Community Sufficiency – living within gift, non-monetary and subsistence economies

Jul 19, 2026 | animals in subsistence permaculture, Artist as Family online event, autonomous edibles, bees, belonging economies, bicycles, biological control, cars, collapse, community gardens, community op-shop, community schooling, community sufficiency, creative frugality, ecological economy making, ecological knowledges, economics, edible weeds, energy descent, family, farming, ferals, fermenting, fishing, flow of gifts, food co ops, food sovereignty, foraging, gift economy, goats, home economies, hunting, Hypertechnocivility, Insurance, locavorism, love, map, medicinal plants, mushrooms, neopeasant culture making, permaculture, post-industrial thought, preserving, rabbits, radical homemakers, raising boys, reculturing, regenerative culture, relationships, relocalisation, resistance, revillaging, roadkill, salvaging, storytelling, subsistence economy, subsistence permaculture, the commons, walked-for food, wild foods, wood energy | 0 comments

We hosted our third July online session last Thursday night, Community Sufficiency – living within gift, non-monetary and subsistence economies. Over a hundred people signed up and many asked goodly questions that expanded the consciousness of the subject. We hope you enjoy this next offering.

Here is the audio-only version,

or you can watch it.

We hope you are enjoying these sessions, and that they are adding to your deliberations, plannings and responding to the predicaments of our times.

Our next session is Joyful resistance, an online tour of Tree Elbow, our 18 year old permaculture home. We look forward to explaining all the main hubs, hacks and behaviour changes that have enabled our transition to living well with little money.

The world that was, and will be…

Jan 4, 2026 | alcohol, bees, Big Tech, carp, change, collapse, colonialism, corporatism, creative frugality, culture, David Holmgren, Daylesford, enclosures, family, fermenting, fishing, flow of gifts, genocide, government, homelife, human rights, lifemaking, post-industrial thought, praise, reculturing, safetyism, state violence, state-corporate nexus, village rebuilding | 28 comments

Hello dear Readers. A heartfelt Happy New Year to each of you!

This end of year/new year season is often marked with big events. Bushfires, higher road fatalities, work stresses, greater financial pressures, family arguments, and major global events. Over this holiday period, the horror of the Bondi massacre and a brazen US kidnapping – presumably part of a plan to steal Venezuela’s oil and gold, needed to help lubricate the US war machine.

For summer solstice we gathered, celebrated and feasted at Melliodora with friends and kindred spirits, and the FireChoir men performed two of their original songs.

On Christmas day Artist as Family gathered for a simple BBQ and later in the afternoon Woody, Zeph and Patrick went fishing at nearby Cairn Curran,

each catching a large carp,

which Meg transformed into her famous carp mousse (click for recipe).

Patrick and Meg met on New Years Eve in Daylesford twenty years ago, and since then we have been regulars in the town’s NYE parade. Here’s a pic from around 2016. Yep, that’s Woody on the right in the purple dress and green shoes blowing his whistle.

This year none of us really felt the spark of creativity to organise a float, until late in the day an idea crackled in Patrick. He got tinkering in the workshop, and an hour later popped out all zombie-like with heavy sign in hands.

We sent the above image to some friends inviting them to join PJ in his pjs and sleepwalk down the main drag with him. Meg documented the stellar performance that Su Dennett and Dave Holmgren joined.

We are paying close attention to the growing tech feudalism unfolding, which western governments are helping to usher in under the guise of safety. A few weeks back we were locked out of Substack for refusing to comply to demands for facial recognition data on that site, due to the Australian Government’s new and overreaching digital ID laws, supposedly aimed at protecting children. Know any kids on Substack? We don’t either.

We’ve been listening to a brilliant Sydney criminal lawyer raising awareness concerning an Israeli phone hacking company called Cellebrite, whose products are currently being used by numerous Australian institutions. We’ve tuned into a British journo-comedian uncovering the surveillance enhancing deeds of tech company, Oracle, and how that company is significantly infiltrating the UK government. And we’ve been learning about the long-standing collusion of The Rise of the Thielverse & the Surveillance State.

But what does the western corporate media really want us to pay attention to? Chinese and Russian infiltration and hacking tech, right? All three links above have helped us understand further what is being prepared for western populations by western corporatism, and we highly recommend them.

