Building – Page 2 – Gallifrey Forest Farm

Winter is here

2015/06/02 Danielle 0

It’s been just over a month since my last post, in spite of my best intentions. In my defence, in that time I’ve been recovering from a broken arm and a nasty cough. At the same time. Yes. Not that it has anything much to do with permaculture, except in that it’s surprisingly hard to do anything (eating with a spoon I felt like an uncoordinated 5 year old – so much work to avoid just smearing porridge on my face!) when your dominant arm is unusable, the broken arm was a result of a rollerblading accident. I caught a […]

House Update – April 2015

2015/04/19 Danielle 0

It looks like, just maybe, we have a green light finally. I’m not sure if I’m even excited after all this time or just relieved that the bank got off its rear end and dealt with the mistakes they made when signing us up for this mortgage refinance shenanigans in December. The first progress payment has been released to the builder, so building can start now. We’re waiting to hear when the building will actually start, which will depend on what else in in the queue at the builder. So we don’t have a delivery date yet, but.. it’s closer […]

I can see my house from here.

2012/11/05 kai 0

When we first thought about buying our property we did a lot of research into the area. We looked at the soil type, the lay of the land, types of native vegetation and generally wandered around to get the “feel” of the property before buying. As part of this one of the things we did was check out the property on Nearmaps. Nearmaps is a little like google maps with a couple of important differences. It’s much higher resolution, so you can zoom in closer and see more detail. In our local apartment complex you can actually see someone sitting […]

A failure of marketing

2012/10/05 Danielle 0

In a dry(ish) climate like ours, water is life. Where there is water, plants grow and animals (and people) thrive. This is fairly obvious to anyone who’s experienced our baking hot summers. Gallifrey isn’t on mains water, so even if we wanted to use the output of the dams and the desalination plants, we can’t. The water in the deep aquifer is fully allocated for agriculture in the area, so we aren’t allowed to sink a deep bore or well. We are allowed to sink a shallow bore, and according to our neighbours the water isn’t saline, but drinking water […]

What is burlapcrete?

2012/09/20 Danielle 1

One of the joys of setting up Gallifrey is getting to try a lot of the things I’ve been interested in for a long time but haven’t had the opportunity to implement. Things like putting in swales and designing a food forest, like large scale outdoor sculptures (I haven’t done any of that yet, but I’m thinking about it), like building a straw bale house, and putting in a big vegetable garden in a good location where I can grow tasty things. Gardens give me so much joy, I’ve wanted to build one of my own for as long as […]