11 Tuesday Feb 2014
Nature abhors a vacuum
Following the evacuation of its previous residents, the bee-house has not remained vacant for long. Offering waterside views and passive solar design, resident roos have recently been spotted conducting an open inspection of this prime real estate.
11 Tuesday Feb 2014
Posted in ecology, regeneration
River red gums (Eucalyptus camaldulensis) are notorious limb droppers. With the recent blistering temperatures (Adelaide’s been experiencing been experiencing strings of days above 40 degrees Celcius, and the normally milder Southern Fleurieu has had days in the early 40s) and a burst of gale-force winds, one of our two remnant red gums has lived up to its notoriety. Continue reading
17 Tuesday Dec 2013
Posted in ecology, livestock, planning, regeneration, waterways
Tags
building, ecology, erosion, fencing, kangaroos, livestock, permaculture, planning, revegetation, trees, waterways, zones
The gate into the top end of the northern revegetation area
While our impact on this landscape has been pretty minimal so far, with the completion of our first phase of fencing, we’ve begun more major infrastructure works. We’ve started by fencing off two big chunks of ground encircling the erosion gullies, surrounding them with a roughly 20-metre buffer zone for future woodland regeneration.
Neat knots
In a permaculture sense, these patches of ground will be our Zone 5, our minimal-management ‘wilderness’ zones, designed for habitat and ecosystem services such as erosion and salinity control and water filtration. Abutting our western boundary they form a link with the creeks and swamps that feed the Congeratinga River. With these zones now marked onto the landscape we can plan outwards towards zones of increasing management intensity. Continue reading
27 Wednesday Nov 2013
Posted in ecology, planning, regeneration
November marks one year since we began our relationship with this patch of soil, grass and rusty car parts. If the permaculture imperative is to obtain a yield, then the yields of this first year have been largely intangible, but no less real. It has been a year of observing and learning about the land, ourselves and what we can do here. I remember emotions I was feeling about this project a year ago, and I think my terror has been mostly balanced by a sense of calm. Where 12 months ago I was overwhelmed by the scale of our ignorance, now, our ignorance is still largely intact, but I’m more confident in our collective abilities as a family, nested within a community, to unravel the challenges we face. Continue reading
12 Saturday Oct 2013
Posted in ecology, regeneration, reviews
Tags
books, ecology, history, kangaroos, permaculture, revegetation, soil, trees
In The Biggest Estate on Earth (Allen & Unwin, 2011), historian Bill Gammage describes a detailed vision of Aboriginal land management prior to European colonisation of Australia. While many Australians have a broad sense that “fire-stick farming” was (and is) a tool used by Aboriginal people, The Biggest Estate on Earth begins to fathom how finely tuned Aboriginal fire use was. With fire as one of a suite of tools, Aboriginal people across the Australian continent carved the landscape into a mosaic of ecosystems, each harbouring plants and animals of differing sensitivity to fire, each maintained to maximise ecological diversity and each nested within the other to increase the ease of hunting or harvesting. For Gammage, Aboriginal land management across the continent was directed by three main principles: “ensure that all life flourishes; make plants and animals abundant, convenient and predictable”; and to “think universal, act local”. Continue reading
01 Sunday Sep 2013
Posted in ecology, events, planning, regeneration
Tags
erosion, events, photography, revegetation, seasons, trees, winter
Sheep figuring out the contour, near Sellicks.
I feel like I’ve never really understood winter until this year. When the first rains came, they came hard, revealing slippery, sticky mud and rivulets in unexpected places. The average June rainfall for Second Valley is around 90mm. This year the Bureau of Meteorology recorded over 200mm, and the nearby district of Parawa scored a record-breaking 266mm. Long-dormant erosion gullies were reawoken, creek banks slumped, and everywhere there was the sound of dripping. Now, the days are clearing, the sun has bite and already the kangaroos have joeys in pouch. Here’s some highlights from the wet season. Continue reading
01 Sunday Sep 2013
Posted in ecology, planning, regeneration, waterways
Kangaroos: so cute, yet so merciless.
One of winter’s most exciting prospects was the chance to get some trees in the ground. Our strategy for revegetation has been to try to build islands of vegetation in the most vulnerable areas, with the view to expanding them outwards until they connect up. We were aware that the kangaroos would take an interest, but just how much of an interest we were unprepared for.
Continue reading
11 Tuesday Jun 2013
Posted in diy, ecology, regeneration, waterways
A Juncus seed head on one of the ridgelines.
With a landscape scarred with a history of erosion, and soil associations that the CSIRO SoilMapp discusses in the most nervous of tones, we’d been apprehensive about this season’s heavy rains. After two days of constant downpours, the water sat on the surface, filled every hollow and started to run in strange new flow patterns along the most unexpected of ridgelines. Neighbours told us they hadn’t seen rain like that for some years, and that erosion headcuts had been reawakened all through the surrounding valleys.
Zephyr Creek before and after: now with less car bodies and more trees!
It was a relief to see that our improvised erosion control strategies (use local materials; slow water flow with rock, fallen timber or mulch; always work on contour; get plants in the ground) had all worked to some degree. Indeed, areas where we had made an intervention, however minor, fared much better than areas without. After the dryness of summer it was unexpectedly thrilling to see water flow, vegetation spring up around the branches we stacked across drainage lines, and most of all, creek banks where we’d removed car bodies didn’t slump and be carried off into the neighbouring paddock.
10 Monday Jun 2013
Posted in ecology, regeneration, waterways
Last weekend we got in the first of (hopefully) many rounds of tree plantings. The ground was soaked after a full two days of rain, the clay soft and pliable, perfect for slipping in the planned 250 trees in several exposed areas of the property where rubbish extraction has opened the now-cleared banks up to more erosion. A team of weather-trusting family and friends came along for the adventure, some planting trees for the first time, others professional tree planters. Continue reading
26 Friday Apr 2013
Posted in ecology
Tags
Whenever we mentioned winter and a yearning for rain, our neighbours would offer wry smiles and allusions to sticky slicks of mud and the appearance of mysterious bogs. The Bureau of Meteorology predicted rain for the Fleurieu. So we went camping.
Yarnauwi Farm 