Double Century

The ETR blog reaches its 200th post today with a celebration of other local permaculture projects. As you are aware, we had the pleasure to host Nicole Foss and Raul Ilargi Meijer at our home last week.

Nicole gave a well-attended talk in Whanganui last week prior to the Australasian Permaculture Convergence in Turangi the 11th-15th of April. We went up to the convergence late on Friday the 13th and came home Sunday morning the 15th to prepare for a tour that we were hosting of local permaculture properties. On our way out of Turangi we stopped by a developing permaculture property called Awhi Farm where I built a frame three years ago for a cordwood structure.

The frame was the first permanent structure on the property which was an abandoned transportation department yard. We used trees from the site to make traditional timber frame mortise and tenon joints for the post and beam structure.

It is amazing what they have done on the property in three years, as is always the case with permaculture properties such as those on our Whanganui tour, including the Mount Saint Joseph Retreat Centre.

This was followed by a twilight visit to the Quaker Settlement, where there was particular interest in a top bar bee hive.

And a yum dinner of pizza, chili, ham soup, salad and real bread.

The following morning we were off to Kai Iwi and an excellent example of a permaculture market garden.

And then to Mark Christensen's amazing heritage apple orchard, home of the world's healthiest apple: the Monty's Surprise!

We trundled down to Castlecliff to look at the eco-thrifty renovation and then back into town for another twilight tour of the vertical gardens.

Our Australian, Malaysian, Chinese, German and Kiwi guests were amazed at what we have going on in our community. We have a lot to be proud of our local permaculturists. Good on them.

A note on some upcoming blog posts: The editor of our paper, the Wanganui Chronicle, has asked me to write a weekly column revisiting the steps we took during our eco-thrifty renovation. The column starts this Saturday and will run at least into August. I will post each column here as they come out. If you know of anyone who may be interested in the retelling of our story please pass along this information.

Peace, Estwing