‘Eggy bake’ is a common meal in our house and one of our all-time favorites – named by the kids.

Eggy bake – this version with grated cheese on top from local cheesery. Typically we eat it plain. Rarely we have leftovers.

 

Another household favourite is pumpkin soup (veggie soup really) using all freshly harvested vegetables – pumpkin, Choko, potato, herbs, turmeric, ginger, garlic chives, mustard spinach, and many other veggies and greens we find.

 

I think our 4yo will discover one day that usually pumpkin soup is orange, not green, but both these meals are great ways to get him to enjoy lots of freshly-plucked organic greens.

 

Weeping rosemary hanging over the terrace wall gets plucked for most meals.

Anyway, I started typing up a recipe for the book I am working on, The Good Life Guide and realized that this meal was far more than the recipe could communicate. A simplicity of just listing the recipe ingredients and steps seemed somehow to diminish the inherent qualities of the food.

 

Tulsi leaves and seeds also end up in most salads, soups, curries, and bakes.

 

 For me it is the rich tapestry of connections that are cultivated through this food that brings it’s true quality to light – the connections with the seasons, with our local environment, with the soil, with neighbors, with friends, with each other in our family, with our play, with our home education, and our workplace.

 

Garlic chives and their flowers have an amazingly powerful garlic flavour.

Here is my first attempt to describe the eggy-bake process…

 

1. Send the kids up to collect the eggs from the chook house we built using timber our neighbour harvested in his woodlot and a gift of reclaimed iron sheeting. We have an eclectic mix of rare breed chickens that the children look after. The eggs are all different shapes and sizes – but all have superbly orange yolks because they free-range often.

 

2. Wander around the garden with a handmade basket collecting a wonderful array of herbs, flowers, and leafy greens (and purples). I take a leaf from this and a leaf from that so I don’t harm the plant and can come back again day after day for more. It’s a peaceful way to garden and harvest.
   
   I collect things like soft pumpkin leaves and shoots, sweet potato leaves and shoots, mustard spinach, any brassica flowers, and soft flower stalks, many varieties of kale, welsh onion leaves, the bolting shoots from coriander/cilantro, tulsi leaves, garlic chives and garlic chive flowers, Brazilian spinach … there are so many things to collect, even pea leaves, bean leaves, beetroot leaves, young chia leaves, young amaranth leaves, weeds – chickweed, dandelion leaves. The more diverse the selection, the more diverse the nutrients in the food.

   The magnificent red mustard spinach is making its way into every meal in these cooler months.

   I love this time in the garden, watching the birds, noticing things – new shoots on trees, self-seeding veggies, subtle changes, and simple beauty. I think about what I can add to the garden to increase diversity or adapt to the changing season.

   Brassica flowers are a wonderful treat. I often snack on them in the garden.

   
   I notice where I need to add some more compost or mulch. The compost is made from the chicken bedding, and the Azolla we harvested by hand from the lake. The mulch is often chopped and drop materials, but we do also go and pick up some local bales of grass straw that another neighbour orders in bulk for us all to use. The kids love to ride in the trailer with the bales slowly back along the little internal road within the ecovillage with the wind in their hair, singing in the breeze,  watching for hawks and kangaroos.
   
   I could ask the kids to harvest the greens too because they know where all the great greens are at any moment – the garden is their playground – and sometimes I do, but I just love this time in the garden pottering for a few minutes.

 

There’s always a surprise somewhere in the garden.

 

3. Ask my children to whiz it all together in the food processor with a bit of fresh milk from the neighbour and handmade ricotta from another neighbour.

 

4. Cook it in a solar cooker (for a lunchtime meal) or a solar-powered electric oven (for dinner).

 

5. Duck out to the garden again just before the eggy bake is ready and collect some salad greens. I like to wrap little bits of eggy bake in a leaf.

   Fresh mixed salad with self-seeding tomatoes and lots of perennial greens, edible weeds and edible flowers.

