Feel it hot, hot, hot

Compost king

We're still recovering from the fabulous weather last weekend, when we welcomed a bunch of Melbournian pals to Rumpty Doo for our inaugural Farm Bee. It was so great to have many extra pairs of hands on deck and we achieved many amazing things over the weekend including the enthusiastic scything of about an acres worth of grass! With all that fresh-cut greenery on hand we couldn't help ourselves but make a nice big hot compost pile that will hopefully give us plenty of gorgeous soil for summer planting in a couple months time.

Hot Compost Ingredients:

45% green (kitchen scraps, fresh cut grass/greens)
45% brown (hay or straw)
10% manure
Some sticks
A hose with running water

Method:

Start with sticks

Layering

One week later and the compost was hot to
touch and had sunk right down!

Loosen a square metre of soil and cover with a layer of thin sticks (we used wattle branches, largely because they were on hand). Amass a large pile of brown materials and another equal pile of green. They need to be big - your finished compost needs to be a minimum of 1 metre cubed. Have manure at the ready as well as your hose too. Start by putting a thick layer of hay over your sticks, keeping it nice and square. Water well. Follow with the same thickness of green, continuing to water as you go and still aiming to keep it as square as you humanly can. Keep adding alternate layers of green and brown with a couple of special manure layers thrown in along the way, and keep watering/squaring up the edges as you go. Once you've reached a metre high or run out of materials cap with a layer of brown. You're done! Over the next few days the compost pile will heat right up and sink right down. It may even steam!
Leave it for 6-8 weeks before using - the longer you leave it the better.
 

Give me shelter

This is Beverley. We got her cheap in the local paper, due to a severe bout of leaky windows and teenage angst graffiti that had left her insides looking a little more than undesirable (see below left). "There's nothing a lick of paint and a dash of windex can't do," thought we, naively as we approached Beverley's insides with scrubbing brushes in rubber gloved hands. Six days, three tins of paint and four metres of vinyl flooring later we were licking our wounds and vowing NEVER again to entertain the fantasy of renovating anything - not even a goat shed - for it seems renovation often means just as much work as starting from scratch.

But with a few days distance and a candle-lit evening spent inside Beverley's freshly painted, water-proofed and cosy interior we're feeling the rewards of our pains. We've even given in and strung up a line of twee-as bunting in celebration (see below). 

Beverley 2.0

And it did feel a little bit celebratory as we worked, despite the effort, as each brushstroke obliterated the hate-speech and scrawlings of male genitalia that had been grafittied across poor Bev's fake-wood laminex interior. As each scraping of revolting 70s lino was peeled away, centimetre by centimetre. As each leaky bump and dent was patched and plastered. As we grew to love this hulking old dame we now call shelter.

We've still got quite a ways to go before Bev will be finished (she's still on candle-power, there's nowhere to sit, and her exterior still needs seeing to), but she's habitable for the moment, and somewhere on the way to being a place we *might* just call home.

That is, if we were really, really desperate.