Our recent SWAP cuts the ribbon on the SOI

Joel FitzGerald, with a capital 'G', came and stayed as the inaugural SWAP (social warming artists and permies) in the Shed of Interrelation.

The SoI is made largely from reclaimed, upcycled materials and is a small garden room built to host friends, peers, poets and artists to come and stay, contribute to our/their food and energy needs by working within our relocalising systems.

Joel brought with him valuable composting knowledge which has been keenly taken on and practiced since. One of his jobs in Sydney is working for councils, fixing methaney composts. Before his stay our composts would cook at a slow 35-40 degrees celsius. Now they're baking at about 60 degrees, fast tracking much needed fertile soil building. He also set a slower compost, collecting a pharmacopeia of barks and wild plants based on a biodynamic recipe. This will be an enhanced compost ready for the spring, he told me, as we set out to forage for the materials to build it.

Collecting bark (above) and plantain (below) for the compost.

We collected mushrooms, stinging nettle, chicken and horse manures to make a tea so as to mist each of the layers as we stacked green and brown materials (nitrogen and carbon) simultaneously. The misting with both the tea and rain water create an even moisture throughout the compost which help generate humidity.

Two important things I learned about composting from Joel was keeping the pile small, so as to concentrate the heat, and the fine misting to help generate the humidity. These two things alone seem to account for the temperature hikes I can now get in my composts.

At the end of the build we bulked up the last layer of straw,

before putting the pile to bed for the winter.

Last weekend Joel returned with his girlfriend, Emma, and the SoI's cherry was well and truly popped.

Our first SWAPs harvest chook bedding from self-renewing indigenous grasses

Meg recently worked with Su and Liz in the office at Melliodora and the conversation of WWOOFs (willing workers on organic farms) came up. Melliodora is not a registered wwoofing farm or garden, however regular travelers do come to learn more about permaculture, exchanging their labour for food and board just like ordinary wwoofs. One lunch break the gals got talking about a more appropriate acronym for the working travelers at Melliodora and Meg responded with MIAWs. Pretty soon they had collectively joined the dots – Melliodora Interns and Workers. Simple.

Just last week we were contacted by two lovely Swedish girls, Erikka and Maria, to see whether they could come and work in our garden. Errika had come to visit Melliodora the week before and had stayed with us as a guest. Despite not having our 'wwoofer' shack – the Shed of Interrelation – finished, we heartily agreed, and were so delighted to have them stay that it's got us moving again on setting up our garden exchange program as a wwoofing-type-experience-cum-artist-in-residence, particularly committed to rebuilding the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in a new era of permaculture.

This morning, after we had farewelled Maria and Erikka at the bus stop, I came up with the acronym SWAPs – social warming artists and permaculturalists – and that's exactly what Erikka and Maria were, or rather are, and that's exactly what we, Artist as Family, like to practice. The girls are on a permaculture study trip to Australia, and while they were here demonstrated an inherent understanding of how essential the interrelationships between bodies of knowledge are – especially between the arts and sciences – and especially if we are going to become more resilient to energy descent and climate chaos. Specialisation just isn't going to cut it.

The first job our SWAPs carried out was harvesting indigenous poa tussocks for our chooks' winter bedding. Here's Maria (left) and Erikka on dusk, savaged by mosquitos but tenacious and happy in their hand-scissor cutting work.

The cut grass was then laid out on the driveway (that no longer requires car access) to dry, temporarily becoming a giant dog bed for Zero.

Elsewhere in the garden, after a week of torrential rain (and flooding in the area), the heirloom climbing beans reach for the sky.

As we no longer travel by air, those who are still flying (for the right reasons – for reasons of social warming and exchange, not indulgence and exploitation) bring the world to us. Thank you Erikka and Maria for being our inaugural SWAPs, thank you for the warmth and ease and love that you brought to our town.

