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self sufficiency and community

2016/11/28 Danielle 0

A friend of mine asked yesterday how long it would be before the farm was self sufficient. It’s not as simple a question to answer as you might think.   One answer is: never. We aren’t planning to grow grain, and although I do have some tubs of potatoes and a sweet potato patch, and plans to put in chestnut trees, we aren’t really focusing on growing what the biodynamic gardening people call ‘calory crops’. Those are the foods which make up the majority of your diet – the carbohydrates that give you a baseline energy hit and leave you […]

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Feast like a Viking

2016/10/08 Danielle 1

This evening we’re off to a Viking-themed pot luck feast – the idea here is that everyone who goes takes a dish, and each dish forms one course of a massive degustation style dinner. We’ve been to a few of these dinners, each with a different theme, and they’re an enormous amount of fun. The food is always amazing, and so plentiful that we all waddle out at the end of the night swearing to be better about taking tiny portions of each dish next time.   The idea for this iteration is reasonably authentic Viking style food. So, being […]

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June 26: belated weekend update

2016/06/27 Danielle 0

It was a busy weekend (although a good one!) so I’m a day late with this post. Saturday we attended the Less is More festival and I presented on keeping bees, then we had a mid-winter gathering at my mum’s place and caught up with friends and family there – and ate far too much delicious lamb tagine and roasted sweet potato. Sunday we headed out to the swan valley for breakfast at the Margaret River Chocolate Factory (which does a very nice breakfast), and then a day at the Swan Valley Cuddly Animal Farm.   So many animals. Including Damara lambs, […]

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June 25: Less is More 2016 (hosting a beehive)

2016/06/25 Danielle 0

Today I presented at the 2016 Less is More festival, on hosting a beehive in your back yard. Here are some of the points I covered, just in case you couldn’t make it to the talk, or need a little reminder of the content. 🙂   Why host a beehive? Well, it’s more a case of why wouldn’t you, really. It’s easy and safe, the bees will pollinate all your vegetables and your fruit trees, and produce honey as well. Plus, honeybees are under a lot of pressure from climate change, pollution, disease and the use of damaging pesticides such […]

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if not you..

2016/01/18 Danielle 0

This weekend just passed, I attended an event called GenghisCon. It’s a small science fiction / speculative fantasy & gaming convention, which runs every year in Perth. It’s run every year for the last 15 years, which is a pretty impressive run for something which gets no funding or support from any corporate or government body. Every year the committee (elected at the previous convention) does fundraising to make sure there’s enough money to pay for the venue and insurance, and organises a program of events to run at the convention, including discussion panels (on anything and everything from how to […]