It’s been 10 months since I did an update, incredibly slack I know, but we have been so busy working there’s been no time. The best way to see what’s happening is to come and have a look, this time of the year the kettle is always on the combustion stove and Bryon has usually made some vegan delight to share. The house is nice and warm and we always welcome an excuse to down tools!
During the year we’ve had a few trips interstate, to Newcastle, Ballarat and Melbourne to visit the International Flower Show, the Begonia Festival and the Botanical Gardens at Cranbourne. Plus catching up with the kids and grandkids. During the past year there has been a lot of travel for work too, 9,500 kms by road just for my training job, plus volunteering at the primary health clinic and working at the community centre so it’s time to slow down a bit. Bryon’s been flat strap too, busy painting (artwork not the house), as he’s sold quite a few and had a couple of commissions, plus working in the community and I enjoy it when he can accompany me on work trips.
We had over 60 people through the house during the June long weekend for the Bay Of Fires Art Trail, Bryon was a featured artist and we were “Venue 10” so he was set up in his “studio”. He sold a few paintings and showed off his talents while I enjoyed talking to visitors about living off the grid, and making tea and coffee. It’s been a busy year. I could go on (and on) but I think you get the picture.
It has bought it home to me recently that we had lost the plot a little bit when I looked back at some old photos of the food garden and how vibrant it looked and now parts of it are lying fallow and looking quite neglected. I have been seduced by outside forces and have not been doing what I set out to do so it’s back to the original goals and I am gradually extricating myself from some boards and committees and other activities so I can concentrate on the task at hand, finish the house, work on the garden, and spend time with friends and family. A quick re-read of Henry Thoreau certainly helps get things in perspective.
So what’s been happening at Banksia Hollow? After my last post we had just finished the first bottle wall, and now the second one is also done. They are both rendered on the outside but still need the inside finishing done. The big wall in our en-suite has turned out beautifully, it is almost three metres tall and when the sun is behind it the mosaics light up. We are very pleased with the result and it is quite unique as there are over 900 half bottles in the wall and 450 finished individual mosaics.
Bryon has done a couple of jobs around town – last September he did some painting for Lizzie at Mt Elephant Fudge Cafe, a frieze around the wall and a frontispiece for her counter of a Royal Indian Elephant and helped get the shop fit-out in order before the spring opening. He also did a small mural on The Bank Teahouse in St Marys.
Through spring and summer the garden provided a constant supply of cut flowers for the house and endless pleasure for us both. After spending a day in the garden recently I realised that I couldn’t be happier anywhere else. We are looking forward to the spring as we have planted hundreds of bulbs and other plants.
The traditional spring display was augmented this year with some fancy doubles . My favourite are still the old jonquils, they smell so good. This year was the first time ever that I had hay fever, and now I know how Bryon feels every year. I think we will get into the nettle tea early this year and see if we can head it off.
Part of my travels earlier this year involved working with these two lovelies, Danita and Melissa. I can believe I get paid to go around and talk and eat cakes, life shouldn’t be this good surely.
The mixed flower beds have taken a lot of work to develop as we are gardening on rock. Note to others when you are siting your house do some testing for soil depth and don’t just get excited about the view. We have put loads of cow manure and mint/fennel mulch on the beds to build them up to a decent depth and it’s starting to pay a dividend. This spring will be the test.
Food production was quite good this year, we had loads of apples, lemons, limes, nectarines, cucumber, sweet potato, beans, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, tomatoes, various beans, peas, beetroot, several different potato varieties, carrots, onions, lettuce, chickory, Brussels sprouts, leeks, pumpkin, zucchini, lots and lots of raspberries and delicious big juicy sweet strawberries (oops I dribbled a bit then). Finally got the corn right and we had 75 cobs off a patch of ground three square metres in size. Three cobs on each stalk and some with four, but this year the flavour wasn’t quite as good as last year. Any suggestions on improving the flavour will be considered.
Some of the smaller creatures that inhabit our area. The small bird is a fire-tail finch that crashed into the window at the front of the house, he was stunned for a while but a bit of TLC from Bryon and he was off again. The moth was a newbie as we hadn’t seen him before and the caterpillar was pretty spectacular. The baby lizard on Bryon’s hand is one of many that we saw this year. They seem to breed quite happily among all the goings on and are quite inquisitive, they often stop and check us out. They run like mad on tiptoes across open areas of the garden so they don’t get eaten by birds, quite comical. Every morning when we have breakfast we are joined by about a dozen wrens and usually a few robins, they are so tiny and vulnerable, but seem to like the garden. We like them as they must eat an enormous amount of pests.
More flowers, just scroll down if it’s too much . . .
OMG, we will be planting more of these little suckers this year, there are loads of runners and I’ll be preparing a whole enclosure just for these. I loved coming home from work and eating a handful of strawberries and raspberries, fresh out of the garden.
The Patersonia out in the firebreak was amazing this year, it added a lighter colour to the lovely yellow hibertia that spread out like a carpet. We had a few roses this year, all scented, and they put on a great display. I had never grown roses before and was pleased with the quick growth and great results, from a cane to a bush in no time, and then prolific flowering. Our pond and solar fountain has been a nice feature at the front door, it’s great to listen to the water tinkling when it so quiet and peaceful, despite complaints from visitors that it makes then want to go pee pee.
