Stay with us in a straw cottage on our regenerative permaculture farm in Blampied, Australia

  • 252 “me gusta”
  • Última actividad: 15 mar 2024

DISPONIBILIDAD

  2024 

 Estancia mínima:  Al menos 2 semanas

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Detalles

  • Descripción

    Descripción

    We are an LGBTQIA friendly regenerative farm, just outside the beautiful town of Daylesford, in Victoria, Australia.

    OUR PLACE

    We moved here 8 years ago on an empty block of land with not a single tree. We are three quarters through stage one: a ten year stage where most of the infrastructure work and building projects are being completed and where all of the revegetation work and landscaping will be done.

    We split our time on the property between the following tasks: growing food, propagating trees, planting and revegetating our land, teaching, harvesting, preserving, foraging for apples, plums, figs and olives, water conservation consulting, writing and publishing articles, building infrastructure on site, welcoming guests to our farm, cleaning, pruning trees, weeding our two kitchen gardens, watering trees, guarding trees with netting, selecting plants for future plantings, caring for poultry, harvesting berries from our extensive berry orchard, baking bread, making yogurt, kneading dough for homemade pasta, collecting wild fungi, collecting edible flowers for drying, making soap from lard, drying herbs for teas and stews, looking up books to identify wild edibles, photographing our beautiful countryside, feeding pigs, cooking and cooking and applying for grants for revegetation work, sharing our stories on Facebook, Instagram and our website. We are parents and are supporting two daughters through school. Our schedule is abundant and very rich.

    WE NEED
    We are looking for people who are not only enthusiastic, but also reliable, committed, able to contribute with flexibility and proficiency.

    There is a great deal to learn here. I absolutely love teaching, I thrive on sharing my skills and knowledge and on making the invisible readable. If you are a thirsty and attentive student I would love to teach you. It is up to you to guide that learning by asking lots of questions.

    We have been hosting for a long time now and I have hosted two types of people, those that are genuinely interested in learning new skills we have to offer and those that are interested in a theoretical context and not in a doing context. I need you to be genuinely interested in learning the skills in a doing context. And not in a convincing yourself way, not in that forcing yourself to be interested way, but in that emotionally real way. You will know the difference because as you read this you will either experience excitement at my words or apprehension. If you feel excitement then you are right for us. If we harvest fungi from the forest for our dinner will you be happy to sit and help me peel and prepare them. If we collect edible flowers from the garden will you be happy to sort them so that we can dry them. Will you be happy to spend an hour or two making pasta using our pasta maker so that we can eat fresh tagliatelle together for our dinner. Wiil you be happy to spend many hours with me in the garden, weeding and pulling out plants and mulching. No two days are the same. But there will be days where we do a lot of one task.

    From the OUR PLACE description above you will see that we are playing with a broad range of activities. During your two week stay you will experience some but not all as the activities are spread throughout the seasons. There will be days that are very dynamic where you will move through a medley of tasks and days where you will only do one to two tasks at most.

    We need you to be someone who is comfortable with moving through a variety of tasks with cleaning being one of them. I need you to be as enthusiastic about cleaning as all the other tasks.

    Our story goes like this. I completed a permaculture course in my 20’s and a Bachelor of Social Science in Environment. I worked as an environmental educator for 20 years. My love, Ralf is a water conservation engineer. Three quarters of his work is engineering and the other quarter is farm work, building infrastructure, irrigation systems, housing for farm animals (we are working towards having pigs on pasture), maintenance and repairs, laundry and school lunches, fixing, and retrofitting.

    These percentages are not static but change from week to week. I teach cooking, preserving, baking, soap making and manage our farm stay. I manage our revegetation plantings, two kitchen gardens, plant and seed orders, farm stay cleaning and hosting, and all the social media work related to our farm. I am a passionate forager, photographer and community member. I am extremely social and love hosting. I love big chats about all things and sharing my stories and I am looking for people who love to share theirs.

