A brief but shameless plug for our brand new website over at www.MilkwoodPermaculture.com.au. Over this winter we've been very busy selecting and organising a bunch of great teachers and courses to fill our calendar for Spring 2009 through to Autumn 2010. There's Introductory and also Urban Permaculture courses, Compost Tea workshops, Keyline Design Courses, the full-blown Permaculture Design Certificate course and who knows what else still yet to come.

Oh *and* our courses are FarmReady accredited, so if you're an Australian farmer, land manager or in the family of either, you can do our courses completely free through the FarmReady subsidy scheme. And you even get a refund on travel, accom and childcare. Wow. If I didn't already live here, I'd come here just to attend something. So go on over, have a look at the site and tell us what you think? I think we've even ironed out most of the spelling mistakes now...

Nick inside his newly completed Geodesic ChookDome, pre-chook.

A while ago we discovered online the ultimate plan for a Chook Dome which was stronger, faster and better than any others we had ever come across before (ok maybe not faster)... Nick whacked one together and it has been helping us establish the top Food Forest ever since, along with its 6 or so feathered residents. What's even more exciting than playing Buckminster Fuller with white plastic piping, however, is being able to share this great construction with the rest of you. The Geodesic ChookDome's creator, Robert Freeman, has kindly offered us to host the plans for this fabulous construction over in our How-To section. So git on down to How To: build a Geodesic Chook Dome and find out how to get your garden's fertility on the up and up. Also watch out for the video how-to here soon. Possibly followed by a run of 'Gosh I love Geodesic ChookDomes' T-shirts and bumper stickers. Maybe.

Water woz ere. A clearly hydrated landscape thanks to good hydrological design at Strathcona Community Garden, Vancouver Canada

We're all becoming acutely aware of the value of water. And so we should, as water's role in our lives and in the planets' cycles cannot really be understated. When designing and planning a Permaculture system, it's top of the list - the order goes: Water, Access, Structure. Design and sort out your water catchments and systems before you design anything else. Give them priority. Water is not an optional extra. Without water, you're stuffed.

So it's very strange to consider that, in most temperate and dryland urban biospheres (and, god help us, many rural ones), water is not top of the list in terms of how living systems are designed, and therefore how our lives are led. Designing water into our landscape is still seen by many as an optional extra in terms of habitat and urban design. Because worst case scenario, you can just turn on a tap. Or a drill a hole down to the shrinking ground water. Water is still seen as someone else's problem, or something we deserve to be handed on a plate with no conditions or responsibilities.

And if we do feel a tweak of guilt or responsibility, we can install a half-flush on our drinking-water grade toilet. Or get a more efficient showerhead. Put in a tank if there's room down the side. Maybe plant some succulents instead of dahlias this year. All very cosy. But there is soooooooo much more we can do to harvest, retain and re-use water within our habitats, which will result in more fecundity, more home-grown veggies, and less reliance on water coming from somewhere far away. And it's not just the domain of those who are building from scratch, or have enough cash and/or space to re-design their entire surroundings. All that water falling out of the sky needs to be put to work back through a natural system as quickly and completely as possible. And letting what doesn't fall directly on your roof or said succulents all skid down the gutter and into the stormwater drain does not count.

There are many good books around that help you take responsibility for the rainwater in your habitat, regardless of whether you're in drylands or in a more temperate environment. An interesting read that I came across recently is Dam Nation - stories from the water underground, which focuses on grassroots water activism, but also the practicalities of greywater re-use. The politics of water is gathering steam, and films such as Flow are starting to articulate just where the future of water could be headed.

Here at Milkwood water has always been a priority, right from the word go. In fact, the reason we still live at Basecamp and not in a lovely passive solar cottage just yet is because we prioritized water-harvesting earthworks over building our home when implementing our initial Permaculture design for Milkwood. And now, as we're building our cottage, we have multiple dams and swales that feed and water various plantings all over Milkwood in a completely passive way... which means that now, while we're busy building, Milkwood's forests and pastures are busy growing - establishing biomass, making  soil and slowly, quietly building up a biosphere that couldn't otherwise occur without so much residual, passively harvested moisture.

Synchronicity - a just-built swale at Milkwood after a big rainstorm. Water is held in the swale until it percolates into the soil on the downhill side - a process which in this instance took about 24 hours. That's a lot of water ending up in the soil instead of rushing off downhill, taking our topsoil with it... After this photo was taken, the downhill side of the swale was planted out with various trees to take full advantage of all that passively-harvested moisture.

Considering how utterly important water is, it's very good to know that there are some very good resources on water harvesting for both the urban and rural sectors. There are many good strains of writing on water-harvesting earthworks - there's people like P.A. Yeomans, an Australian farmer who developed the Keyline system of farming in western Sydney in the 1940-1950's and put out Water for every Farm, which is seriously funky stuff and far reaching for the carbon farmers end of things, among others. There's classic Permaculture earthworks, as outlined in Bill Mollison's magnus opus Permaculture: A designer's manual. There's also folk like Peter Andrews who'se natural sequence farming basically incorporates aspects of both Keyline and Permaculture techniques by another name with a focus on bioremediation and watercourse re-shaping. All these resources lean towards, but are not exclusive to, water harvesting on properties and larger areas, which is why this strain of thing is sometimes called Designing Water into Landscape.

