Milking the Rooster

Seems like quite a few people are still visiting this site, so let me get you up to date since our 7 month sojourn at Melliodora in 2007.  Cr. Sebastian Klein continues to live in Daylesford and is the region’s youngest ever councilor.  From what I’ve seen, holding a public office doesn’t discourage the ladies.  Aya became a qualified beautician, and can make fully sticky up 3d roses on your fingernails, while she now works for NAASA the organic certifying body in Adelaide, making her one of the world’s most sort after permaculture beauticians.  Adam has been back in Melbourne, bartering his skills for board, co-ordinating the permablitz network for fun, and directing Very Edible Gardens PTY LTD for money.

I hold a definate sense of being bound to the earth. Not just by gravity, but by something in my blood, or deep in my being. Something about living in interaction (symbiosis?) with the earth and world around me, hand in the earth. The right tools feel like a natural extension of my arms and my intention, the sweet smell of good, well tended earth stirs a passing excitement.

So am I dedicated, to growing, both my self and my garden. No wonder then, given this connection, that in the wet, quiet months, where naught but weeds will grow, I find myself questioning this aspect of my character. Alright, I find myself outright hating the cold miserable soil, wondering what the fuck I’m doing out again in the bitter numbing cold, when there is rare beauty to tracked down, strange wonders and humour that shakes the very belly existence.

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The feed-back loop is a standard example of what I’ve heard of as systems theory, it boils down to “Repeat any action for long enough, and the side effects of this action, no matter how slight, will become apparent”. Here at Melliodora and throughout the Permaculture world (and probably that of most pre-affluent societies) these side affects are made into opportunities wherever possible, eg. foodscraps for chickens, waste composting and topically, hard green waste from the goats’ fodder.

I refer here particularly to the medium sized, spindly branches left from the goat fodder once the resident Caprines (Bette, Read the rest of this entry »

One of the major winter undertakings is the construction of a hot compost, a job involving some nuance, as layering of materials is necessary to ensure a good decomposition and that the appropriate ratios (C:N:P) are maintained to get a good even pH. In the photo below I am upto the manure layer. I am also using wood chips from spent goat fodder and green weeds from the garden, this is the time for weeding as so little is active and it meens that gradually I can prepare all of the garden beds for planting in spring.

Thats right the goats have grown a little fella, yeah and he’s really cute… of course. Rescued, well bought from a familywho get the excess bucks from a goat dairy before their physical characteristics actually grow to fulfill those of a fledged male goat.

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Left: Tan

Mother of Bet. She is nomally every friendly, but sometimes naughty and try to eat Bet’s food. She is always hungry.

Right: Bet

Tan’s daughter. Usually, she is a chicken, quieter than Tan.

Although she is always grabbed her food for Tan, she sticks to her all the time.

They produce beautiful milk for us everyday.

They are always together:-)

It is I sebastiano, making the first of what is hopefully to be many posts for the site of Rooster fetishism (read extreme permaculture). I guess I’m the more practical of the bunch, or perhaps sociable, or perhaps it’s just that the idea of sitting in front of screens for any longer than i have to doesn’t really appeal to me but hey here I am. Fresh from an epiphany concerning my detatched abode here on the Meliodora block. Read the rest of this entry »

Bless the feijoa bounty! This post celebrates feijoas, and reveals an inadvertently poignant recipe, chicken feijoa.

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We’ve been collecting a veritable bounty of wild mushrooms. Check them out, some delicious types you may not be familiar with. Get fungal!

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Welcome to Milking the Rooser, an introduction and the first of our semi-regular body counts…

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