On NYE Patrick, Su and Dave were spontaneously joined by Jean-Marc and a blow-in called Rachel. Both have been active in highlighting the genocide of Palestinians over the past two years. An article appeared in the Green Left telling how Rachel was stopped by police on the night she joined our float, and asked to put away her Palestinian flag.

As far as we’re aware, not since c1975 – when cartoonist and national treasure Michael Leunig (with friends) entered ‘Fun in the Forest‘ in the Daylesford NYE parade, where their float featured “real trees on the back of [a] truck and Mr Curly chased [a naked] female around the trees… greeted with hoots of laughter…” – have the police intervened in the free self-expression at this grass roots community event in our town. Many people cheered and clapped our Sleepwalker foot float. Apparently one person complained about the Palestinian flag. That’s democracy for you.

However, not all is solidarity. In our backwards and forwards with Rachel assisting her with her Green Left (GL) article, Patrick also expressed to her the loss of trust many of us felt in the GL’s capitulation to Big Pharma and Big Health during the great pandemic exaggeration years. Most of the GL mob back then refused to see the captured narrative and revolving door health officials, such as the head regulator of the TGA during Covid. Here’s Professor Skerritt revolving his door just 8 months after retirement from the TGA to become an ‘independent director’ of the largest pharmaceuticals lobby group in Australia. Go John!

‘Medicines Australia’… sounds so helpful and righteous, doesn’t it?

Patrick was also wishing to let Rachel know of the loss of human rights that resulted in the Green Left’s naivety. If anyone needs a recap of that pitiful time you can revisit Patrick’s long-form piece, The Left got Covid almost entirely Wrong, and why it matters.

Unity among diverse groups is what’s required now. To form a unifying stance of mistrust against any form of the state-corporate nexus. To trust any large industry that has enthusiastic state backing is a straightforward recipe for serving up more divide and rule colonialism. Globally, large industries and governments pay billions to nudge units (behavioural science companies) to sucker people into believing ‘we are doing this for your safety’. Our prediction for this year is Israel and the US will create a false flag operation to justify a major war with Iran. This will elicit a world war and thus greater crackdowns on free speech will ensue and bring in a general state of info-confusion and possibly even civil war in some western countries. Ever more sophisticated fake news delivered by AI tech will intensify greater justification for governments to erode our rights and mandate digital IDs for everyone. We will see political gulags emerge, further political assassinations, more journalists sacked and muzzled, and a further shadowing of independent websites like our own.

In the face of all this, one lecture series that has been important to us in expanding our understanding of the historical contexts for what is occurring today geopolitically, is the 28 part Secret History series, delivered by Professor Jiang, beginning here.

Professor Jiang’s work is wonderfully informative and provocative, though at times a tad shorthand. Gratefully, however, he says to his students, ‘don’t take my word as truth’, and states he’s ‘presenting theories, which are there to be challenged’ – the mark of a proper teacher. Western universities used to have such engaged teaching, and in part of this lecture series Prof Jiang speaks of his time at Yale University and gives a good summary as to why the western neoliberal academies are in decline in step with the broader empire. We’ve witnessed this too and spoke about it often over the past several years. Funding and research is often dependent on one’s compliance with neoliberal agendas. True scholarship, therefore, is sidelined to the margins. Our response has been to leave the neoliberal academies as potential places of knowledge and wisdom, and to immerse ourselves in more expansive intelligences.

Honey is filling the hives in the garden as we write this post, goats are converting gorse and blackberries into divine subsistence protein, Meg and other women are fasting in the forest and listening in Mother Country, sunflowers are on point of flowering, strawberries are setting a new flush of fruit, and each morning before dawn a young fox returns to our chicken forest to figure out a way in.

Life is rich and beautiful. It offers us an invitation to participate, an invitation to connect with what Professor Jiang calls the ‘divine spark’, and be part of it. There is much suffering around us, and in us. Much evil and hatred and censorship and authoritarianism on the horizon. Our political leaders will once again sell our human rights for bullshit wars and for ‘our safety’ and billionaire greed mongers will continue to enslave the material world to fill the great void in their beings where their souls once resided. The potential for such darkness is in all of us, and can usefully serve as a feedback for when we are not connected to the divine.