    
6. Sometimes I go the extra bit and drizzle a salad with homemade dressing – shaking together a little organic olive oil made just down the valley (sourced from the local organic food store), with some homemade kombucha vinegar (using a SKOBY dropped off by a neighbour, a chopped up garlic clove hand-delivered from a friend in Tasmania (traded for limes), and some herbs and spices from the garden like rosemary, oregano, thyme, or chilli, ginger and lemongrass. Even simpler, I grab a lime, lemon, or grapefruit and squeeze it over the salad. Delicious just like that!

    

   Fresh greens, snowpeas. tomatoes, citrus and garlic

    

7. Ask the children to set the table. Often they gather a little posy of edible flowers and lemon myrtle leaves and make a beautiful arrangement.
8. Sit down together and enjoy, discussing the particular flavours and textures that we like in today’s version. You see, they are always different – and that’s the beauty of it too. 

 

It sounds quite complicated, but really it’s ultimately simple. All the ingredients are all just here around us, it’s seasonal, it connects us with our neighbours and friends, and our local environment,  we all help to make it happen, we all enjoy it immensely because of the heart and soul that we know has gone into every part.  And, from start to finish, cooking from scratch, it usually takes us around 30 minutes to prepare and cook as long as we keep it thin in the glass cooking trays.

 

Brazilian Spinach has leaves all year round for harvest.

This is slow food, but it’s not slow, quite rapid actually. With three children – two of them boys with huge appetites – preparing good food quickly seems to be the best approach, as well as getting them involved in the process.

 

Keep in mind too that I typically garden for about 10 minutes a day to maintain this garden – not a huge commitment, but an enormous benefit to our health and to the education of my children.

 

Some other reasons I love this way of cooking:

• this is community food
• it’s package free – the natural packaging of the eggs goes back to the soil. The milk comes in re-used bottles.
• it’s part of nutrient cycles in the garden and is waste-free
• it is so satisfying and just makes me smile so deeply when I sit down to share this meal

What’s a simple meal you cook from scratch?  What does it mean to you?

The post Good Food: Good Life: My recipe for simple eggy bake straight from the garden. appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

I just discovered a neighbour of mine in this ecovillage has started making organic tempeh – free of GMOs.  I love tempeh and I have been meaning to make some for ages, but unfortunately it has only stayed on my wish list so far. I fell in love with it in Indonesia when I was teaching permaculture over there in 1999 (and the many times I returned), particularly the fresh local village made tempeh.

Tempeh is a good way to eat beans and grains because they usually lose a lot of their lectin and phytate contents in the fermentation process. I really enjoy it added to a big cook up of our homegrown veggies and spices.

The texture and taste of my neighbour’s tofu was amazing – not like the hard and sometimes slimy tempeh in supermarkets. I had thought that was OK (because really I wanted to like it), but now I know where to get the ‘real’ stuff, I’ll be putting in a standing order! Luckily I have lots of plants and food in my permaculture garden to trade with them.

What is tempeh?

Tempeh is typically made out of fermented soya beans but can also be made out of other things such as things such as mung beans and chickpeas, but also grains. Partially cooked whole soybeans are aged overnight in an incubator at a tropical temperature with a starter culture. During that time a thick, white mat of mycelia, a kind of fungus, covers the tempeh and this binds the beans together as a ‘cake’. 

A local fresh source …

Every Monday the tempeh maker and his family invite people over to their place for a falafel and baclava feast – a lovely opportunity for people in this community to get together informally and chat.

It was there a few days ago, that on the table I saw the tempeh they had prepared as a taste test.  My three year old son absolutely loved it and asked if I could get some for his kindy lunchbox. How could I resist such an earnest request?

I picked up a couple of blocks up today – it was still warm. Fresh tempeh! 

This is how I prepared it.

How to make simple and delicious tempeh – for meal protein, or a snack.

