Weekly body count: 19 fowls, 7 geese, 3 humans, 2 goats
Welcome to Milking the Rooser, an introduction and the first of our semi-regular body counts…
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So there’s 19 fowls, 7 geese, 3 humans and 2 goats. To break it down a bit further that’s actually 7 roosters and 12 hens, which is entirely too high a rooster:hen ratio. The excess roosters have formed a renegade band who live on the outskirts of Chookcity (an advanced integrated permaculture chicken facility). Throughout the day they raid and ravage the lovely eggbearing lasses. It is our sad duty to diminish this ratio by way of consumption — killing and preparing roosters is not exactly something we have had much experience with. Throw in to the equation the fact that winter is the goats ‘hot’ season, and you have hell with a beard on.
Well that’s perhaps not to portray this situation from the fairest of perspectives… You see where we are, a 2.5 acre property known as Melliodora in Hepburn Springs, is one of the world’s best documented permaculture sites. It was set up by Su Dennett and David Holmgren and their family over the last 21 years. David is the permaculture movement’s co-founder along with Bill Mollison. It’s a beautiful place: a passive solar mudbrick house surrounded by vege gardens, sheds and orchards. We’re near by healthy mineral springs and plenty of bush land. And it feels like the drought has broken, at least for now.
Dave and Su are away on tour until October, teaching permaculture in South America, and meanwhile we’re here caretaking. We milk the goats, feed the geese and chickens, make the compost, weed the garden, make the cheese, fix the fences, bottle the fruit, chop the wood.
On this blog you can follow us as we figure our way through the next few months. And if the story follows any kind of respectable narrative tradition we’ll be positively transformed by the challenges, and get to kiss someone with our mouths open at the end!
As we learn useful stuff we’ll post about it, so we can remember what we did, and maybe you can learn something too.
So who are we?
Aya, 26, “deep ecologist, sustainable girl.” From Hiroshima. She likes Adam Sandler movies. She doesn’t like spiders. Or chickens.
Seb, 23, the exocarpus – nut on the outside. Monsteria deliciosa in the middle. Whatever that means…
Adam, 32, recovering geek.