Eco's Lodge

[Grahame]

Great stuff Eco! Keep up the good work

[Tezza]

Welcome to our First "Female Emperor"... Arise EMPEROR "ECO" 1st...

Burn your bras and lead your "Permies" out of the Wilderness....Lets bring the Wilderness back HOME again

Tezza

[eco4560]

I can be an emperor. So long as you don't expect me to fall for that old trick about making me clothes that aren't actually there!

[eco4560]

I met a lovely chap at the talk that I gave. His name is Peter and he is 94. He is the living embodiment of optimism - because he's worried about what will happen once peak oil and climate change make their presence felt.... At 94 I think that is optimism!

[Tezza]

"Emperess Eco" arise...a permie Emperess will recieve the finest organic silk,"one straw method" Hemp products....No Invisable materials for Us...

I think Fresh blood is required in our permie world thats forever changing. AND WHY NOT A WOMAN................. Me thinks that males have let the planet down,BIG TIME....



Tezza

[Tezza]

Wow Optimism at 94.... Thats a wonder, good on him,surely this bloke must'nt listen to the media much..... hard to be optimist in a lotta cases out there in the big old world...

Glad he can still work on removing the negativity in his own way,like myself and most permies,but "DOING" instead of "DOING NOTHING"..

when we stop, that's when we give up/in..

Tezza

[eco4560]

My PDC is officially over, which is bittersweet. I'm looking forward to having one extra day a week to do stuff in, but having a day a week sitting still and talking to others about a better way to live was very nice (I guess church fulfils that spot for some).

We had two consecutive days of teaching - our usual Sunday, and today Monday - which is a public holiday up here in Qld. Yesterday we covered aquaculture, which was interesting. Tom introduced us to (amongst other books) the Power of Duck book - using ducks, plus azolla plus fish on rice paddies, which has lots of scientific data about the experiments the Japanese author did to prove that it increased rice yield, and you get to eat the duck and the fish as well.

We had some time in the afternoon to complete our design, and it was hard to decide what to leave out, because we wanted to add a bit of everything we learned about during the course! The chinampas never made it into the final design, nor the guinea pig tractors after much discussion.

We two ladies were camping over at Tom's place to save on driving time and petrol. Our male student lives close by, so as the sun set we had a tour of his garden before settling in to a fabulous chicken curry made by his wife. We watched the Urban chapter of the Global Gardener DVD after dinner - just can't get enough of this permaculture even after a full day of lectures!

We girls headed back to camp about 9, and under the gloriously bright full moon and a clear sky set out a circle of candle lanterns and sat in the middle talking until WAY too late... And then hit the sack. My air bed let itself down halfway through the night, and some demented rooster thought that sun rise was about 3 am and all the other roosters started talking back. After tossing and turning a few more times I heard Tom berating an animal soundly and knew that the farm was about to spring into action. (The littlest dog had left a donation on the door step in protest about the cold night - hence the telling off!) We joined Tom on his morning round feeding the cows, geese and chooks, and headed back to the teaching area to cook ourselves breakfast.

There was still some time to fill in before class so we weeded a section of the kitchen garden and mulched it. The chooks got to share 2 wheelbarrows worth of greens from the garden.

Today we covered the final chapter of the book - about establishing a permaculture community. When we took stock of it, the Sunny Coast is very well served with a strong permaculture group, several Transition groups, community gardens and so even a good number of intentional communities based on permaculture. We talked about alternative financial systems, and about how we might generate an income give our own individual skill sets.

Because we were such keen students we didn't need the last few hours of the afternoon to finish off our design, so we cut back the long grass hiding the lovely rock wall around the camping area that had been made by a former intern, and piled the grass up in the mulch bay in the kitchen garden ready for use, and did a bit more weeding.

Eventually it was time to show off our design. I had been really confident that we nailed it until we started presenting it, because it seemed too easy and I kept thinking that it had to be harder than this! But we got a thumbs up for it and were presented with our certificates. Yay!

To top the day off Zaia made us afternoon tea. And MA - I'm going to get the recipe just for YOU! It was banana and choko tart, served with bunya nut and coconut cream. It sounds a bit weird but my heavens it was truly splendid! After doing a round of the table to talk about what we got out of the course and giving feedback, the sun started to set and we had to drag ourselves away to return to our 'normal' lives.

At least until there's a really interesting course on that I can get to at Tom and Zaia's place one weekend....

[eco4560]

It's almost time to spread my wings and head back to Cambodia. I'm taking my teenage daughter with me this time (which will be a huge challenge for her!). We'll be there for 4 weeks as volunteers with Women's Health Cambodia.

If you didn't get a chance to look at the story from last years trip it is here - Photoblog.

You can also follow what is happening at Facebook, or make a donation via the Life Options website.

If you haven't made a donation yet please, please, please do it. It all goes to on the ground work. $2 will pay a village health care worker to visit a new mum and her baby three times in the first 6 weeks of life. Every little bit helps!

Will add more photos to photoblog during this years trip - if I can get internet access that is. The village I was at last year didn't have electricity so I can't make any promises!!!

[eco4560]

Everyone here in the Southern Hemisphere is gearing up for Easter. Except it's all wrong! Easter is a spring festival (Ostara) of fertility, held around the vernal equinox.

It's just past the autumnal equinox which means we should be celebrating Mabon instead. The Harvest festival. I'm pretty sure that you can have chocolate at a harvest festival.

So I'll be celebrating the balance that comes with the equinox (OK I'm late it was the 21st.....) and being grateful for bountiful harvests, and reminding myself that descending into the cold and dark is just part of the cycle and makes us appreciate the sunny and warm times even more when they are here.

Happy Mabon to all my fellow Antipodeans.

[Tezza]

Happy Mabon Eco and all the forum members