"The Transition Handbook: From oil dependency to local resilience" - front cover 

 The reason I am brandishing this book about at the moment is *not* because it crushes the reader with an avalanche of undeniable evidence. I feel that we've all been beaten about the head a fair bit with how the media portrays Peak-Oil and our society's utter and complete dependence upon this black sauce. Not to mention Global Warming. And/or a potent combination of the two. It's enough to make you go and find a large rock to wedge yourself beneath.

The reason I am brandishing this book about at the moment *is* because it is a template for community-level solutions. It ain't a call to run for the hills, nor is it a treatise on how to greenify your life. This book describes (and very well, I think) possible ways to set up structures for community awareness, organization and implementation of action that will make a community more resilient to massive change.

Rather than simply pottering out a list of examples of village life as it used to be (with those 'old-fashioned' tenets on local food, locally-owned business, community participation), or explaining how you too can grow vegetables in your bathtub, The Transition Handbook serves a couple of very useful, and very fundamental, purposes. It discusses ways to ready a community for change, and how to facilitate that process so that it is born of and by the community in question, rather than being some imported wall-chart-solution of tips and tricks. The other thing that this book does is something that I really haven't seen any other text of its ilk pull off: it discusses the impact that information (in this case, rather bad news) can have upon a person, and explores how we can move beyond that immobilizing state of AAAAARRRRGGGGGG! (followed by crawling under aforesaid rock). 

Most of the 'call to action' texts and films i have gobbled up over the past few years around such topics as Peak Oil and Global Warming and Food Security and Re-Localization have been, for the most part, rather bleak. This may be because the information involved is just sooooo bloody important that the filmmakers/writers themselves haven't got very far past the immensity of the situation. Fair enough. But some people, like Rob Hopkins (and many others that I can now think of, actually) are doing something lovely. And that is looking beyond and indeed, getting beyond, the big scary facts of the situation. So I would recommend you read this one. It will, I think, give you some good ideas on how to move forwards.

Transition wha? - go here and have a look at the concept of Transition Culture and Transition Towns  

Getting a copy for yourself, your freaked-out brother-in-law and one for the local library while you're at it:

• The Transition Handbook - Australian source (Home > Publications)
• The Transition Handbook - UK source (and Rob Hopkins' site)
• The Transition Handbook - the ubiquitous Amazon option
  

Our Permaculture Design Certificate students planting trees on the main swale

'Twas an autumn of harvesting apples, and to a degree, reaping what we had sowed... we may not have brought a crop in at Milkwood, so to speak, but we sure did our Autumn toil.

To summarise the last period of time, Milkwood was awash in farmers, tractors, students, caravans and Keyline Plows. There was much planting of trees and eating of stews, and many, many pots of tea were drunk... a wood-fired shower materialized, a bigger (quite deluxe, really) Milkwood HQ caravan arrived. Landscapes were charted, courses were convened, hillsides were surveyed and many cakes baked...

 The cause of all this kerfuffle was, in part, a bunch of courses we ran out of the family woolshed. I'll spare you the details (though they were all really fabulous, exciting and excellent) but suffice to say that they all went very well. 

First up was a 3-day Keyline Design Course which was attended by 35 farmers and earthmoving operators from as far north as Maroochydore and as far south as Adelaide... Darren Doherty had them all enthralled regarding the potential of Keyline Design (I think - they looked pretty engrossed), which is a set of design parameters and techniques to hold water in the soil without large-scale, expensive earthworks, by working with the contours of the land. Photos.

Secondly, there was the Permaculture Design Certificate Course - a two-week, live-in, boots-and-all course attended by 15 brave souls from across the land of Oz and also from far flung places such as Vietnam, Japan and the US of A. Darren Doherty taught this one too (with Nick Ritar and Tom Bell contributing sessions) and goodness gracious but he was fine... two weeks of Permaculture Design Theory (supplemented with tree planting, surveying, compost making and propagation), followed by a substantial design exercise. This group took it all in their stride and came out the end of those two weeks far wiser than they went in... and slightly more sunburnt, too. Photos.

Lastly was a 3-Day course called Designing Water into Landscape. This was one we held off-site - Goulburn, in fact... 3 days with both Darren and Geoff Lawton, the affectionately dubbed 'earth surgeons'... and that was something else again.. whew-ee. Great stuff. Photos.