Ingredients: 

• Tempeh
• Cononut Oil
• Chilli
• Fresh Ginger Root
• Garlic

Method:

1. Slice tempeh into 4mm slices
2. Heat fry pan and add the following – 2 tablespoons of coconut oil, a sliced chilli, 5 mm ginger root – grated finely, a crushed and chopped clove of garlic, a sprinkle of himalayan salt.
3. When oil hot add the tempeh to the pan. 
4. When brown on one side, turn over and brown the other side

The freshly fermented tempeh.

Chopped and cooked with a 2 tablespoons of coconut oil, grated ginger, sliced chilli, crushed garlic, and a sprinkling of himalayan salt.

After a couple of minutes, they were brown on one side, so I gently turned them over for another minute or two before moving them to a towel to absorb the excess oil.

I laid it out ready for my family to come back home from their outing.

Then I realised that it didn’t quite looked enough, so I cooked up the other half.

… and in the few moments after they walked in the door, it was gone! Even my picky food critic son loved it – so it must be really good. Now I have to make some more at 6:30am so that little Monty can have some in his kindy lunchbox.

A goal of mine is to grow some grains and more legumes in my permaculture garden to make my own tempeh!!! I’ll let you know how I go when I get to this point, and I’d love to hear your experienced of making various sorts of tempeh.

The post My neighbour’s tempeh & a simple vegan recipe for delicious tempeh slices appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

Today, October 16, is World Food Day – a day of action against hunger. What could you do to help raise awareness locally and take personal action?

I’ll be making the most out of my permaculture garden abundance – collecting and processing the most flourishing seasonal foods and collecting open pollinated seeds to plant, eat and share. I am also writing this post to share with you in the hope that you will share it on.

Control over seeds must remain in peasants’ hands,” La Via Campesina. (Photo: Tineke d’Haese/ Oxfam)

Did you know that:

• 60% of the hungry in the world are women.
• Almost 5 million children under the age of 5 die of malnutrition-related causes every year.
• 4 in 10 children in poor countries are malnourished which damages their bodies and brains

But did you also know that:

• Peasants produce over 70% of the food consumed globally on small farms of less than 2 hectares, and 80% of the food consumed in those countries.  The best way to prevent hunger is to prevent land grabs and enable peasants to be free to grow a diversity of food using their own seed on their own land.  Rather than cashcrops, hybrids etc. ‘Big’ solutions are not the answer.
• Increasingly global food giants are involved in land grabs that are evicting poor farmers from their land to grow cash crops (often in the name of food security or economic development).

“No-one should come and tell us how to produce our food”. Elizabeth Mpofu of Zimbabwe is General Coordinator of the international peasant movement of La Via Campesina, a coalition of 164 organizations in 73 countries around the world, representing about 200 million peasant, landless, indigenous, and other farmers.

What’s the difference? Food security or Food Sovereignty

La Via Campesina, the global peasant movement which represents 200 million peasants in over 70 countries, prefers to celebrate today as World Food Sovereignty Day. Food sovereignty differs from food security.

It’s not just old peasants either who are calling for this. Young women calling for change at La Via Campesina’s Youth Forum.

More reading (just a small selection):

The post Did You Know That Peasants Produce More than 70% of Global Food? appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

Grab a cuppa and take a listen. Please leave comments on the Up For a Chat site (and also here on my blog) about the sorts of things you’d like me to speak about when I return to the Wellness Couch for a follow-up conversation about how to get your own simple garden set up.

UC196: Permaculture with Morag Gamble (73:03 mins)
http://thewellnesscouch.com/uc/uc-196-permaculture-with-morag-gamble

Some of the points of conversation include:

• How I came to live a permaculture life
• How to live a simpler, less stressful life and step away from the over-consumerism.
• How the healthier the earth is the healthier we all become
• How living in nature is like a natural meditation.
• How superfoods come from supersoils – the importance of keeping your soils healthy
• How everything has a context for learning – my approach to homeschooling.
• How seeing the world through children’s kids eyes opens up the world tenfold.
• How to reduce waste in our home – food waste and single-use plastics
• The value of growing as much as we can at home & how there’s is more food in most edible gardens than we typically imagine.
• How to think of your garden as one big ecosystem
• How we all have a voice – we can all be part of the change.