Public fruit - social warming

About one year ago I gleaned some early season cherry plums with my friend Pete in Castlemaine, which is a forty minute drive from here. My friend Jason had initially supplied us with a map of where to find them. Cherry plums are probably the first stone fruits to come into season in this region, and we've just discovered a tree about a four minute walk from here. As this lovely specimen is doing so well, survives only on intermittent water from the gods and its own self humus for nourishment, bears delicious fruit free of charge and pesticides, and is growing in the same micro-climate as our own we reckon it's probably a good idea to dry some seeds and attempt to propagate them for future produce.


Until recently our south boundary has bordered a vacant lot, however it has been sold and our new neighbours are getting ready to build. A food producing screen or fence that both sides can harvest could be a nice idea, so I'm going to grow these seeds and suggest this as another type of social warming fence.

Harvest Swap Meet

If we must stop aggregate growth because it is uneconomic, then how do we deal with poverty in the SSE? The simple answer is by redistribution — by limits to the range of permissible inequality, by a minimum income and a maximum income. What is the proper range of inequality — one that rewards real differences and contributions rather than just multiplying privilege? Plato thought it was a factor of four. Universities, civil services and the military seem to manage with a factor of ten to twenty. In the US corporate sector it is over 500. As a first step could we not try to lower the overall range to a factor of, say, one hundred? Remember, we are no longer trying to provide massive incentives to stimulate (uneconomic) growth! Also, since we are not trying to stimulate aggregate growth, we no longer need to spend billions on advertising. Instead of treating advertising as a tax-deductible cost of production we should tax it heavily as a public nuisance. If economists really believe that the consumer is sovereign then she should be obeyed rather than manipulated, cajoled, badgered, and lied to. Herman Daly, A Steady-State Economy

The future of food and social relations

Young people and the Yam daisy

This morning Barry Golding, from the University of Ballarat, led a group of us on a walk from inside the crater at Lalgambook (Mt Franklin) to Larnebarramul (Franklinford). Barry is a font of anthropological, geographical and archeological information dating from the earliest volcanic activity 20 million years ago, to more recent history, specifically that of the Djadjawurrung.



The other half of the day I spent at the senior citizens rooms behind Daylesford Town Hall with another group of people. The issue of heritage was a major sticking point with us, some people thinking that social heritage begins with Cornish miners. We were attempting to agree on a way forward for the contentious community reserve which adjoins the equally contentious youth (skate) park. On my agenda was public food, and I was sucessful in having fruit and nut trees (20-30%) considered as a recommendation for the final planting scheme.



Among the day's highlights was learning about the murnyong (Yam daisy). The murnyong was a major staple tuber that the Djadjawurrung lived off for tens of thousands of years, and which still grows wild in the area and across central Victoria. Barry had collected seed earlier in the morning and gave some out. I'm looking forward to propagating our five seeds. Another highlight was working with others of wide-ranging opinions to develop a common objective, and potentially the beginnings of a food relocalisation mind-shift, that local council backs on behalf of the community.

Compost & Cos

Today I killed Bill. She wasn't getting better with the garlic water and we couldn't justify the expense of a vet, nor the fantasy of industrial pharmaceuticals. I killed her as part of redressing the compost area, which looked like this at about 5pm. 

At 4.30pm I brought the black and white bins, full of kitchen scraps, back from Ben's cafe, laid Billy to rest at the base of the right-hand bay, tore up several cardboard boxes and placed them over her. I then wet down this elegiac layer and heaped on Ben's scraps, straw from the coup and Meg's day's weeding material, before covering up both bays to cook the compost.

The bay on the left (above), that I last turned here for Hamish Morgan – who today sent more reference humus: Katherine Gibson's 'The End of Capitalism' – is almost ready for use on the garden.

I picked our finest cos lettuce (above right) and returned Ben's bins, proudly presenting the first exchange of our casual gift-ecology.

Social Warming

Until today we have managed to live on our 1/4 acre without one single fence, with the exception of temporary guards around our vegetables to keep the chooks from helping themselves.



However our neighbour to the North has insisted we build one because he doesn't like looking at our water tank and 'unsightly' produce area. We agreed as long as we could design and build it and not have to pay for it, so this is the beginnings of our social warming fence.



The Cuban says, "grow your own food, catch your water, say hello to your neighbour" – a reachable suburban anarchy.

Chicken coup