    I need you to be the kind of person that asks “what next?” and ‘can I help you?’ and I need you to share in the daily dishes without me needing to ask you. Your proactiveness really matters and contributes to creating a very nurturing space.

    KITCHEN GARDENS
    We have two kitchen gardens ORTO One and ORTO Two. These gardens are designed to produce food for us, our volunteers and our farm stay guests. Excess is bartered.
    The gardens have peaks of productivity and times of quietness. We use animal manures, straw and green manures to fertilise our soil. We hand weed and use a fork to loosen the soil for new seedlings.
    We are working towards being self sufficient in the following crops.
    Potatoes, asparagus, garlic, artichokes, tomatoes, pumpkins, zucchini, kale, lettuce, spinach, eggplants, peas, edible flowers, sunflowers, herbs, beetroot.
    And the following fruit trees.
    Apples, quinces, persimmons, cherries, plums, apricots, nashi pears, figs, pears.

    REVEGETATION
    We have planted thousands of native trees and native grasses.
    Our plan is to plant until every corner of our property is thriving.
    Along our corridors are hundreds of trees, banksias, callistemons, eucalypts, acacias.
    The next step is to plant Australian flowers and groundcovers.
    I really, really love gardens, I love the habitat they provide, the beauty and peace they share.
    We bought 15 acres of land with not a single tree on it, all the plants and trees you will see were planted by us.

    PRESERVING and COOKING
    I love to have a larder full of preserves made by us. Most of the preserving happens mid-summer to late autumn. We make all of our own passata, jams, pastes. We dry quinces and make quince paste, we dry nashis and apples and pears when available and mushrooms in winter.


    WETLAND
    Our first project here was our wetland. We completed earthworks and planted various aquatic plants and hundreds of trees around it. The wetland is very beautiful and provides a fantastic habitat for visiting birds, frogs and insects.

    WATER
    We have a 200,000 L water tank. All our waste water is reused on site and we ask that you treat water for the precious resource that it is.

    DAY to Day
    I will need you 5 hours a day five days a week. Sometimes those hours are on weekends and other times not. You will have 2 full days to yourself in every 7 days.
    Summer Hours
    We start at 6am and stop for breakfast at 7:30-9am. After clearing away breakfast dishes we begin working again from 9am to 12:30pm.
    Lunch from 12:30-1:30pm, 1:30-2:30pm clean up kitchen, then your time.

    We will cook all meals together, lunch, dinner, & breakfast.

    MEALS
    We will share all meals together both during the week and on weekends unless you plan to site visit in which case you are very welcome to take a cut lunch with you or leftovers.
    We have many vegetarian meals. In winter our meat consumption increases as we crave warm stews and hot meals. We are sorry but we are not able to host vegans.
    We really cherish and welcome people to become a part of our family during their stay and welcome them to join in activities and social gatherings.

    BED TIME
    We go to bed early, at 9pm and need the house to be very quite from that time on.

    SHOWERS
    We use mostly solar hot water and in winter our combustion stove to heat water. This means that we often don’t have a lot of hot water. So if you love having frequent showers some will be warm, some will be cold and only very occasionally will they be very hot.

    CONTRADICTIONS
    We are very interested and actively pursuing a low carbon life and very much desire to reduce our waste and resource intensity. We do some things really well and others very poorly. We acknowledge this and look forward to being part of a much more ecologically sustainable world.

    We look forward to hearing from you. All the very, very best with your travels.

    Arrivederci, Mara

  • Tipos de ayuda y oportunidades de aprendizaje

    Tipos de ayuda y oportunidades de aprendizaje

    Ayuda en proyectos ecológicos
    Enseñanza
    Jardinería
    Ayuda en una granja
    Cuidado de niños y juegos creativos
    Cocinar para toda la familia
    Ayuda doméstica
    Mantenimiento general
    Ayuda informática
  • Objetivos de sostenibilidad de las NU que intenta conseguir este anfitrión

