By our estimations, the house here at Arborlon was built about 20 years ago.We don’t know who built it, but as we’ve lived here now for two years, we’ve noticed how well they designed the aspects of the house to achieve natural heating and cooling. We have no need for heating or air-conditioning!
We have some good friends here in our local area and just up the mountain a bit friends own a small parcel of land right on the border of the rainforest.
They have a number of large and old citrus and fruit trees, that do extremely well in the rainforest environment.
In lots of photos you may have seen the ‘blue snake’ across the lawn on the plot level. That was the Plot hose connected to the Plot irrigation…
Well we finally got it ‘buried’ and completed.
Being off-grid, we try to make use of everything. The rule of Reduce, Re-use and Recycle is always on our mind here at Arborlon. So when we had accumulated enough flour containers, we decided to make them into something useful instead of tossing them in the recycling bin. In their second life they have become cloches in our veggie garden to help protect our young seedlings from being eaten by critters.
What do you do when nature throws you too much spinach, you make Spanikopita!
Growing your own food is one thing, but eating the food you grow is a whole other thing. You have to be prepared with recipes and ideas of how to use the abundance of food that nature gives you, which prompted me to start posting some recipes to help us all use our home grown veg. So,
Living off-grid require some changes to how you do things. I’ve found it’s been a few small changes that have made the biggest difference in our power consumption. Here are a few of my favorite things that I’ve found useful for off-grid living.
We have had Native Raspberries(Rubus probus) in pots at the top of the driveway now for almost a year. They have done well, but they do cop a bit of a hiding from the traffic, the sun, the birds etc. So we have decided to move and replace them.
The Raspberries will go to the ‘Raspberry Patch” and they will be replaced with Lomandras.(Lomandra longifolia, Lomandra hystrix, Lomandra confertifolia)
Save your egg shells to make great calcium for the garden. Food scraps are great for worms, but worms don’t digest egg shells, so instead of throwing them out, you can store them in a separate container to be ground into calcium powder for the garden.
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