Child of the Planet

Continuing the shacks posting... First thing I asked when I heard about the shacks was 'were they exorcised?' The quick answer was an emphatic 'yes! they were expunged of bad Joo Joo' It sounds like the makings of a Stephen King novel. Prison shacks are transported to a permaculture farm and the vegetables start attacking people We've been refurbishing the 'prisoner cells' into a library, seed stores, and tool shed. The bunks in some of the accommodation sheds are being converted into a single double bed. These are a few shots of the tool shed before we stripped it out... And these are some shots of the tool shed after the conversion.

The panel on the roof is the old setup When i got to the farm, it was mid summer and the solar panel for the communal area was strapped to the roof of a tent. This isn't an ideal situation as the sun alters its track through the sky and solar panels like to be perpendicular to the suns rays. So I was tasked with re-jigging the setup. We built a frame to house two panels, the angle of which can now be adjusted to make the best use of the suns changing position in the sky as the seasons cycle by. The batteries like to be kept at an even temperature so we scrounged up an old chest freezer to house them. A side benefit is that currently the four deep cycle lead acid batteries are taking up room in the communal roundhouse and shifting them frees up some space. I mainly organised the labour on this build. C.J. a young local builder knocked up the frame, and Andy (our resident mad scientist) hooked up the cables.

When I first arrived at Awhi farm, a group of bedraggled 'rescue' chickens were the only domestic animals on site. Then we caught and neutered several stray cats , which have since settled down into domesticity. One of the cats joined us for breakfast a few mornings back. We were eating porridge and it had caught a sparrow. We watched it crunch it's way through the bird. As soon as the wings had folded back and dissappeared down it's throat,  the cat licked it's butt, and sauntered over to sit on a human lap. Pigs arrived today. Two little sows, whose destiny lies within our tummies. They will be fed and watered till just before sexual maturity (where they become a lot harder to handle). Then slaughtered just before Christmas. They arrived during the wet morning on the truck, and we pieced the nose of each pig with three wire loops. The three loops discourage the animal from rutting in the dirt. Fantails swooped about snatching flies out of the air (felt a...

Both white and purple varieties Read... awhi-farm-gardening-mega-garlic-planting

This rivet gun had a tiny section of metal wedged inside it, I broke it apart, extracted the sliver (this involved hitting it hard with a hammer) Put it back together and now pulls rivets again.

Someone promised to clean the airlock on the feijoa  wine, but forgot, and this was the result...

These are all carrots Preparing a meal at Awhi farm is a bit like embarking on a construction project . One needs to decide what one is going to make, and then, go out and gather ingredients that are scattered across the property. It's like a great big dirt supermarket where everything is super fresh, but the isles are really badly labeled. First thing that struck me was that a lot of the produce wasn't the colour I was expecting. There is a lot of purple veg out there. Purple cabbage, kale, potatoes, and multi coloured carrots are the norm. I'm told that orange carrots were developed by the Dutch, to celebrate their national colour. Carrots used to be available in all sorts of colours. Purple Kale Purple Broccoli Pak Choy

We harvested a pile of pumpkins. The frost had wiped out all the leaves so there was no point leaving them out in the fields. I remembered a pumpkin pie that my Uncle Gary had recently made on a whim. The German girl and I were preparing dinner for the camp that night, so we decided to dig up a recipe online, and we made it for the evening meals desert. www.taste.com.au/recipes/6226/pumpkin+pie Our first attempt was OK  but the centre didn't really set properly when it was baked in the wood fired oven. When a pudding or cake doesn't quite workout on Awhi farm, we make the best of it by calling it 'self saucing' and scoffing it down anyway. There was some sweet pumpkin filling left over, so the next day we had a second run at baking the pie. While I built the fire up in the oven, the German girl took to the role of domestic hausfrau  goddess, whipping up a second base which we 'blind baked' before pouring in the filling, There was a lot of heat giv...

Sometimes I get the impression that this place runs on garlic. We consume a lot of it here, and it's all grown on the property. Some people pop cloves like its candy, I participated in a couple of big garlic planting sessions. A bed of compost is laid down, into which the cloves are pressed, about a hand-width apart. All the little cloves are then blanketed in a thick layer of mulch. This keeps them warm and inhibits the weeds. I've heard said, that garlic should be planted on the shortest day, and harvested on the longest. This isn't a rule that's followed here on the farm. Shoots were poking up through the mulch with in a couple of weeks. Huge bed that we planted

If you visit Awhi farm, you'll notice lots of tiny huts scattered about the place. These shacks have been recycled from a local prison that was replacing some of it's prisoner accommodation. A tender was published for their removal and the farm won the rights to several. Most of the shacks had graffiti hidden under the bunk-bed frames, out of sight of anyone who didn't lie down in the bed. We painted over the markings which were mostly personal tags, and Mongrel Mob (a local bikie gang) shout-outs. One shack was marked with Neo-Nazi symbols and had a swastika scratched into the single small window set into the front of the building. We discussed options for hiding the symbol such as stickers or painting it over, finally deciding that the best way to obscure the design was to add scratches to change the shape. A young German woman who was spending her gap year travelling New Zealand, volunteered to modify the offensive marking. She was at it for more then an h...

Learnt how to fix a section of one of the water pipes that snake across the property Start by finding a short length of tubing with walls thicker then the pipe that needs fixing. Take the two cut ends of the damaged pipe and submerge in hot water to make them malleable. Then insert the short length to join the two.  Wrap wire around the cut sections to hold in place. Nice thing about this story, is that four weeks later, I was able to teach someone else how to mend a water pipe.

