SOLD: Beautiful Happyzine

Come away with me, today we’re going to visit Ro and Joanna Piekarski, of Pohara Valley, Golden Bay.  Wear your gumboots, because come the end of our time there it will rain.  And you can expect glamour – if you’re a permaculturalist.  As in, just as the sweet, colourful and heady flower is to the bee, so this property is to those with a love of permaculture.  Why? Because this couple have walked their talk on their beloved land for over a decade.  They’ve eaten from this land every day, for nearly as long.  Guess many of their two meals per day come from this sweet, densely earthed property … two!

Come with me and meet the sharp witted, quick to smile Joanna, who is most at home organising community events, editing documents, or strengthening the web of HANDS (our sparklingly successful complimentary currency).  We’ll give her a hug (as is standard practice in Golden Bay) and meander down one of the paths that criss-cross this place, as we take a quick tour.

And after that, further down the path, we’ll find Ro, whose ‘default setting’ according to his wife, is to tend to this land.  Ro is the systems guy, not to imply that he’s not a gifted community builder too (which he is), but Ro can apparently be found most days out-side, taking care of all the small and large details that a self-sufficient property requires to tick along – working the compost, creating new garden beds (asparagus today), creating nutrient dense ‘teas’ out of manures, and seaweeds, digging, fixing, and maintaining.

I can’t resist, I have to pepper Ro with questions about his work.  Thankfully he’s a patient man, see how he stops, leans on his shovel and ponders my questions (farmer like)?  Joanna proudly mentions a water irrigation system that he’s set up – it’s called a Hydraulic Ram Pump.  She seems kind of excited, I hope you’re not in a hurry, for I must probe.

Ro tells me that he’s set up a system that uses gravity and air pressure to move water around their property in the hotter months.  So apparently this system was used by farmers long before electricity came along.  They have a creek running through their property and by using the weight of the water as it flows down-stream, Ro’s built a pump that lifts water to a higher level than it’s source and allows it to trickle back through the garden beds.  Ro says that for every metre that the water drops through the pump, it can rise up five metres before it’s dropped back down as irrigation water. Ok, this sort of talk isn’t my forte, but it’s interesting.  Here are some links if you’d like more information.

Let’s leave Ro to the humousy compost he’s investigating and complete our tour by heading back up hill.  That’s right, come with me, just a little longer, because there are so many little details on this land that you just have to see!  Check out the set-up for long-term WWOOFers, very nice – they’ve even constructed a little shower block so that people could live there reasonably self-sufficiently, within this larger self-sufficient property.

Don’t ask me to go into even ten percent of what this couple must have to do to maintain this self-sufficient life-style, they’ll do a far, far better job of telling you themselves (do I feel a course coming on???). Hey look over there at all that self-sown kale, rocket, and the edible chrysanthemums beneath the citrus trees.  And look at Ro’s impressive rock-walls, how long did that take to create?  And it’s supporting those terraced gardens.  Everywhere you look, food is growing.  Isn’t this place amazing?

Ohh, oohh there’s one more thing I want to show you – it’s their food shed.  That’s right, this shed is full of the previous season’s harvests of onions, garlic, pumpkins, potatoes and more.  How exciting!  I can feel my inner bear quaking with pleasure, can you feel it?  That lovely feeling you get when you look at a full cupboard of food?  They’re well stocked for a winter of hibernation aren’t they? Not that Ro and Joanna seem to hibernate.  They lead full, busy, happy lives and they appear to be very in love (which is kinda sweet, isn’t it?).

Well the rain’s coming, so we must make a move.  That was it, that was our grand tour.  I hoped you enjoyed it as much as I did.

Today’s rating: 9.5/10

365 Days of Fun and Chillaxation (as I raise my gorgeous son and grow my good news website to a subscription base of 100,000 people).  The Low Down on this Blog.

Check out yesterday’s blog.

Tags: Permaculture