But all seasons have their end (just as well - we were quite tired out by the end of all that). We're settling down for winter here - nearly finished the first half of the Kitchen Garden (stay tuned), propagating, propagating, propagating (just like last year), and wondering if one can plant too many turnips... I hope to be gathering 60% of our food from Milkwood by the end of Winter... hmmm... if only I could graft a green thumb onto my novice digits...

The studio dam, the one halfway up the ridge and in the middle of our system, was the first one we all sunk our teeth into. And boy oh boy...earthworks are something else... it's like having your skin torn off in large slabs, while someone tells you it's not skin, it's just butter. No problem...

Strange analogy, perhaps... but until I had witnessed these earthworks, the landscape of Milkwood to me was a solid and impermeable mass... something that you could get a shovel into if you were lucky, but essentially one big, solid object. And then the bulldozer showed up. And now everything looks like a completely different place.

We were actually really lucky with what is usually a  traumatic time (don't get me wrong... it was still pretty scary) when setting up a property... hydrology earthworks are something that you want to only do once, if at all possible. Nick and I had chewed over the Permaculture earthworks design for months, and to add excitement to the situation, we invited the very fabulous Geoff Lawton to Milkwood to teach a Permaculture Earthworks course during the first three days of the madness that has been the terra-forming of Milkwood.

So then we had 35 farmers and earthmovers on-site at Milkwood for three days. The course was great, and many of the participants came up to me during or after to express thanks that such a course had been run... you have to understand that there are bugger-all courses or workshops in sustainable hydrology earthworks for farmers and earthmovers around... unless they want to do a PDC, which for most of them might be a bridge too far, for various reasons.

But back to our fabulous dam. The minute it was finished, the rain came down... which was not at all what we wanted (sorry, rain) because we wanted to mulch and plant out the dam wall first. At the final stage of the dam's construction, our earthmover re-covered the earthworks with the topsoil that he's scraped off at the start, before he began his digging proper. This meant that our completed dam was covered in topsoil, which meant that we could plant stuff into it, and reasonably expect it to grow. Not trees, mind you... taproots (ie most trees) and dam wall = bad. Hairnet roots (perennial grasses, clumping bamboos) and dam wall = good.

A couple of weeks after this video was made, Nick turned a neighbor's disaster into our Christmas present, and pumped the contents of a failing dam ('she's about to blow, boys!') across the valley into our dam with a fire-fighters pump and a very long hose. Despite growing up by the ocean and always eschewing muddy water when it came to swimming, I am in love with my dam! And I am proud to say we already have four froggy friends that have moved in, and sing us to sleep all this summer long...

Technical bits:

• We sowed the dam wall with a 50-50 mix of Lablab and Cowpea seeds, both of which had been inoculated with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, which will help them grow (you just ask for the to be inoculated before you buy the bags of seed). Geoff recommended sowing at between 4-8 times the commercially recommended rate - the idea is to get that dam wall jumping with growth asap, and growing with the species you want.
• Both these species are nitrogen-fixing legumes, which means they will improve the topsoil quick smart so we can plant some other things in there .
• Over the top of the broadcast seeds, we did a 'feather mulch' of oaten straw, which we got cheap because it was all a bit wet and rotten. A 'feather mulch' is where you lightly mulch the ground so that you can only *just* not see the soil. This mulch holds dew, protects the seed from birds and increases the germination rate of the seeds, all without blocking out all the light.
• We hit good clay in in this dam, which should mean that it doesn't leak much at all. We also hit a lot of huge rocks. 
• A dam this size when full, will hold just under 1 Megalitre. It took about 3 days (24 hours) to build with one bulldozer and Nick manning the laser level to check heights of various bits. The bulldozer (with a driver in it) cost us $150 p/h. So that's about $3,600 for this dam. Which is not much at all, really, for the multi-purpose resource that it will be for Milkwood.
• In terms of dam size on Australian rural properties, this is a very small dam. We wanted it small and deep, in order to minimize surface area (evaporation) and  so that it would be on a complimentary scale to the other elements in the system nearby.
• By putting in multiple small, deep dams, rather than one big-kahuna dam, we are spreading the many benefits a body of water brings to its immediate environment around the property, hedging our bets in case one dam leaks badly or gives way all together, minimizing evaporation and generally creating diversity in the landscape. Diversity in a productive landscape = good.

Once we had all made it through the first four days of earthworks, things started hotting up with Nick and the Bulldozer... top dam, top swale, middle swale, bottom dam, studio site... it was on for young and old... at an hourly rate of $150 - yikes... and we've got approximately 3 weeks of work for the bulldozer.. so... better have a cake stall sometime soon, I think...