In 2026, western hegemony will edge closer to a great unravelling, so we will continue to be in service to the divine spark, access it in both ceremony and in subsistence, while we drink a toast to this precious life and all who are part of its eternal flourishing.

Here’s a recipe for a simple cider we might well toast such life with: Catch nine precious litres of water from the heavens and place in a ten litre brewer, add two cups of honey from the labour of garden bees, and ten sprigs of elderflower growing in the common. Let it brew for a week. Strain the flowers from the brew and let it brew another week. Enjoy this wild fermented, low alcoholic drink while listening to the cricket on the ABC – about the only thing we can trust on the ABC these days is sport. You can also make a non-alcoholic version by using whey as a starter.

So cheers and solidarity, dear friends! Let’s stay connected as hypertechnocivility descends deeper into collapse, and let’s dream together and renew the light out of the lessons from the dark.

With love,
Artist as Family

The New Peasants (plus 12 companion films that have inspired our journey)

Jun 10, 2025 | agriculture, appropriate technology, autonomous edibles, bees, belonging economies, biodiversity, children's learning, civil violence, colonisation, community sufficiency, creative commons, creative frugality, culture, David Holmgren, degrowth, earth stewardship, ecological knowledges, eldership, energy descent, farming, food culture, food medicine, food sovereignty, foraging, gleaning, Grief, Happen Films, herbs, home economies, interspecies relating, lifemaking, locavorism, love, low-carbon, medicinal plants, neopeasant culture making, peasants, permapoesis, post-industrial thought, radical homemakers, regenerative culture, relocalisation, storytelling, subsistence economy, subsistence permaculture, the commons, Vandana Shiva, village rebuilding, walked-for food | 27 comments

Hello from our nestings by the fire, preparing for our community’s winter solstice.

We have some news! Happen Films has just released a trailer of their about-to-be premiered feature documentary, The New Peasants, based on our family and community. To some extent we feel a little exposed right now, as this film shares our life, including a very painful family story, to a much bigger audience. However, we are abundantly grateful to Jordan and Antionette at Happen Films, the composer Tommy Castles, and all the crew who worked on it, and we hope it inspires people in their journeys back to being land-bonded peoples in diverse, gallant, soft-hearted, hard-bodied ways.

Before we embed the trailer we’d like to share with you some of the key films that have inspired us along the way. Each film has a unique theme for us, and each has informed and helped us to journey on this path we call neopeasantry, or subsistence permaculture.

Reclaiming
The Babushkas of Chernobyl (2015) speaks to the resilience, meaning-making and determination of Ukrainian peasant women who stole back into their ancestral villages in the exclusion zone of Chernobyl, to live out their lives freely. Despite the toxicity of the land, many have been out-living their fellow villagers who have been existing in the sorrow of disconnection from their Mother Country, while the babushkas have their land-bondedness intact.

Making
The Nettle Dress (2023) is a story that integrates grief, beauty, craft and connection to the land. It shows what is possible by unplugging, living simply, and returning to a rooted, earth-conscious making. It gifts us an insight into how our ancestors laboured in hand crafts and how this ancestral technology is complimentary to living with pain and processing grief. This film exemplifies for us a permapoesis approach to life and culture; that is, a permanent meaning-making approach.

Salvaging
The Gleaners and I (2000) made by Agnès Varda reveals many forms of salvaging from the wastes of industrialisation, from food to other materials for life making. The filmmaker is not a passive voyeur extracting story from peoples usually unseen in capital-modernity, but a sleeves-rolled-up, camera as witness poet-anthropologist.

Communing
Honeyland (2019) is a film of interspecies relating and daughterly tending, detailing what pragmatic and earth-bonded love can be, in a depleted village biome. It is an example of slow cinema, of letting the story unfold, and empowering the subjects – Hatidze Muratova, her elderly mother, and the bees – to speak mostly by their doings. In the shadow of economic and personal hardships, and ecological ruination, Hatidze’s joy for the bees and the true gold and gift of honey, shines through in her eldership, and exposes the vulnerabilities of a desperate, smash ‘n’ grab mentality, a madness that incurs upon her life, which she attempts to understand.

