Permablitz #29 at the Permaculture Forest

Well yesterday and today we had a huge weekend, hosting Permablitz #29, having heaps of fun with about 20 wonderful visitors, and getting a heap done. As well as having workshops on hot composting (thanks Cam!), sourdough breadmaking (thanks Dan!), grafting (thanks Adam!) and even Chinese medicine acupressue points (thanks Kim!), we made enormous progress both on the zone 1/2 orchard and veggie area south of the house and the maincrop terrace north of the tennis court (which harvests water for the terrace) - see the pictures below to see what we achieved. On Saturday afternoon we had a tour and demonstrated some features of the mainframe water design, including bringing the South-Eastern spring sideways, taking the dam sideways along a swale, and converting all the swales into diversion drains by turning a pipe. Thanks so much to everyone that came along.


Our lovely dairy farmer neighbours helped us out with two huge trailer loads of cow poo.




Cam explains the approach to sheet mulching the orchard, as part of a plan to turn it into an edible forest garden.



Digging in the paths for the forest garden.


Going for it in the orchard on Saturday.



The sheet mulch (blood and bone, then newspaper, then cardboard, then cow poo, then woodchip mulch) down.



Marking out the maincrop bed on the terrace.



Putting in the paths in the (90 square metre) maincrop terrace, which we've designed to fit the chook tractor.



Digging them paths and planting them spuds.


Mulching spuds.


More spud mulching. What we don't eat or give away out of the 90 square metres of spuds we'll leave to build the soil.



The new maincrop bed at the end of the blitz.



On Saturday evening we took the group on a tour of the whole site, explaining the core features of the design as we went along.



Cam leads a compost workshop on Sunday morning.



Here's the team - we got a lot done but had heaps of fun too, with amazing food from Di and a bonfire and even a firebath on Saturday evening.



One more time...