A reporter from the Examiner, Sarah Aquilina, came and did a small article about Bryon and the bottle wall. The new wall is partly brick and has an organic design, when finished it will be punctuated with tree like limbs made from render. Very much in the Art Nouveau style. This wall lights up from behind when the sun sets which casts colour through the living room like a stained glass in a church. The main glass bottle wall in the en-suite also lights up when the sun is low in the northern sky during the winter, quite mesmerising when you’re having a shower.
Same again, more flowers, feel free to skip, or click on them for a slideshow.
I went out one morning and the pond was like a mirror and it reflected the Japanese Water Iris perfectly, they are such an ornate bloom, although very delicate. We didn’t get many flowers this year as we were a bit late getting the pots back in the pond. You have to lift them each winter and place them back in the water in the early spring.
The cut steel motif below is called “Flower of Life” and we bought it for Bryon’s 60th birthday at the Deloraine Craft Fair. We went for two days last year as it has been hard to get round in one day in more recent years. The two events we always go to are Agfest and Deloraine Craft Fair. We always come home with a ute full of plants from Agfest and you never know what you are going to see at Deloraine. We have to be quite discerning now as we have a much smaller house and very little wall space, we’ve had to sell a lot of our paintings and there’s still a lot of “stuff” in the shipping container waiting to be sorted.
In January we had 340mm of rain here in 48 hours. The house is built on a ridge so flooding is not likely but due to the volume the run-off took it’s time getting away. At it’s peak it came to within four inches of the floor level. Water was rushing through under the shed and we had to go our with hoes and shovels and do a bit of last minute ditch digging to divert water from the house and garden. It was a good thing though as we now know where we need to improve our drainage.
The tomatoes gave a particularly good crop this year, and as always there were so many cucumbers we didn’t know what to do with them. We are collecting more of our own seed now as we learn more about it, and we grew chilis here for the first time and got a great crop. Our best experiment was sweet potato, we grew it in the greenhouse and it was a great success, we learned that we will need to provide much deeper soil as the bigger tubers just stuck up out of the ground. The vines grow like crazy and wrap themselves around everything and they have a pretty flower at intervals along their length.
White fly were a problem again this year in the greenhouse and the best defense initially was garlic and chili spray, and more recently neem oil has proven even better. I think we have them licked and we need to as they can decimate the crops in the greenhouse, especially tomatoes. We bought six goldfish for the new pond and the randy little buggers promptly went and had about 100 babies. I’m not sure what will happen as it’s not that big a pond. The native pond weed, Azolla, grows so quickly on the pond that I have to keep skimming it off and we add it to the compost as extra organic matter. Nothing goes to waste.
Our latest erection, and believe me it’s an impressive erection, is an arbor to grow wisteria on. We have four plants, two blue and two white, and have created garden beds either side for polyanthus and other flowers to line the pathway. Eventually the path will be done in cobble stones and it will lead to the door of Bryon’s studio. It measures 6m x 2m and is 2.5 metres high. We drew up a design and had our friends at Small Farm Living fabricate it and Peter also came and helped us put it together. As you can see he is excited by power tools and scratched his head when we told him we had built the whole house using a hand saw as we didn’t like the noise made by the circular saw!!
Bryon finally talked me into getting rid of the clunky outdoor setting and replaced it with this little beauty. Now I see it I can appreciate what he was on about and look forward to have afternoon tea out here in the summer. I’ve posted a couple of Bryon’s paintings from the Art Trail exhibition we had here, he did quite a few floral ones, still life and others, plus some landscape, a few with reflections and a nice big one of the beech forest we visited on the Findhorn River in Scotland. After seeing one of his images in use on a website I have started watermarking his paintings when I put them on the web just to protect his copyright.
It has been a mild winter so far, lots of rain and windy at times. So far the dam has only frozen right across once, compared to staying frozen for days on end last year. I love the frost in the grass and am constantly fascinated by the reflections on the dam at different times of the day. I still haven’t built my jetty yet but still enjoyed swimming in the dam last summer, it gets quite warm down to about 1.5m but when you tread-water in the deep end its bloody freezing below that depth. We still haven’t planted the water lillies yet and I don’t intend to until the water warms up again as it’s far too cold right now. We have a pair of mountain ducks nesting near the dam again this year so are waiting to see the chicks.
We just took delivery of a shipment of David Austen roses, all scented and a variety of bloom sizes and colours. I never promised Bryon a rose garden so he went out and bought one anyway! I can’t wait til these plants get going as the rose garden is right outside our bedroom window and we have also planted beds of ranunculas, sweet Williams, anemones, peonies, sweet peas and many more so it will be nice to wake up to that in the summer. We have purchased plants named after some of the kids, Alida is a powder blue iris, Ellen is a rose, Madison is a daffodil, sweet William (an old favourite), just looking for Fred and Phil, and then we need to find a plant named after Caleb and Levi.
Anyway, that’s enough for now, I’ll be posting again soon as I’ve been asked to do a “how to” on the bottle walls and a bit more about passive solar, the worm farm in a bathtub, and the compost process. Jeez, just when I thought things would get a bit quieter!
Banksia Hollow 
Amazing you two are! Built house using handsaw!!!
Vegetables look delicious.
What an amazing life you two are making togetherXX
Thanks Joanne, it was just wonderful to catch up the other day, we mustn’t leave it another 20 years xxx