house – Gallifrey Forest Farm

Spring Planting

2016/08/21 Danielle 0

It’s been a busy weekend. As well as finishing off a literature review around implementing dehesa style agroforestry in Australia, for my uni course (once the paper is marked and returned, I’ll put it up here in the Resources section), I’ve planted 17 trees. The bare root trees from Heritage Fruit Trees arrived, so there’s been a lot of digging and planting happening. Five more apple trees for the orchard, five pears and two nashi pears planted in a new little pear grove, and another five stone fruit trees for Zone 1 behind the house. Zone 1 includes the […]

June 12: Housework

2016/06/12 Danielle 2

This is not a post about cleaning, doing laundry, or even about looking after the cats (yes, that counts as housework normally). The kind of house-work I’m talking about is more along the lines of minor renovations. When the house went in, nine months ago, there were some casualties – a few trees had to go to make room for the trucks to come in. The contractors knocked them over, and (at our request) left them for us to deal with. We collected a few sections and painstakingly de-barked them on the verandah. They’ve been drying out and seasoning […]

June 10: Art and Happiness

2016/06/10 Danielle 0

Everyone understands the need and desire for nourishing food, to provide us with energy and amino acids and essential nutrients. That’s pretty straight forward. But as a social species, we actually need more than that. We have needs that go beyond the physiological – we need things like acceptance, love, appreciation, and autonomy. We seek happiness, or self-actualisation, or a sense of belonging and community (or all of these things, they’re not mutually exclusive). We create meaning for ourselves out of the things we do, because we need our actions and our lives to have meaning. There are many […]

June 6: furniture modification

2016/06/06 Danielle 0

When I was 19 or so, I built myself a bed. To be precise, a queen-size loft bed – effectively the top bunk of a bunk bed, but with no bottom bunk and instead space for a desk or couch underneath – made of large chunks of jarrah and aged pine. Today’s project was modifying that bed. We’ve cut the legs down a bit, so it’s only 80 cm off the ground, rather than a full 1.5 m. K got to use the table saw he got for his birthday (and thinks it’s the best toy ever). And then […]

June 2: Seed Planting

2016/06/02 Danielle 0

Winter is here. Cold nights (and cold days, too, at the moment!), rain and wet, black soil. Every night there’s the smell of woodsmoke from wood-burning heaters in the neighbourhood, and the deciduous trees are all in the last stages of losing their leaves. The sweetgums are glorious, red and purple and gold. Everything is settling in for a good winter’s hibernation. Perfect time to plant tree seeds. I’ve had some stone pine (Pinus pinea) seeds and cork oak (Quercus suber) acorns in the fridge for a couple’ve months, getting the chill they need to start germinating. They’re going […]