Sovereignty
The Seeds of Vandana Shiva (2021) is an honouring of one of the most fierce warriors for the rights of peasants and food sovereignty, that is the agro-ecologist and permaculturist, Vandana Shiva. Not only a public speaker and advocate for a de-corporatised food system, Vandana walks her talk, setting up seed-saving initiatives that directly challenge the privatisation of the world’s food by the US agri-business hegemony and others who perform economic and environmental terrorism on indigenous, peasant and wage-slaved peoples of the world.

Healing
The Work (2017) is the radical story of compassion, healing and post-traumatic growth inside a US prison. A group of experienced community volunteers, experienced in men’s work, gather with a group of incarcerated men, who step inside a held circle of masculine vulnerability to discover their inner power, souls, and connection with one another. This film shows what is possible and reveals the necessary processes of deep listening, for the rocky future ahead.

Coercion
Schooling the World (2010) is an important critique of western education colonisation being rolled out by NGOs and other missionaries of empire. It reveals the continual patterns of colonial shaming tactics, which the west brings to land-bonded, peasant communities and shows how these missionaries disregard traditional, ecological and place-based knowledges. It examines how western schools are merely industrial-capitalist compliance factories, aimed at destroying diverse cultures in the name of ‘doing good’ and bringing so-called ‘backward’ peoples into the 21st century. In this intelligent telling and reframing of the global educational crusade, the film makers allow we western subjects of capital to reflect on the propaganda that has driven our civilisation, and in the process de-cultured and homogenised us.

Energy
The Power of Community (2006) is a seminal film for us. It marks both the beginning of our relationship (Meg’s and Patrick’s) and the start of our permaculture transition. When one of the film’s stars, Roberto Perez, came to our town hall to show it and to speak and field questions, we recall him saying on that night, ‘Grow your own food, catch your own water, say hello to your neighbour.’ We heeded his advice. The film details how Cuba responded to their oil taps being turned off due to the collapse of the USSR. From starvation to permaculture abundance, the film tracks the struggles and exposes the reality of life for all of us in an energy declining future. Although this film is nearly 20 years old, it still exposes the current energy blindness of the west, and allows us to step through it into life after cheap oil, as we descend further into that reality.

Stewardship
Fools and Dreamers (2019) follows the life of botanist Hugh Wilson, who with a small cohort of people and a patron, practices radical, low-impact land restoration in New Zealand. This is one of our favourite Happen Films, and Hugh is a true elder – clear-eyed, humble, caring, unfazed, resolute and determined. It is a film that shows how working with and listening to, instead of imposing ideology and big technics, can bring you into right relationship with Mother Country. Hugh’s method of healing trammelled country is largely about getting out of the way and observing what Country is saying by her doing. It also requires seeing out the critics and the judgements. This is a film for those interested in land management and land care in a post-industrial reality.

Medicine
Juliette of the Herbs (1998) is a film that gives deep insight into the medicinal wisdoms of author, mother and herbalist, Juliette de Bairacli Levy. It shows how herbalism is powerful medicine for land-bonded peoples and animals, and how this type of medicine belongs to a commons, shared mostly via feminine power. This inspiring film shines a light on our current era of extreme chronic disease, and how masculine-privatised medicine is seemingly ruining our health. Juliette’s book, Nature’s Children, is our first go-to text whenever there is a health issue in our household. Our family stopped seeing doctors 8 years ago, and Juliette’s life work has in part enabled this.

Subsistence
Pig Earth (1979) is a film by John Berger, based on his book of the same name. Berger lived with alpine French peasants in the 1970s and wrote about their lives, their culture and how modernisation was decimating their subsistence livelihoods by seducing peasants into debt to buy modern farm equipment. This debt was often the death knell for peasant economy, which was largely free from wage-slavery and bankers dictating the terms for life making. Berger’s critical examination of the hubris of modernity as experienced through the humility and humanity of land-bonded peoples of place, is an important story for the west, additionally because peasant agriculture still exists in Europe. While Berger is reporting the end of these lifeways in the 1970s, he probably underestimated the longevity of the energy bubble that has created what we call hypertechnocivility. Many of us will return to subsistence lifeways before too long, and Pig Earth is a nearby reach back to how most Europeans lived only a handful of generations ago. It certainly doesn’t perpetrate the myth that ‘peasants are only wretched, poor, diseased and stupid people’, and other such propaganda spread by capitalists and Marxists alike.