After two weeks intensive building here at the farm, I could sink a nail with three hits, measure and cut lengths of timber accurately, and I can rip a three meter board by hand. It's amazing what one can find when digging around in what we call the 'industrial area', where most of the construction material we use on the farm are stored. My first creation was this rack for ripening tomatoes. I found an old bike rack and we tipped moved it into position and tipped it over. Note the warning flag made out of some old insulation. There has been a number of bad frosts biting into all the crops recently, so all bodies were bent to the task of harvesting anything that was suffering badly. Unfortunately the Basil was beyond saving. The red tomatoes have been bottled. The almost ripe tomatoes have been laid out in this rack, and the green tomatoes are destined to be processed into chutney. I then took on the task of construction a windbreak for the gas hobs in the camp k...

Saturday is market day and Awhi farm loads up the battered old ute with produce to sell in the town. The market is tiny, but very cute. The ladies running the cake stall tend to do the most business. The gardens here on the farm produced two huge pumpkins during the year, so we ran a 'guess the weight' competition which proved to be quite popular. While we don't make a huge amount of cash from the morning, we do get to have some brilliant conversations with folk.

Loaded up the ute with builders mix I went out with our Spanish Architect to collect, some 'builders mix' (stone and sand) from a road side dump, for a series of concrete reinforcing that we are going to add to the masonry building at the farm. Jan and Maria have been building a shelter for the Awhi farm bikes. One cycle in particular is an 'electric assist' that was gifted to the farm by an American woman who was travelling the length of New Zealand. This little timber and corrugated steel addition to the tool shed is beautifully built. The pair got a reputation for 'toughness' as they continued to work through some shocking weather we were suffering this week. German built lean-to

First was on Food Forest cultivation. manual-for-creating-a-community-food-forest-on-public-land Second was on passive building heating.  Finished cutting up a video of the construction of the compost shower...

Woke up to rustling sound out side of the camper. I ignored it for a bit thinking it was kids mucking about, and it intensified. Eventually peeled back a curtain and looked outside. The view was of the entrance to one of the round houses that dot the property. Saw no signs of life, bar a large cardboard box. It was shaking, occasionally rocking on the spot. Noticed that there was an illustration of a cat driving a car printed on the outside of the box. Ahhhh, it dawned on me that we had captured another feral cat. Two cats left the property intact early this morning. They have returned in good health. The price they have paid to continue hanging around, it there reproductive organs. The property is to be purged of all other feral felines. Finished up most of the stuff I intended to do on the showers today. The plan was to make a seat, then attach it to the wall with two metal braces. I've never bolted anything to a wall before, so I thought I'd test a bolt by scr...

Rain has moved off breakfast in the sun Unhappy pussy Awhi farm has a number of stray cats that slink around the property, usually in close circuits around the kitchens. A decision has been made that the cats are useful for keeping rats and mice numbers down, but the cat population can't be allowed to expand either. The local SPCA performs free de-sexing on a Wednesday so we have had cages positioned around camp for the last couple of weeks. The cats now treat the traps as normal parts of the scenery. This morning one black and white kitten was spied snooping about inside a cage, so we sprang into action and slammed a piece of polystyrene across the entrance and slide home the wire door. The cat has spent the day in a quite room, away from the bustle of the camp, in an attempt to reduce it's stress. We've been reminding each other that it's there so that we remember to feed it. Tomorrow it's off to meet an appointment with the vets knife.

Working on the new composting shower and toilet today. I'm mostly under cover but having to venture out into the deluge to collect tools or materials. Most of the build was done last month, but the facility got 'put on hold' when other projects became a higher priority. I'm installing the internal fixtures such as a seat, curtains, and clothes pegs. The hooks for the pegs were made by a blacksmith from bits of old rebar during a visit to the farm by the  www.michaelpark.school , which was back when the showers were supposed to be completed. Composting shower uses the heat generated by decaying veg matter to heat water for a shower. opensourceecology.org/wiki/Hot_Shower Composting toilet is a process where human excrement is processed to make it safe for gardening. wikipedia.org/wiki/Composting_toilet Finished the day watching a doco  wikipedia.org/wiki/Surviving_Progress

Started raining round nine last night. The showers continued this morning and dragged on during the day. Didn't flood here like it did in Auckland. The Awhi farm Wwoofer crew spent the day in the squash club. We cut up and juiced apples for a potent cider that the resident German mad scientist brews in his caravan. Had to give the poor old juicer appliance an occasional breather to cool down, when we noticed an electrical tinged burning odor wafting about the room. There is a Permaculture coarse on this week for paying participants. To make the squash center a little more comfortable as the weather cools, we cleaned it from top to bottom, and fixed up the curtains which separate the courts from the lounge area.

This is the start of a new chapter in my travels around New Zealand. I'm currently camped out in Awhi farm, which is in Turangi. It's a sustainable showcase for energy, food production, and housing. www.awhifarm.com View Awhi farm in a larger map I showed up around 2:00pm on a Monday, six weeks back, and I was put to work immediately digging up potato's. It was brilliant, grubbing up pink, gold, and purple tubers out of the soil that was almost black with fecundity. I'm staying here under the Woofing * arrangement, and I was glad that I could earn my evening meal that night. Since then I've made bricks, some of which I've built into a dome, which is built on walls of packed earth bags. I've also cooked several meals for the camp inhabitants. Meals are made mostly with produce grown on the property. So far the food has been freak'n amazing and we have decided to write a cookbook compiled from all the visitors experience in the guest ...