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Category: Retrosuburbia

After nearly 40 years living off-grid, we moved to a 1950’s fibro cottage, on a small suburban block, in regional city. How much of what we have learned about permaculture and homesteading and small footprint living, will work in a suburban setting?

Green banana flour

Green banana flour. This has been a quest of mine for a little while. My coastal subtropical climate is all wrong for wheat or rice or most of the staple grain crops that anchor our Western diet. I can’t even really follow Irish tradition (and Peruvian before that) and use potatoes as the calorie base – potatoes are a seasonal treat here rather than a year-long storing staple. It’s easy…

Quails

Aren’t they the cutest little things? They’re day old quail chicks, and we’re finding they’re nicely suited to raising in suburbia. Besides being prolific egg layers, there’s some good science that quail eggs are very effective against hayfever, and possibly, probably other allergies too.

Part of a world map, centred on Australia and extending west to Iran, north to Japan, and east to New Zealand. I has hundreds, a thousand or more green arrows moving across all the oceans. They are so concentrated around the shores of China that they make one green area.

When the ships stop, what then?

Isn’t it stunning? This is the current position of all the cargo vessels in the world. Just cargo vessels – I’ve set the filter to remove the passenger ships, the tankers, the fishing vessels, all the other types of sea traffic. How do we prepare for when those ships stop, or, if we are smarter than I think we collectively are, when they start using fuel that is clean and…

Gearing up for heat waves – Part 3 – Plan

The Bureau of Meteorology says that it’s likely that this will be an El Niño year, drier and warmer. That is, it says, on top of the drier and warmer conditions that climate change predicts anyhow for much of Australia, especially the south east. It brings with it an increased risk of extreme heat. And my ‘470’ research came to the same conclusion as this week’s article in The Conversation – Australia’s…