Aerial photo of Kirwin, with Milkwood top left-ish. Taken in about 2002, we think. 

Standing on a bare hilltop, with the creek below and a small creekflat to the left, it all seemed so easy when we first got here... all we had to do was figure out where to put some structures, avoid the big trees, and build a bridge over the creek to get in. Grow something on the creekflat, put in a vegie garden, and get water from the sky... and the rest of it all, all those complex ideas and fiddly bits, could just wait till we were nicely set up.

 However, the more we sat and looked, and the more we thought about it, we realised that establishing a well-functioning Permaculture system was going to take a bit of planning. Rushing in putting down a driveway, and putting up a studio, wasn't an option. So, we went back to the basics of Permaculture design: Water. Access. Structure. In that order. Hard to stick to, when it gets down to -17 here in winter... but we're still here, now on the sunny-side of that first winter, and we're now ready to implement our Permaculture design for Milkwood.

 Milkwood - Permaculture Design

I know the above design may look fairly un-interesting at first glance - but I assure you it is TREMENDOUSLY EXCITING and, in addition, quite a damn fine Permaculture design, as far as designs go. The blue bits are dams, the dark-brown lines are swales, and the yellow thing is the studio, with the kitchen garden next to it (the little green bit). The lighter brown lines are the access roads, to enable us to get vehicles everywhere that we need to during system establishment, and the greeny-blue line is the existing creek.

 The swales are the thing we are most excited about. Without going into a lengthy explanation, swales are water-harvesting elements (they look like long ditches), made exactly on-contour within the landscape. Basically, everything uphill from the swale (in terms of rain + nutrient run-off) flows downhill into the swale. At this point, the water is captured, and ends up sitting in the swale, rather than rushing off downhill to the creek. The swale then fills up along its entire length, until the overflow pours into the dam that is attached to it at some point.

If you have a series of these systems, you end up with long canals of water in the landscape, everytime you get a big rain. The water quickly soaks into the downhill side of the swale, making the downhill side of the swale a *great* place to grow trees. And your dams fill up. And your trees grow. And the whole landscape has heaps more water in it, not just on it - you want to store water IN not ON the landscape if you possibly can. Which makes the creeks flow for longer. Which nudges everything towards a more stable ecosystem. Which is not just good, but great. It benefits us, our food production, the wallabies and the water table. Hurrah.

 Milkwood - Permaculture Design with Aerial photo underlay...

So that's it. Three dams (plus the one at bottom left, which is on next-door's land, but will feed our system), three long swales. Some access, and a studio-site. Which just happens to be right next to the middle dam. Which will provide thermal mass and temperature stabilization (not to mention reflected light in winter). And which will also mean that we can jump off the front deck of the studio into the water. To swim with the fishes. And the ducks, and the yabbies, and the frogs, and the turtles.... 

Now all we have to do is... do it. 

Friends, romans, countrymen, may I present to you... my compost. Living, breathing soil in just three weeks. What began as thistles, rotten veggies and election advertising (hmm... striking similarities there) is now good brown stuff that smells great and is going to make things GROW... And I've finished off my slightly dysfunctional but ultimately successful How to: make Compost series over in our resources page.

Can i just add that this post is a bit late due to a bunch of Permaculture courses we've been running in Sydney and here at Milkwood - most noticeably the 'Designing Water into Landscape' earthworks course last week which was a hoot... So the compost has, infact, been finished for weeks... it lies in wait for the formation of the Kitchen garden, a thing of beauty which will be constructed from January onwards...

We are off to wash the dust from our overalls in the ocean for a week. Some swimming, reading, eating and fishing, and a little bit of headspace to gee-up for the next year at Milkwood.

Thanks so much to all for your help and comments this year! The whole process has been both very exciting and rather tricky so far... it really is so different from where we were a year ago. Challenging (actually, terrifying) at times and sublime at other times, I wouldn't be anywhere else for all the tea in China.

And a year from now.. who knows? Hopefully we'll be pulling yabbies and fresh-water crayfish from the dam and making plum pudding from feral fruit while resting under shady boughs, surrounded by friends, ducks, chikens and goats.

Happy holidays to all and we'll be back shortly...

 Site of Strawbale studio and middle dam, looking southish - the courtyard will be on this side, along with a few prize deciduous trees.

One of the things that always gets me is seeing old photos of how a place used to be. I have a photo of what the headland at Kiama looked like when it was still a windswept farm - before my parents (and everyone else) put up their brick-veneer houses in the 60's and turned it into prime-real estate, densely packed suburb it is today....

So in light of this, and because we like to document things (incase you hadn't noticed) , Nick and I have committed to a very long-term project: Milkwood Timelapses. Every morning before sunrise, we will walk the boundary of Milkwood, taking photos from 7 different points. We will do this each morning, every morning that we are here, until such a time as we can walk no more... and by then we will have trained monkeys to do it for us. Or some future solar-powered zero-footprint adsl whizz-bang gadget which requires no maintainence and also makes cheese as a byproduct.

Every so often we will compile the daily shots and produce a timelapse movie for each position on Milkwood, and post it here.

Things will grow, things will be built, seasons will pass. The finger on the camera shutter will get gradually older. So will the camera, for that matter. But 40 years from now, I hope to still be getting up before the dawn and shuffling off on my daily timelapse circuit, treading a well-worn path around Milkwood... to both record, and appreciate, the passing of yet another day...

And we started yesterday. Here are some of the views-to-be: 

Panorama of creekflat, looking North. Recently slashed to create mulch to help with moisture retention throughout summer. Eventual main crop with bottom dam on right, at the base of the ridge. Bridge and entry on far right.

It's been two weeks now and I've been a-turnin' my compost... and it's working! Sortof. I think I should have ripped up all that newsprint - it's proving a right pesk to turn with my pitchfork - it just becomes great gloopy clumps of glossy advertisements and happy-families pamphlets from the bank, all bonded together as if by magic to thwart my composting progress. But I am undaunted... I just mutter darkly at them and enjoy poking various political leaders through the eye with my pitchfork as I turn my pile...

So the compost is heating and life is fermenting (literally) in there... Nick and I are having fascinating anthropological discussions about its components. About why the corn flakes packet seems to take the longest to break down (we rekon it's coated in arsenic to repel rodents or similar - yech), followed closely by any and all full-page car ads... there might be a thesis in this, actually... anyone?

I'm planning to harangue my scientist sister into figuring out a wicked compost recipe which uses lots of the glossy newsprint, but still ends up not-too-toxic at the end of the composting process. I now see all magazines as simply inert carboniferous material, just waiting to be turned into rich soil humus... the trouble is, I don't really know how best to deal with the suspended animation caused by all their glossy coatings and such, and how to negate those chemicals within the composting process... there might be another thesis in this, actually... anyone?

Anyway. I wrote down the full process of turning compost over in resources under How to make compost: Pt2 - have a look. Slowly but surely, I will become a composting machine...