APC10 - and the Atherton Tablelands Permaculture Bus Tour

Where do you usually have lunch? I pondered my regular lunchspot, an alternately frosty or dusty stoop off my front porch, while sipping on tropical fruit smoothies and snacking on flowers at the Botanical Ark. Three weeks ago in the wee hours of the morning, I flew into Cairns for the Tenth Australasian Permaculture Convergence. What followed was four jam-packed days of presentations, design processes and meeting the elders and newbies of the permacultural movement in Australia and overseas, set to the backdrop of tropical rainforest in Far North Queensland. Alternately inspired, exhausted and enthusiastically manic, I spent four days refining my introduction to strangers from "I run a permaculture consultancy business in Central Victoria", to leaping from from a haybale stating "I'm committed to excellence in integrating permaculture, literacy and numeracy, running workshops from my place and interactive theatre", during Robin Clayfield's Leaps of Faith session. I made good on the interactive theatre soon after, see below...

It's not easy to coherently write about all the mind flutterings that overtook me during the Convergence. I was regularly scribbling good ideas in my notebook as they came to mind. One idea, however, kept coming back to me, in the form of a permaculture principle, "Use edges and value the marginal". The people that I was most drawn to were working on the edges of permaculture, following their passions and integrating permaculture into the things that got them bouncing out of bed in the morning. From Cecilia Macaulay's balcony gardening and share house permaculture, to April Sampson-Kelly's online Permaculture Design Courses to the Garden at the End of the World, I got most inspiration from those people working through different media, in far-off places, or finding their own niche within the movement.

One of the major issues leading up to and during APC10 was the call for a national representative permaculture body for Australia. Robina McCurdy, Robin Clayfield and Rowe Morrow, some of the best facilitators I know of, ran a participatory workshop to develop a needs analysis for the nation. The results are posted here. I came away from the Convergence, disappointed that there wasn't more of this. At APC9 in Sydney in 2008, there was ample opportunity to participate in workshops. Rowe Morrow's Water Workshop had hundreds of people brainstorming solutions for water issues for a number of types of human settlements, including small towns, cities, country/urban fringe, drylands, etc. In all, at APC10, I spent too much time sitting on my backside watching powerpoints, a common problem with conferences, but from a permaculture convergence I expected more. The first opportunity I had to participate in a presentation saw me bouncing off the walls. I made a personal commitment that next convergence I will only attend if I also present a workshop.

APC9 Water workshop: Source unknown

I made good on an earlier personal commitment involving what I called, for want of a better term, 'interactive theatre'. I had decided before the convergence to take advantage of any future opportunities to facilitate dance events. The final night party of the Convergence was scheduled, with Costa, TV's gardening guru, as MC I put my hand up to run the Interpretive Permaculture Bush Dance. Loosely based around a traditional bush dance, with some permaculture principles thrown in for good measure, it culminated in a spiral of dancers being dragged into a vortex screaming, "This is so much fun!". Suffice to say, it went off, and I am now addicted to the power of telling people what to do on the dance floor.

Lastly, one of the most exciting features of a Permaculture convergence is the tour that inevitably follows. The APC10 post-convergence tour took us through dry savannah of Mareeba and back to the tropical paradise of the Atherton Tablelands. So many things I haven't seen before, eggplant trees, green ant highways and creative approaches to cracking coconuts (see below right).

My deepest gratitude goes to permaculture elders Rowe Morrow and Phil Gall for their graciousness and effusive generosity. It's always humbling to meet those for whom you have so much respect and for them to be willing and happy to give so much of their time. Further opportunities to rub elbows with heroes, Robina McCurdy and Robin Clayfield on the bus tour, sounds captured below.

From the archives: make a chicken coop from farm junk

A couple of years ago I made my first foray into raising chicks. With a borrowed incubator we started incubating our first batch of eggs just before our chickens got broody themselves. After three weeks, we had eight chicks being raised by their mother hens (the country chicks) and seven chicks raised by us in a brooder (the city chicks). We set up a skype account and camera to keep an eye on the city chicks while we were working away from home.

