Abdallah House - Redesigning a Home

My memories of Mel Part of me feels like a fraud. I hadn’t spoken with Mel for maybe 20 years, though we had exchanged the odd message. I first found out she was sick by reading it on the ABC news back in late 2023. I got in touch, sending her my love. “Thanks so much Richie Rich x”. It seemed that she had recovered. It wasn’t until just over 2 years later that I read a distressing message from Paul, her Dad, on Facebook, and I reached out again. But, no reply. I wanted to see her - but it was too late. She was in a hospital on the other side of the planet, closed off, from all but those closest and dearest to her. On hearing of her death from her sister Beck, the foundations of my life shook. A deep grief overcame me - where was this coming from? Memories of our journey together came flooding back. I pulled out old photo albums, and an old case filled with letters and birthday cards. Later, I went through old emails too. I’d kept everything… ------------------------ Mel and I grew up ...

After being assured by the organisers that they would feature our place in promotional material, I decided to go all in with another SHD. I figure it's a good opportunity to show people how our established low cost permaculture property functions.  The way it works is a bit different this year. With the one $15 ticket you can visit multiple properties by setting up your own 'tour'. Unfortunately, there's not many other properties in our region that are participating. Cooee Park  in High Camp (online tour only) or Clearwind in Glenhope isn't too far away (if you've got a car) - so you might want to check it out too.  Our place features as one of the case studies in David Holmgren's RetroSuburbia , which was released back in 2018. So if you are familiar with the book you can see how our place has evolved over the years since then. It's a hands on 'manual' on how you can live a more self-reliant life and transform your home. I'll have copies of...

Garden helpers at The Centre in downtown Seymour I decided to step up and focus more effort into food production in 2025. Of course, putting more effort in and seeing the results takes time. The effort has been in making better use of the marginal garden beds, by making use of the 3 cast iron baths I've had sitting around for years, getting seedlings in regularly / early and revisiting soil mineralisation - which was last done in 2012, not long after we moved in. The wicking sleeper beds have been performing well, and I decided to separate the produce results from our home garden so we can keep track on how that's going as well as have a easy way to determine how our home garden is going compared with results from previous years.