However there are now some resources that really truly span the urban and rural sectors when it comes to harvesting rainwater. Two hotspots of this sort of info that spring to mind (heh) are the websites of writers Art Ludwig (He of titles such as Creating an Oasis with Greywater) and also Brad Lancaster (He of the really rather brilliant Rainwater Harvesting website).

Brad Lancaster in particular has some great books out at the moment, the Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands series - I recently reviewed Volumes I and II and you can read the book review I did here. What I like so much about Brad's work is that his stuff truly straddles both urban and rural environments, and his books outline intelligent, do-able solutions for rainwater and greywater use on both the large and the small scale. Finally, both volumes are finally available in Australia, so you can figure out how to get your hands on a copy over on our Bookshelf. Yay for access to good information.

If you want to continue learning and thinking about rainwater harvesting, you could do worse than having a look at Brad talking Rainwater Harvesting on YouTube. Or you could go outside next time it rains and get a feel for just how much water is slucing off your property and into the gutter / roadside ditch / neighbour's paddock, and have a think about what you might do to keep that water in place, so that you can use it to create general fecundity.

Plan for our Rocket-Powered hot water system for the Basecamp shower + bath block

Spending all your day gathering sticks for a hot shower is just no fun. No fun at all. Mind you, anything that results in a hot shower (or even better, a hot bath) has to be considered a priority at Milkwood. So when Nick finished converting the old 'Sunbeam Sheep Shower' structure (basically a new-fangled sheepdip) to a shower block with a little wood-fired, home-made firebox thingamy to heat the water for the shower and the bath, that's what we did. Lots of stick-gathering.

The romance of wood-fired hot water quickly wears thin, however, if your water-heating system is not terribly efficient. Because this means the system requires a fair deal of wood to heat the water, which therefore releases a corresponding amount of CO2. And also results in lots of stick gathering. So Nick went searching for the most super-efficient, super-simple and super-funky heating system idea he could find, which could then be converted to a water heating system. And thus we discovered the glory that is the Rocket Mass Heater.

Nick Ritar + Si Horsely cobb around the burn chamber and firebricks to protect them

The basic premise of a Rocket Mass Heater is that the heat energy of a small, very hot-burning fire is used in a optimal way to get the utmost out of that heat energy. Hyper efficiency with minimal fuel input. Ianto Evans + Leslie Jackson, a couple of Permies who are prettymuch gurus on this subject, put together a great little book called Rocket Mass Heaters and this was our inspiration and guidebook for our project. The heat of the small fire is drawn up through a vertical heat riser of some kind, which creates an updraft and therefore causes the fire to burn extremely hot. A hotter burn means less smoke. And less smoke means more hot water per handful of sticks.

Then the hot gases in the riser is put to work - pushed (or pulled) under hot plates, past water boilers, underneath cobb benches, through thermal mass walls - wherever you need to heat. By the time the hot gases make their way out to the outside world, they are spent, and much cooler - the heat energy has been transferred along the way to whatever needed to be heated. Hurrah!

The completed system - two days work, all told

Rocket Stoves are quickly catching on in various places around the globe - because they're so fuel efficient, for example, they're being used in development aid projects where fuel is scarce. And because they're super simple, they can be made by prettymuch anyone with a need, a plan and some simple tools. There's a stash of great Rocket Stove projects that have been done around the world at RocketStoves.org. 

But back to us at Milkwood. The making of our Rocket-Powered water heater took two days for two blokes. The above diagram explains it all pretty well. Firebricks in a pattern with a burn chamber in front, topped by an insulated heat riser, topped by a small heat exchanger, topped by a chimney. The water came in one end of the system from the bottom of the water tank, then passively circulated between the heat exchanger and the hot water tank (just a normal hot water tank like you would have on your normal western hot water system) once the fire was going via simple pipes and the power of convection. A handful of sticks in the burn chamber set the fire going. Then we waited and finally turned on the shower tap and... voila. Steaming hot water for one shower. Hoo-bloody-ray.

Post-wash, the water flows into a greywater trench which waters a planting of She-Oaks (Casuarinas) downhill from the showerblock. These will, in time, yeild excellent stickwood for the fire, as Casuarina wood is some of the hottest burning wood in the world. Which is the closest we'll come to closing the loop (in terms of energy, carbon and responsibility) on our daily shower anytime soon... which makes for a very happy shower.

A handful of sticks is all you need...

Here's a Flickr set of the construction process - it should give you a good idea, it's fairly thorough. Feel free to ask questions if you like, I'm sure Nick would love to wax lyrical about his beloved Rocket construction.

So viva la Rocket Stove. These things are hyper-efficient. They should take over the world, I rekon - what is a better beacon for sustainable, responsible living than a guilt-free hot bath?

 Happy Nick bathing in the glory of his Rocket-Powered Shower

**Notes on this system for safety: you want a pressure relase valve on the hot water tank (most have them on already) so the water tank doesn't explode, and also a tempering valve on the hot water outlet (so no water hotter than 60º comes out), so that no-one burns themselves during their lovely wood-fired shower.