Emplacing
Reading Landscape (2023) is a film that documents the life practice of ecological thinker, permaculture co-originator, friend and mentor, David Holmgren. David’s unique way of seeing brings us back into appreciation for how our most skilled ancestors looked and understood the Mother. David sees with many overlaying lenses – geological, hydrological, technological, cultural and energetic, to name a few. He brings these lenses together into an integrated whole way of looking. He has taught his method for decades, helping others to skill up and be present to what is, in order to know how to work with, and be in relationship with, Mother Country.

Without further ado, here is the trailer to Happen Films’, The New Peasants (2025).

We would love you share the top films that have most sung to you as you have prepared for a world with far less energy and wealth, but steeped in beauty and abundance.

Being home (food, medicine, and life mostly outside the machine of the Capitalocene)

Oct 12, 2024 | agriculture, bees, belonging economies, biology, Capitalocene, celebration, censorship, compost, culture, fermenting, food medicine, goats, health, home economies, homelife, humanure, interspecies relating, lifemaking, permaculture, politics, speech, subsistence economy | 44 comments

We’re home. Well, nearly all of us are home. Woody and Patrick knitted their way back to Djaara Mother Country on a 12 hour train journey,

and were collected by dear friends who also helped us with the expenses of getting back from Kashmir, fast. Meg has stayed in NSW to assist Jan and Robert, Patrick’s mother and father, in their home. It was Patrick’s mum, Nana Jones, who became seriously ill after a medical procedure was botched. The doctors and nurses were incredibly caring, for the most part, and miraculously, despite the anti-sleep, anti-fresh air and anti-food the hospital mandates,

Nana has recovered and is back at home after a month escaping death.

There is nothing like a crisis in a family to bring everyone more closely together.

Patrick and Woody have celebrated the return of Zero, who has come home from staying with friends. His dementia and deafness have accelerated. Unsurprising for a 14 year old dog who has lived a kick-arse life. He spent the first day home searching high and low for his beloved Meg.

There is a special joy in the spring air here that only a close encounter with the death of a parent and the ageing of a dear dog can muster. Our presence to life is magnified at the moment, and it is the trace of our travels that is feeding into this. Adding to this joy, our chooks are back home, after also staying with friends, and we received our first egg on the afternoon of their return. Precious gold.

Before we left we told the bees we’d be gone for the winter, and on our return we announced to them our arrival home. Telling the bees about big events in a household is an ancestral tradition, especially for animist romantics like ourselves.

One of the many joys of being home has been to enter the cellar of our summer and autumn labours (mammals, plants, insects, microbes) and bring out a bottle of garden honey, which has creamed up over the winter. This is our bullion.

Woody and Patrick came home a little earlier to get more food in the ground. They first weeded row number one and planted it out with seed potatoes.

Then top-dressed the bed with the humanure compost from our household’s autumn ablutions, which has been quietly transforming itself into life-giving humus while we were travelling.

See our humanure compost workshop for more on producing this earth-giving force. The next row along in the annual garden area, row number two, has about 20 roundhead cabbages, hidden amongst the weeds, ready to kraut when Meg returns.

Sauerkraut is just one of our food-medicines that keeps us far away from the industrial medical system. Blood oranges in the garden, is another.

While on the subject of health, we travelled across ten countries, eating street food, interacting with other animals, soils and innumerable biomes and waters that our bodies had never encountered before, and yet we took no industrial medicines beforehand, no prior travel jabs, and took out no travel insurance. We got sick from pollution, and rested when we were run down. We steered clear of processed and acidic foods, and ate a tonne of chillies, well at least we adults did. Blackwood has never had a vaccine. Irresponsible or intelligent? You be the judge. From this vantage point, especially after being in the bizarrely self-congratulatory industrial medical system with Nana,

and beholding how that system is a mix of constructive and ruinous processes that often cancel each other out, our pro-active, non-participation in it is good for everyone. We don’t drain precious resources from those who have no other choice but to risk their health in an Australian hospital today. Good food, sleep, air, love, ecology, water, community and meaning are our pillars of health, as we unpack in greater detail in our Life beyond the Industrial Medical Complex video. Broad beans, planted just before we left, are just one more aspect that helps grow these pillars.