The post Permaculture & Healthy Living: Morag Gamble Speaks with Cyndi O’Meara & Friends on the Wellness Couch Podcast appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

True Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) – a familiar plant in our everyday landscapes – typically overlooked as a source of great food and medicine.

Of the dandelion family (also known as False Dandelion) is Cat’s Ear (Hypochoeris radicata). It is a familiar plant in my landscape. It has a blander taste than true dandelion and tends to be less bitter – young leaves are less fibrous. The leaves are also edible – raw or cooked. The root can also be roasted as a coffee substitute. Not good for horses to consume too much.

WHY EAT DANDELION GREENS?

• Dandelion greens are rich in antioxidants which prevent free-radical damage to cells, and are high in:
• Vitamin K (building strong bones, preventing heart disease)
• Vitamin A (healthy teeth, bones, mucus membranes, skin and eyes)
• Iron (essential for producing red blood cells and transferring oxygen from the lungs to your body)
• Fibre (helps body shed waste)
• Potassium (to help regulate heart rate and blood pressure)
• Also vitamins C and B6, thiamin, riboflavin, calcium, folate, magnesium, phosphorus, and copper.

USING OTHER PARTS

The post Three Great Uses For Dandelion Leaves – Wild Harvest this Edible Weed in Springtime appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

Me threshing grain in Ladakh, India in the early 1990s – here I learnt the importance and significance of local food.

The film touches on many of the issues caused by and impacting upon our current unsustainable food system including climate change and peak oil, and points to the relocalisation of food systems as a key strategy for working toward a more ecologically sustainable, healthy and socially just society.

I made this film in 2008, but I find the issues all are still very current and the examples of ways forward possibly even more pertinent now. I will be following up each of the key themes introduced in this film in the short films I am making each week and posting on my youtube channel: Our Permaculture Life. You can subscribe there so each week you’ll get another short film about permaculture, ecovillage living and sustainable local food systems.

PEOPLE INTERVIEWED

Fritjof Capra (source: www.fritjofcapra.net)

There are interviews with:
• Dr Fritjof Capra – Author, Physicist, Educator, Activist
• Morag Gamble – Permaculture/Community Food Educator, Designer, Writer
• Evan Raymond – Advisor, Climate Change Adaptation
• Kirsten Lyons – Associate Professor  Social Science (incl. Food Politics)
• Les Nichols – Community Supported Agriculture/Farmers Market
• Anaheke Metua – City Farmer/Farmers Market Organiser/Weaver
• Sequoia River – Farm Shop
• Isabella Siodmak – Natural Health Practitioner, Natural Attitudes
• Chris Bond – Chef

COUNTRIES VISITED

The film includes footage and images taken over a 15 year period in 15 countries by Morag Gamble and Evan Raymond:
• Australia
• Bulgaria
• Bahamas
• China
• Cuba
• Denmark
• Germany
• India
• Indonesia
• Slovenia
• Spain
• South Korea
• Turkey
• United Kingdom
• USA

Maple Street Cooperative – my favourite local food store.

ABOUT THE FILM

This film was made in 2008 with the support of the Maleny Film Society and launched at the 2008 Maleny Film Festival (hence the many examples from Maleny). Since then, it has been screened around the world by community groups looking to cultivate change in their local area, and in schools to raise awareness about local food issues.

Directed by: Morag Gamble and Evan Raymond
Editorial Director: Gregor Gamble

The post Think Global: Eat Local – a short film by Morag Gamble appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

How do you get thriving permaculture garden while you’re renting?  There are particular challenges, but there’s also a whole lot of great ideas for creating abundant temporary gardens and flourishing community spaces.

