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The recycled envelope hanging out of my letterbox told me already that this was the package I was waiting for.  My Permaculture Design Course handbook had arrived.

When I was 14 I decided to become a hippy. It was the alternative alternative to becoming a goth.  I took up reading poetry and painting, drinking chamomile tea. I stopped shaving my legs and I started wearing second hand clothes. After a while I wondered if this was it. Surely, if there were so many people involved in this ‘movement’ it had to involve more.

I watched Woodstock, I hung around the university, I became vegetarian.  But this was still not enough.

I read.

In a second-hand bookshop I found an edition of John Seymour’s Self-Sufficient Gardener.  Suddenly I found what it was I was going to do, something that no Careers Advisor or other worldly adult had managed to aid me with.  I was going to be Self Sufficient.

I read some more.

To become self-sufficient I was going to need some stuff- considerable investment.  From the ripe old age of 17 I set about acquiring the knowledge and skills to achieve this goal.  Through my local community college I enrolled in my first horticulture course.  I met other like minded folk and gained some work experience in organic farming.  From there I went on to polytech where I started to learn about market gardening.

My career came screeching to a halt.

For a teenage girl market gardening isn’t terribly glamorous.  Not that I was the glamorous type; but while these market gardeners were messy folk, they didn’t care about their environment. Veges were money, and being green only meant exchanging as few lettuce as possible for a $20 bill.

I quit before the year was up.

After a while I was apprenticed to the local Botanic Gardens.  Within months of having started the staff dropped tools and demanded to be taken seriously.  They’d had enough of chemical usage and its dangerous outcomes.  They’d decided to Become Organic.  With the support of Fruit Fed and Soil and Health, the Botanic Gardens started trialling biological pest control.  I was in my element! This was where I needed to be.  With a bit of work and a lot of dedication we substituted garlic for pesticides, baking soda for fungicides and good old fashioned hoes for herbicides.

Meanwhile I moved to the countryside, to a 5 acre plot 40km from where I worked- 5 acres, the book said, would suffice to be self-sufficient.  I sowed seeds, I spread muck, I cultivated and sweated and eventually I admired my toil.  Every day I drove my petrol powered Morris Oxford ute into town, to work, to learn.  Even then, in the days of a litre for less than a dollar I was spending a quarter of my earnings on getting there….  This was not the alternative.  This was not being self-sufficient.  In the early 90s I don’t think anyone had muttered the word sustainable- certainly not when I was listening; despite that, it wasn’t sustainable either.

And then tragedy struck.

One afternoon on returning from work I discovered some neighbouring sheep had escaped into my paddock.  Those free-loading bastards were grazing my greens!  I broke world records leaping over fences and while I pursued my enemies I seriously contemplated cashing in my vegetarian chips to harvest the harvesters….

After a year in the countryside I wondered whether self-sufficiency was really for me.  I liked the open spaces, but I also liked the funk and grime of a city.  I enjoyed the peace and tranquility, but I also liked people, companionship- community.  Could I really get that in the sticks?

Offered a scholarship to work and study in Australia, I eventually left on my Big O.E.  A year in Asia travelling overland followed and lead me to the UK.  More study, more work, more travel- volunteering on a Vegan Organic farm in Greece where I helped build a straw-bale house inspired me to keep on keeping on.  I was on the right path, it just wasn’t offering me any shortcuts yet. Travelling mostly by public transport I visited villages in as many farflung places as I could manage.  I learnt how to make sago in Indonesia; I sat at the foot of a wise herbalist in Morocco and learnt as much as I could about herbs and wildcrafting in the Atlas mountains; I wove baskets to catch fish (although my vegetarian self set them free again afterwards and ate plain rice); I studied under an olympic winning yogi in India; I taught myself Spanish and visited organic finca in Central America.

It all lead me to one question: how come, if so many people around the world were living like this, we were referring to it as being ‘alternative’?  Most of these people lived without electricity or generated their own.

The most beautiful example of sustainable energy production I’ve ever seen was on the street in India:
I bought some food from a street vendor; it was served on a leaf plate.  When I was finished I put the leaf carefully into a nearby rubbish bin and, as the bin had no bottom to it, the leaf fell to the street.  A cow came along and ate the leaf.  The cow, as cows do, relieved itself in the middle of the street.  The street vendor raced out from behind his stall to collect said poo, which he added to his collection: the fuel for his mud-oven street kitchen.

All this led me to fall in love with a French man I met in Siberia and to return Home, after twelve years, pregnant.

This is the real beginning.  Our tale of creating a home in kiwi suburbia, using all our acquired knowledge and skills.  Of how to retro-fit a 50s rimu bungalow to an energy efficient home, and create an organic sea-side vege garden that will sustain us.  Of how to make our own fertilizers, our own coal, earth oven, solar-cooker, solar bathroom, solar dehydrator….
This is the story of a pair of former nomads, one, a former engineer, one a former landscaper- the story of a pair of modern urban peasants.

Tags: design, green, green design, Permaculture