They grew up quickly and it soon came time to relocate the city chicks to the chicken run outside, but we didn't expect the country chicks and their mothers to be too happy about sharing their coop. It was decided, then to let them get to know each other slowly across the chicken wire and construct a new coop in the 'forage zone', where I'd planted amaranth, oats, and some sunflowers and sorghum that had come up from a handful of chicken grain I'd scattered around. Having just come across the work of Patrick Dougherty, I decided to put my fibre craft skills to work and weave them a new coop out of whatever materials I could find on the farm. Finding some fencing mesh attached to galvanised posts on the scrap metal pile, I wired it into a semi-circular shape, weaving wisteria prunings in and out of the grids. The plan was to make a wattle and daub structure, an earth building technique in which a mixture of clay and straw is daubed onto a woven wooden lattice, called the wattle.

We mixed straw with mud dug out of the dam until it felt about the right consistency, roughly a 50/50 mix of mud and straw. Then a team made it into patties to be daubed onto the wall by builders.

Stick perches were put in place before the daubing began, and the clay and straw layer was slowly built up onto the wattle.

The big people help the small people work in tight corners

As some of the branches were thick, it was difficult to get a tight weave in the wattle, which resulted in troubles getting the daub to stick in places. As it dried, we kept an eye on any clay that dropped off and fixed up small gaps with more daub.

 After the clay had dried the coop was roofed with the lid of an old water tank, which sat on the top of the posts, allowing some cross ventilation at the top of the wall. This proved to be a much better coop than the corrugated iron coop the country chicks grew up in, staying cooler in the heat and providing a lot of choice in sticks for the chooks to perch upon. Two roosters lived in comparative harmony in their separate coops, sharing the same forage zone by day and retiring to their different coops by night. Contained in a fenced in enclosure, this open structure worked well. However, I'd love to build a fox-proof elevated chicken coop for our orchard like this one from the Planet Repair Institute.

'Tis a Mighty Swale

One of the major assets of our property is a storm water culvert which brings storm water runoff from a number of roads nearby. Water begins to flow through the culvert whenever we have rainfall of more than 8mm. After 25 years of water pouring through, a large gully has been washed away, and this is one of the places in which gorse has found a niche.

This satellite pic shows the course the gully runs and the growth of gorse around it. The main swale bisects the water course and now directs water across the property on contour.

The first priority was to more effectively use the water currently running straight off the property and to slow it down to help with the erosion problem. This led to a design for the mainframe swale, running on contour at the highest point that traversed the longest line across the property. This was partly determined by looking at contour maps, to help decide where we would begin surveying. Online contour maps promised a level line that ran from one far corner to another, beautifully traversing boundary fences and sheds. However, there's nothing like getting outside with a laser level or A-frame... and while pegging it out it began to look somewhat different. South of the gully the swale would run just where we wanted, but on the north side, it ran into the boundary fence. We opted to build the south side swale and come back to the northern paddock at a later date.

Digging the swale at the end of summer, the ground was too hard for the bucket on the little tractor. First the pegged line was ripped a number of times and the loose earth was scooped and piled on the downhill side of the swale.

Scoop and dump ... scoop and dump

Levels were checked by hand by moving along the swale with metal tubing and a spirit level. Constructing swales seems to have a magical meteorological effect... I'm not the first to be rewarded by rain the day a swale is dug. Water is the ultimate spirit level and indicated the need to dig a bit deeper at the bottom end.

The top side of the swale was planted with a variety of acacias - blackwood, black wattle, lightwood and wirilda in the mix. The last thing to do was to make a bridge to the lower paddock.



After years of drought, rainfall this autumn and winter has been constant. The swale has been full since April, resulting in waterlogging in the paddock below. When it came time to plant bare-rooted fruit trees, we decided to mound them up to prevent them drowning. As it turns out, the bottom end of the swale is somewhat higher, which means the ground below is less damp, and a good place to plant cherries, peaches and apricots, which are more susceptible to waterlogging. When things dry out again, the plan is to deepen and widen the swale. Having thought in terms of water scarcity for so many years, I didn't account for how much water would be coming through that culvert. 80mm fell in 24 hours in August, blowing out the walls of small ponds we had constructed to slow down the remaining water that travels through the gully.

This represents a major challenge. We're grappling with how to deal with the force of the water flowing through that small channel in big rain events. There's also a concern about contaminants coming onto the property that have washed off the roads, particularly for the two small dams scheduled for future works. For the time being, the big rains are cleansing, washing up an assortment of rubbish and old bottles that have been thrown in that gully for countless years.