    Objetivos de sostenibilidad de las NU que intenta conseguir este anfitrión

    Objetivos de las NU
    Fin de la pobreza
    Hambre cero
    Salud y bienestar
    Educación de calidad
    Igualdad de género
    Agua limpia y saneamiento
    Energía asequible y no contaminante
    Trabajo decente y crecimiento económico
    Industria, innovación e infraestructura
    Reducción de las desigualdades
    Ciudades y comunidades sostenibles
    Producción y consumo responsables
    Acción por el clima
    Vida submarina
    Vida de ecosistemas terrestres
    Paz, justicia e instituciones sólidas
    Alianzas para lograr los objetivos
  • Intercambio cultural y oportunidades de aprendizaje

    Intercambio cultural y oportunidades de aprendizaje

    I think that between Ralf and I we have many, many skills to share. We are motivated by people who are good listeners, who are focused and willing to show initiative.
    Preserving, harvesting, fermenting skills (for some of the year, and one of my favourite tasks).
    Foraging skills.
    Wild mushroom harvesting skills (autumn, winter).
    Cheese making skills (when milk is available)
    Soap making skills (we make soap twice a year only so check with us about the timing).
    Pasta making skills. (all year)
    Cooking skills, pastry making, etc (all year)
    Revegetation, tree planting and garden planting skills, propagating and sowing.
    Language skills: English, Italian or German.

  • Proyectos con niños

    Proyectos con niños

    En este proyecto podría haber niños. Para obtener más información, consulta nuestras directrices y consejos aquí.

  • Ayuda

    Ayuda

    We need help making bread, cheese, yogurt, ferments, home made pasta, jams, preserves, foraging, harvesting, soap making.
    We need help, planting, weeding, transplanting, watering.
    In winter we look for edible mushrooms in the nearby forests and need help harvesting.

    We will teach you and need only your enthusiasm, positive attitude, care and a great volunteer ethic.

  • Idiomas hablados

    Alemán: Fluido
    Inglés: Fluido
    Italiano: Fluido

  • Alojamiento

    Alojamiento

    A beautiful straw guest room in our home with a bathroom rarely shared by us as we have one upstairs.

    We ask you to please bring really warm jumpers, and hats (summer and winter hats). Not all parts of Australia are hot. Our area is often very cold, truly very cold, so please bring really warm clothes, at least one woolen jumper and woolen socks. We only heat our home during winter. We rarely light the fire during the rest of the year so please bring good clothes. Australia is very different from Europe and America, where central heatign can be found in almost every home.

  • Algo más...

    Algo más...

    We live in a very vibrant community, full of creative people, artisans, ecologists and sustainability practitioners.

    We are ten minutes away by car from the picturesque town of Daylesford. On your days off you can visit Daylesford cafes, galleries, Daylesford Convent, Museum, the Wombat Hill Historic gardens and on Thursday mornings the Friends of Wombat Hill.

    I drive into town once or twice a week, sometimes more and you are welcome to come into town with me on those days.

    There are walking tracks around Daylesford lake, or along creeks and rivers. In winter there are wild mushrooms to be found in the pine forests and surrounds. You can volunteer to take part in our community garden working bees, or attend the local library or Cinema. There are day spas, and the Hepburn Bath House. Fabulous live music at Blue Bean Love Cafe, the Hepburn Grande Hotel, Belvedere Social, The Perfect Drop and the Old Hepburn Hotel to name but a few.
    The food culture here is fantastic and the permaculture movement abuzz with workshops. Once a month the Culture Club hosts free fermenting workshops.

  • Un poco más de información

    Un poco más de información

    • Acceso a Internet

    • Acceso a Internet limitado

      Acceso a Internet limitado

    • Tenemos animales

    • Somos fumadores

    • Puede alojar familias

  • ¿Cuántos voluntarios puedes hospedar?

    ¿Cuántos voluntarios puedes hospedar?

    Uno

  • ...

    Horas esperadas

    5 hours per day five days a week or as negotiated.

Número de referencia de anfitrión: 156998244574

Comentarios (9)



Comentarios

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Intercambio cultural: (5.0)

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