As are alliums. Meg’s leek kraut is about the best thing you’ll taste.

As is our roast goat that has been fed on a cornucopia of medicinal herbs, weeds and leaves from the forest we tend, love and learn from. Rubbing garlic kraut into the flesh before roasting is yet more gold from the gift of the sun. Mmmm, garlic kraut.

While we were away, some of you might recall, we had to give away our flerd. Our sheep and goats kept getting out, causing neighbours and friends a fair deal of hassle. After travelling through southeast Asia, China, Nepal and India, we have done some further thinking about farming on commons, and how to improve our herbivory processes. We have learned a lot from subsistence lifeways in many of these countries.

One of our biggest takeaways is the simplest thing: to spend the spring and summer harvesting and drying grass, and storing it for the winter. 10 minutes a day on a morning walk, can cut a wheelbarrow of fodder. Buying bales of feed in the winter is expensive, may hold residual pesticides and doesn’t help with managing local grass and mitigating bushfires in our neighbourhood. So cutting, drying and storing grass, as we saw in Nepal, Himachal Predesh, Ladakh and Kashmir, is for us subsistence-resilience, a term we coined while we were away. Here is the new herd we have just brought in.

There is so much spring growth here at the moment and few animals to convert this life-force into health-giving protein. A dear friend has loaned us money to buy this starter herd so we can continue to manage the local forest, (as Happen Films documented us doing a few years back), and supply our home and local gift economy with meat with no industrial inputs, while offering a bushfire mitigation and dominant weed reduction service to the neighbourhood. We are so grateful for the meat, organs and fat, which are transformed gifts from the leaves, fruits and sunlight (and much more) in the forest.

In Patrick and Woody’s first week home, hitchhiking to Castlemaine to get to a rites of passage event was a joyous father and son moment.

After hitchhiking from our home in southern Australia to Darwin at the beginning of our journey, thumbing our way to Castlemaine was a breeze. Patrick is about to volunteer again with 10 other uncle figures to guide a teen boy and their dads rites of passage. Our whole family is involved in this precious village rebuilding movement, which brings great joy into peoples’ lives, including our own.

Well, that’s about it for an update. We so look forward to all being home together and to start back up the many processes that make possible our living with little reliance on the machine of the Capitalocene.

Artist as Family’s Book of Neopeasantry (third excerpt)

Oct 29, 2023 | bees, belonging economies, subsistence economy, SWAP (Social Warming Artists and Permaculturalists) | 8 comments

October 25
Patrick

While weeding the food forest on the street with Victoria, a SWAP from Argentina, Meg yells out to us, ‘Swarm at Melliodora!’ I quickly load up the bike trailer with a Warré box, bee jacket and hood, a whitish bedsheet, a cardboard box and ride down to Hepburn. In my rush I can’t find my bee gloves so when I arrive I fossick around in Dave and Su’s workshop and find a solitary garden glove. It’ll have to do. I also spot a ladder in the workshop. I’m going to need that too.

Swarming bees are so laden with honey that it’s difficult for them to sting. Their main focus is on protecting their queen, transporting food stores, and awaiting the several hundred scout bees to return from seeking out a place to build a new hive.

The combination of bee-offending perspiration from my rapid 5 km bicycle ride, a humid spring day, lack of adequate gloves, and my general impatience to catch the swarm before it takes off is not ideal. Rushing bees is idiotic at any time, but especially rushing bees swarming high up on a tall, flexible oak sapling only reached by a ladder.

My plan is to make multiple trips up the sapling, gently sweep honey-laden bees into my cardboard box with my gloved hand, descend the ladder and tap the bees out of the cardboard into the timber Warré box, which I’ve set up on a flat knoll on the slopey ground with the whitish sheet used as an illuminating runway for the bees to navigate their way inside and join their sisters.

As I begin my labour, my uncovered hand is stung. It instantly becomes inflamed with stings, then my stomach, which is now exposed as I reach up to sweep the first thick pad of bees into the box. Stings then make their way to where the glove isn’t covering. I come down the ladder, angry bees following me. I tap the first lot into the Warré and take off to find Su or Dave to ask to borrow their bee gloves.