In our 20s, Evan and I lived in rental houses for years before we moved to Crystal Waters ecovillage.  We grew a fair bit in pots, in the yard and along the footpath, but we also became avid community gardeners and helped to organise a food box system for the other foods we needed. Our sense of permaculture gardening embraced the community – the city farm, friends places and verges (amazing macadamias and tamarinds).

Maia checking out the community garden at Maleny Neighbourhood Centre’s community garden – one of the many local community gardens where I run regular free permaculture workshops.

Not all renters move regularly of course and some landlords are happy for you to create an flourishing edible garden. My grandparents rented the same house for about 40 years. They always had a lovely vegetable garden out the back. Generally however, renters or not, people do move more often now. Almost half of the Australian population moves every 5 years. In Australia, government statistics show that people in their 20s and 30s move multiple times in that 5 year period.

So, whether you are a renter or just a regular mover, here are some ideas for you…

Mesclun Greens Pot

Create a fabulously productive salad bar in a pot. Densely seed up a pot with a mix of things like lettuce, rocket, mizuna, endive, coriander, asian greens, spinach, basil and mustard greens. As soon as the leaves grow big enough, start snipping a leaf here and there – a pot full of nutrients, colour and flavour. To keep the plants thriving, regularly water them with a natural fertiliser – diluted worm liquid is great.

Lettuces, radishes, rocket, basil, mustard greens all grow so quickly. Very soon you will be plucking fresh leaves for your salad bowl or stir-fry.

For getting things going in your temporary pot gardens, I recommend using a few bigger pots rather than lots of little pots which dry out so quickly. Using self-watering pots or mini-wicking gardens is also a benefit.  Here’s a few ideas to try:

Herb Garden in a pot

In large pots you can also grow a wonderful diversity of herbs together.

Try themes – teas, asian spice, pizza pots…

• For a nice tea – try mints and lemon balm.
• For an spice pot – try chilli, lemongrass, coriander, vientamese mint …
• For a pizza and pasta pot – grow sage, rosemary, oregano, parsley, chives, mini basil and thyme together.

Mix of basils and tomato in a large up cycled pot.  (source www.yougrowgirl.com)

Fruit tree guild in a pot

If you are in a temporary garden, it’s still wonderful to be able to have fruit trees, but you most probably want to be able to take them with you when you move.

Even the smallest garden can support a dwarf fruit tree or two in a pot. So many fruit trees are now available in dwarf varieties and they do really well. However, you do need to remember that these plants are entirely dependent on you for their water and nutrients – they cannot send their roots off in search of more food and water. Plant the fruit tree in a big pot  – remember that in 2 years you’ll need to trim roots and add fresh potting mix, so choose a shape of pot that you can slide the tree from.

Some good fruits plants for pots – dwarf lemon, pomegranate, acerola, finger lime, kaffir lime, jaboticaba, dwarf apple, dwarf mango, dwarf avocado (need another to cross-pollinate though), tamarillo, strawberry … just to name a few.

You could also try a multi-grafted tree to get a few different varieties on one root stock – for example mandarin, orange and lemon.

Make sure you mulch the pots well and add complementary plants such as nasturtiums (edible leaves, flowers and seeds), herbs to repel insects, flowers to attract pollinators.

Nasturtiums add great colour. It attracts pollinators, is a living mulch and has edible flowers, leaves and seeds.

Worm farm in a pot

In the middle of a large pot, sink a mini worm farm. You can feed the worms directly and the worms take the nutrients to the plant roots for you. You can simply use a large lidded yoghurt container with holes drilled in the base. Bury it in the centre of the pot, put in a little soil, add a handful of worms then start feeding them.

Use grow bags or sacks

Fabric grow bags are an interesting lightweight and affordable alternative to pots. I have a collection of old sacks and chicken food bags that are good for this, but I have also seen grow bags for sale. These grow bags are better outside than the balcony as they seep.

Old potato sacks can be reused as grow bags – chicken feed bags also work.

