the compost heap.
Another example, alter our homes to better capture the sun during the lower winter sun, and insulating the house to prevent heat loss.

This really is just common sense, but most of us aren't thinking this way - I wonder why!! :-)

Grocery shopping... at my backyard?

We've cut down our grocery shopping to about twice a month to shop for essentials that we can't grow in the garden. The two wondeful chooks have been supplying us with enough eggs since April 06 with enough to give some away to friends.

We're exploring using Linda Woodroo's mandala system to provide for most of our food..most posts to come..