Pitchfork Projects

 I've launched a new website over at pitchforkprojects.com and am now offering services both on the ground and over Skype. So now you can contact me for permaculture design and advice wherever in the world you are. Designed for people who want to be hands-on with their own projects, and are seeking design advice, solutions or ideas on how to move forward with their objectives. I also offer tools for teachers and parents on using the garden as a tool for learning language, literacy and numeracy.

Business card designed by Andrea Shaw.

P.S. I didn't realise at first, but that's our place on the card! Look at that!

Our Place

In September 2009, I spied online what looked like my dream country place. Low price tag, enough land to play with and most amazingly an old house that looked to be in a fairly liveable condition. Tim and I had agreed upon what we wanted for our budget: a watercourse, even if only running in winter, a shed or basic structure, close to a train line and suitable for m permaculture wants, food growing and a few animals.

What we got: An old house with town water and power connected, storm water outlet running onto property, plenty of sheds, old pigeon coops, a couple of old pear and plum trees.

Challenges: Storm water coming onto the property had created an erosion gully that had been overrun with gorse for the last 20 years. The property had been overgrazed and then neglected for years. Rubbish, car parts and broken glass were strewn everywhere. The first focus was on cleaning up and using whatever resources we could find in sheds and strewn about.

We started work to retrofit the house for energy efficiency, attack the gorse forest without the use of chemicals, utilise the storm water more effectively to tackle the erosion problem and find the pipes that bring mains water to the house.

A lucky resource was the years of pigeon poo that had collected in the pigeon coops over the years. It was old, dry and very dusty, but a fantastic resource. I set to work almost immediately to start composting the pigeon poo goldmine. I used the Berkley method, and made a pile using a a mix of straw, newspaper and pigeon poop. This I turned after four days and then every second day til 18 days had passed. Check CSIRO's publication 'Composting - Making Soil Improver from Rubbish' for a guide to mixing your materials for the right carbon/nitrogen ratios, downloadable here.

Econospace Framing - step by step

Some very good workshops happened near Castlemaine this summer and I was lucky enough to catch one of them. For a long while I'd been wishing for the skills to build my own shed, houseboat or composting toilet, but the mystery of how to make walls and roofs stay up on their own eluded me. This changed after I attended Peter Cowman's Econospace framing. In one weekend, the construction of a small building had become something within my range of experience. What follows are my notes on how to build an Econospace - in our case, a 10 square metre structure.

We began with some theory: the principles of foundation and triangulation, the benefit of a good work bench and appropriate tools.

We quickly saw these principles in action. The foundations: basalt crushed rock under a brick foundation covered with ant guard. The floor is raised to keep it accessible to check for termite damage, which should be held at bay by the rock and ant guard.

The floor was constructed before our arrival. The framing was laid and levelled and beams placed across and attached to frame from below. The cross pieces tie it all together. The lip here where the frame joins the beams allows for the placing of insulation.

















Notice how the triangulating pieces run opposite ways at each end.

The basis of frame of the Econospace is the Peter post. The peter post is designed for exterior and interior cladding, with space for insulation in the middle.

We made up the peter posts on a jig and nailed them together with 75mm flathead nails.

One problem you can encounter with conventional timber framing is thermal bridging, where the timber provides a bridge - points at which wood can transfer heat inside to outside. The peter post avoids this problem, as no part of the wood travels all the way through from inside to out.

With our peter posts ready, we built the frame. Firstly, we made a temporary floor and laid out 4 peter posts, lining them up with the foundation and measuring the distances carefully. 4 sheeting rails were nailed across, with one laid diagonally along the top for the sloping roof.


A diagonal cross-brace was added, running in the opposite direction to the diagonal roof rail. Two bottom rails were added.


Bracing beams were fixed at a single point, to allow them to pivot. Then we raised the wall and braced it in position.


The front wall was constructed in a similar way, except that the wall sat on the floor joists when raised. It is essential to accurately measure the width of the peter posts relative to the floor joist to ensure it fits.



With all four walls raised, we secured them and removed the bracing.

Playing Music on a Bike - Outrageous!

I love this kind of outrageous gadgetry. When I was a bike courier, people would kit their bikes out with over the top suspension and mountain biking gadgets, which on city streets just seemed a bit much. This is kids doing what kids do best. Making weird but cool stuff.