Resistance is Fertile
We’ve built a food forest!
Much of our time lately has been given over to building the structures to accommodate our food forest orchard. If you are planning on building a 1500m2 , 3.7m tall wired and netted orchard by yourself….don’t!
Run away now…save yourself! Continue reading “Building a Food Forest Part 1”
Hey offgridders and those considering it, welcome back! This post will be all about hot water without mains electricity or natural gas. It’s pretty important and in fact in most parts of Aus you won’t be able to get an occupancy certificate with out provision for it.
So what are the common options? There’s a wetback for a wood heater, LPG storage or instantaneous, solar thermal or a heat pump system. Continue reading “Off Grid Hot Water Part 1”
Hi regular readers and thanks for stopping by!
Yes Langi Billin is still going, but we’ve been a little busy. Currently we are finishing the house and about 2/3 of the way through building a 72 metre long and 21 metre wide, netted food forest. We’ll put up pics and designs when we get a bit of time, we’re pretty much exhausted all the time currently, so the blog has taken a back seat for a bit.
Also we have some more info to post for you on off grid hot water, smart farm open source monitoring, our notes on soil carbon and mycelium from a session with the brilliant Walter Jehne of Regenerate Earth and some stuff on Johnson-Su bioreactors for fungal compost.
Back soon – stay well everyone!
Thanks to Dan and the crew at Centre State Drilling we have a 60Lpm bore! If you need a bore and you’re in Vic we reckon Dan is the man and we don’t recommend people lightly.
Research on batteries can be really confusing when you start. Hopefully this post can help you dig down to just the factors that are important when selecting a battery type. First though, here’s the rule; battery technology is moving so fast whatever you select will be close to outdated by the time you install it. So don’t worry about the latest and greatest, just worry about what will do the job for you. Continue reading “Off Grid Solar Part 3 – Batteries”
In our last post we started showing you how we’ve added post sets to our gullies on our front fence line so that we can get away with using mostly star pickets for our fence.
Major stress relief this week, it looks like we’ve just sold our existing house. Now only waiting for finance approval for the buyers. Funny how things work out. We redesigned the new house and cut out some of the cool stuff because covid meant we couldn’t sell our current house and even if we could its value was estimated to have dropped 10% or more.
To be honest house prices in our area at the moment are ridiculous and we both feel very uncomfortable about participating in an unaffordable market. The only way we can rationalise it is our small farm project will, all things going to plan, generate a great deal of community good to offset the negative. Neither of us are sure this calculus is valid, but we can’t see any alternatives.
In the end the house sold in less than a week and for about 10% MORE than we had budgeted for! So we could have left everything in and it would have all worked out – c’est la vie!
Apart from a recent 5 day lock down this is the reason we haven’t had much time to be at the farm recently. However, our new house is now done to lock up and waiting for the builders to release it to us.
So the last couple of days have been enjoyable, getting to work on the farm. Today’s action was building the front fence. So I thought it might be a good time to introduce a couple of fencing ideas and talk about tools.
Our front fence will be mostly star pickets (or Y posts in the US) because they are easy to install and relatively inexpensive. They have some issues though. When you strain a wire running through a star picket, if that picket is lower than its neighbours (like in a gully) then it will just pull out of the ground as you strain up the wire. So how to avoid? Continue reading “Fencing and News”
We were lucky enough to stumble across a timber clearing auction recently and managed to snag a truck load of reclaimed Oregon (or Douglas Fir) beams for very little outlay. Oregon is a wonderful timber for construction. It’s light, easy to work with and has a high bending load capacity. The drawback is that it is very hard to get in long lengths and if you can find it, it’s also very expensive. The folks at Recycled Timber Discounters in Woodend were having a clear out of old stock – lucky for us! They are really nice people too.
So how come we need construction materials when we already have a shed? We built our first shed on a relatively small footprint for a number of reasons. Cost and space were contributing reasons. Every dollar we put into shedding was a dollar we didn’t have to put into the rest of the farm and similarly ever square metre we used up was area that couldn’t be used for production. So we built the smallest shed we could reasonably get away with.
However, there is a broader and more compelling reason – embodied energy. Continue reading “Let’s talk embodied energy”
UPDATED UPDATE 5/2/2021
We’re almost to lock up! Woo hooh!
UPDATE
Well we have walls, a floor, and most of the roof trusses in place! We are naturally very excited! Continue reading “House Progress”
There aren’t words for how stressful trying to get a house build started in the middle of a pandemic has been! Yet despite all the drama our house has begun. Our builders, Swenrick, after a few hiccups, have begun and have quickly gotten as far as the subfloor.