I return to the tree, suitably gloved up now and immediately bees start flying at me. I climb the ladder and reach up to sweep another pad of bees into the box. My exposed stomach is set upon again. What an absolute debacle this is. I have rushed my first swarm of the season. It’s obvious I haven’t as yet stepped into my bee care mind and I have come to do this work with all the stupidity a human can muster. All my knowledges about catching a swarm have eluded me. I’ve forgotten what I’ve learned in previous years. I am too cocky and too eager and these bees are aggressive, a trait I don’t ordinarily mind because it means the colony is generally robust to predators. It certainly is.

I pedal home with my tail between my legs, kicking myself for being such a fool. You cannot rush bees, and tonight I have a hundred swellings over my body as appropriate feedback for my foolishness.

October 27
Meg

I work from home today and sit near the fire with my laptop and a bottomless cup of tea: wild fennel, mugwort and stinging nettle.

It rains all day so Victoria, our lovely SWAP, is doing inside jobs. I am not sure how I’m going to go working from home while overseeing Victoria but it’s easy. I explain things once and she’s away.

Blackwood is supposed to have a friend over but his friend is unwell so he works with Victoria, telling her stories, asking her questions about her native home of Argentina, bringing her ingredients and utensils she needs.

They measure the seeds; sesame, linseed, chia, sunflower, then add almond meal, and the psyllium husks we collected from plantain seed heads, mix them with water, salt and herbs, roll them out, score them and bake them as crackers.

They harvest, peel and chop the last of our onions, blitz them with salt in the old food processor I inherited from my grandparents and make an onion kraut.

Next they make hummus, bland, the way Blackwood likes it. And then they scoop the yoghurt I strained last night into a jar and add greens from the pots on the deck to make a creamy herbed labne.

‘I like being a volunteer in my own house,’ Blackwood says, when we sit down for lunch.

Into the glean and scene of 2017

Feb 7, 2017 | bees, cellar, community, home economies, homelife, preserving, radical homemakers, SWAP (Social Warming Artists and Permaculturalists), terra nullius | 4 comments

We ended 2016 with a community garden working bee with mates,

cleaning off graffiti from around the town (that one of us thought was a good idea to do at the time),

building a new squat compost loo with SWAP, Isobel,

going for a little ride,

to spend the summer solstice at Melliodora with neo-peasant and permie mates,

advertising for our first SWAP-intern suitable to work with the whole family, particularly Zeph,

and carried on with forest work and play,

until the year was done and we gathered with various friends and other community groups to celebrate the new year.

Our little ensemble of community gardeners won best ‘float’, despite our on-foot-ness.

The next day, with our Milkwood mates, we were very floaty when we heard the news of our win ($500 to the community gardens to grow more free food).

This year we’ve been welcoming Connor into our family. Connor was chosen to be our first SWAP-intern. Within days it was like this remarkable young man has been with us for years.

And we’ve been blessed with more wonderful SWAPs coming to live and learn with us. Hello Anna!

And hello Marta!

We went out of town with our mate Pete to collect some locally grown and milled timber. We’re going to build a number of things in the next few months.

With friends Mara, Kirsten and Kat we made a banner,

which will be used each year to mark January 26, terra nullius day at the Daylesford Town Hall.

We’ve been doing little fermenting experiments and loving the results.

Actually, Connor doesn’t need elderflower cider to fool around in the gloaming.

Connor and Marta have been hanging out working together, riding the tandem and generally keeping the home fires burning.

Because it’s a time of storing,

food forestry and many people staying,

pumpkins, citrus and kiwi fruiting,

honey making,

poultry growing,

appling,

learning,

keeping the mice numbers down,

and more storing.

Collecting materials from building sites, the tip, and having friends who gift large doors and windows (thanks Nicko and Elle), has enabled the planning of the north-facing greenhouse.

Our home is a busy mess of multiple projects, ferments and general productivity. We’re using the excessive affluence of industrial civilisation to transition to low-money, low-carbon lifeways before inevitable decline or collapse.

Prepare now or struggle later is our motto, and what we’ve found in the meantime is a more joyous, meaningful form of life making.

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