More progress at Bodhi Farm

Well I know that I have not added anything to this for a while and everyone has asked me when I am going to do another entry. I have been pretty buggered lately with my new position at work and consequently because I spend all day on the computer at work sometimes I just want to chill out, so I apologize for that.

Well things are coming along really well in the straw bale shed building department. We have finally managed to get a builder to put the frame work up for it after a few Owner Builder dramas thanks to the Council (that was before I started working there by the way).

The framework and roof are in place and last weekend I spent Sunday painting bitumen paint on the slab where the straw bale frame is going to sit and Jamahl did some piping for the drainage around the site. The bitumen paint is to prevent moisture coming up through the bales and rotting them out. I painted around the outside of the slab as well to stop any moisture sitting around the bottom of the bales. Now that the frame is up this weekend we are going to be building the ladder work to put the bales on above the slab, again this is to keep the bales off the ground in case of moisture. This will then be filled with 20mm gravel. It should only take a weekend to do the ladder work if the weather stays the way it was today.

Later next week we are having the trench dug by Wally for the electrical cable and our next door neighbour Michael who is an electrician is going to lay it for us and connect it up to the meter box. This will be pretty exciting as it means that we can put some lights in the shed that we already have built and also we will be able to use some power tools without the use of a generator. We have also had some tanks delivered so we will connect one of those this weekend as well so that means that with all the rain that we have been having lately we will fill the tanks in no time at all.

It has been raining for the last couple of weeks non stop and we still have snow on the Hartz mountains as well and today was pretty warm despite all of this. It is absolutely beautiful at the moment over here as all the spring grass is growing, it is beautiful for the rest of the year as well but for some reason it is even more so at the moment. We have nearly been here for a whole year now.

It is pretty hard to believe and in our true form we have managed to do a fair bit in a short amount of time and had a lot of fun doing it.

Tao and Kai are still loving it as much as us over here. They love the snow, the bike riding, the new friends and the new farm lifestyle which is great. Tao mentioned the other day that he wants to be a farmer when he grows up and he asks for a horse almost every day. His school is very much into gardening and he does really well at this.

Both Jamahl and I are very much into the Permaculture Association over here which is great. I have been doing alot of the paperwork stuff like redesigning the membership form and Jamahl is about to run a short workshop on Grey Water systems and then I will be helping to teach the introduction to Permaculture course sometime this year. The association is quite young and small still but interest is growing every day and hopefully new members will grow as well.

On the way to work one morning I saw the most bizaare sight, it was quite a windy day and I looked to the sky and saw the weirdest shaped clouds, they looked like UFO's in the air. I have never seen anything like it.

Hope everyone is good and keep an eye out on more news....