Private: 16th March 2007
March 16th, 2007 - Posted in Blackball - by Sarah|
We’ve been busy again and the weeks have flown by. The batch of ginger beer we showed in our last update has now all gone. I overfilled the bottles so a good 1/3 of it exploded before drinking and we had to spend 10 minutes opening each bottle to avoid just getting a glass full of froth. It tasted very good though and I know next time to leave about 5 cm space at the top.
Some of the ginger beer formed part of our first all home made or grown dinner…
Our first self-sufficient dinner consisting of home-made ginger beer, home-made Wensleydale cheese and home grown salad including 3 different types of rocket.
It’s got cold and wet here in Blackball over the last few days but before that we had a run of about 3 weeks of sunshine. The nice weather resulted in some beautiful dawns. This is the sight I am greeted with when I go out at 7:15 to let the chickens out.
Blackball dawn.
Last weekend we headed off to Hokitika (30 minutes south of Greymouth) to the annual Wildfoods festival. It was a really clear sunny day (see also the photos of Camerons beach we took on the way back) and there were about 13,000 people there. Not bad when you think that the whole West Coast only has 30,000 residents.
Wildfoods festival 2007.
There were Possum pies and lots of wild pig and venison but the one thing that Brendhan was really keen to try was…
…a live Huhu grub.
And he did (close your eyes and page down to miss these if you’re sqeamish!)
Huhu going in – still wriggling.
Crunch!!
A day or so later the weather broke. It got cold and wet. We had 50mm of rain in 24 hours.
West Coast rain.
The veggies had been getting a bit dry though so they appreciated the rain when it came.
Veggie garden after 7 weeks.
The potatoes had just started to flower.
Potato flower.
Brendhan has been busy planting the next batches of seed which will go into our new veggie patch at Camerons – once we’ve created it!
Seed raising.
Just to make sure that we don’t go hungry we’ve set up our hydroponics system in a homemade, lean-to greenhouse. We’ve got a real assortment of things in there including chickpeas, sunflowers, peas and quinoa.
Home hydroponics system.
The whole thing has cost us about $80 as we used wood that was lying around in the garage at Blackball for the troughs and the pots were either given to us by our course tutor or were made by cutting extra holes in cheap plastic planters. The most expensive item has been the sphagnum moss but we wanted to try that instead of other growing mediums as we should be able to produce our own at Camerons.
Private: Month 1
March 16th, 2007 - Posted in Uncategorized - by Sarah|
We have spent a few days out at our plot at Camerons over the last month. Mainly measuring and mapping but also doing some initial clearing of the area where we hope to be building. We’ve had a few queries about where Camerons actually is, so here is a link to google maps: Location of Camerons. Greymouth is about 10 minutes to the north and Hokitika is about 20 minutes to the south. We’re just over a kilometer inland from the main coast road.
One of the council’s hurdles – that we have to jump in order to get building consent – is to get an engineer’s report confirming that the site is suitable for building and this report also specifies the foundation requirements. We had to organise a digger to be there to dig holes as required although in the end only 2 small ones were needed so the size of digger was seriously over the top.
Engineer and digger.
We have decided that drawing our own detailed plans was simply going to take too long (years rather than months!) so have appointed an architect/designer to do that for us. His name is Ian Redfern and he specialises in designing environmentally sound buildings for owner builders to construct. He’s doing the plans required to get building consent and he’ll also mentor us through the building process. If you’re interested, his website is www.adobesouth.co.nz.
We met him a couple of weeks ago and he visited our site and took photos. We’ve sent him our floor plan and general requirements along with maps of the site and loads of questions that he’s currently ploughing through.
We’ve also been working on our permaculture plan and have done a first version map of zone 0 – the hub of the site – which includes the house and immediate surrounds.
1st version of Zone 0 map.
One the way back from Hokitika at the weekend we also stopped off for the first time at the beach, about 1.6km (a mile) west of our land. It’s a beautiful spot, especially on such a clear day with the Southern Alps visible to the south.
Camerons beach looking South.
Camerons beach looking North.
We are currently aiming to move onto the land in a month or so (just as the weather gets REALLY cold!). We’re not sure what we’ll live in yet as the big yurt that we had planned could prove more expensive in the long run than something more conventional that we could sell on later (eg a caravan).