A type of grow bag available – shopping bags also work in this way.

Not pretty – but a simple concept. If you need to buy in soil anyway, why not use the wrapping it comes in.

Potato tower

A temporary potato garden can also be made in a tower of wire netting. A potato tower is a great way to grow backyard potatoes in a small space without digging up the soil. Keep adding compost and mulch as the plants grow. When the tops die back – undo the tower and harvest the spuds.

Sprouts and Microgreens

You can have a constant source of greens all year round even if you have no garden at all. Right in your own kitchen you can have a mini desktop garden. Microgreens are the shoots of vegetables such as lettuce, beetroot, rocket, celery etc that are picked just after the first leaves have developed.  I love sprouting too – particularly mung beans, alfalfa and buckwheat.  They are so quick, easy and nutritious.

Turning your scraps into food for the soil

In a small space it is possible to set up a worm farm, compost bin or tumbler. They are compact and can move with you when you need to.  Collecting your food scraps and sprinkling it with a bokashi mix can really reduce the smell and activate your scraps for composting.  Have you considered a community compost system.  The city of Sydney even has some helpful guidelines on how to manage one.

Caloundra community gardeners separating the worm castings and collecting worms for a new worm farm

Growing on the verge

Verge gardening is growing in popularity. People are taking their gardening endeavours to the streets and claiming some public space in common areas for edible landscaping. It’s a way to grow food together and build community. A nearby town, Buderim, has a great example called Urban Food Street, so does Sustainable Chippendale in downtown Sydney.

Join or form a community orchard group

Cities can be places of abundance with fruits and vegetables growing in many of the underutlilised spaces. Public parks and community gardens can become community orchards – places where people can grow, tend and share locally-produced fruit. Some cities such Seattle are actively encouraging this. Often the harvest from one backyard fruit tree can be too much for a person or family, so sharing a range of plants makes good common sense. The Urban Orchard Project in Melbourne links over 200 households to do just this.

A gorgeous community food forest Evan and I stumbled across walking about Ljubljana, Slovenia many years ago.

Join or form a community garden

If there is simply not the space or right aspect at your place, consider joining a community garden, growing on the verge or helping at a local school garden. There are so many resources to help you on the Australian City Farm and Community Garden Network website

I love gardening with other people. I learnt so much this way. Big jobs just seem to disappear amongst the laughter of working with friends in the garden. Sharing the work, sharing the produce, sharing ideas, sharing knowledge created greater abundance and a sense of amazing possibilities of what we could achieve together.

Some of the lovely participants from a recent workshop I led at the city farm – some just beginning their gardening journey. City farms and community gardens are great places to learn.

We started Northey Street City Farm over 20 years ago now – and as a small community group we not only filled a public park with herbs, vegetables, fruits and perennials – we regenerated a segment of urban stream, planted a woodlot, developed a bush tucker corridor, created a vibrant community hub that continues to thrive today with an organic farmers market, permaculture nursery and fabulous education programs. There are no fences – people can wander, smell, taste, feel, enjoy and learn from the space.  Now there is also market gardens and an allotment garden section – no fences still! Fabulous.

Our involvement in setting up the permaculture educational gardens at Northey Street City Farm inspired the way we developed our garden here at Crystal Waters – which we offer too as an educational space.

These are just a few of the many many ideas for growing food in small spaces and temporary situations. Please share your favourite temporary permaculture ideas.

Living a simple life and having a thriving edible garden helps us to live a healthy life, reduce our impact, diminish the waste we produce, scale down the debt we are in and simply connect to nature, the seasons, our community and our selves.

The post Temporary permaculture for renters – 11 ideas for growing abundant food without owning land appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

Evan and I most recently met with Vandana Shiva in Indonesia.

Vandana is one of the world’s most prominent environmental advocates. She is an Indian scholar, environmental activist, anti-globalisation author and tireless campaigner for seed freedom – a clear and loud voice for Earth Democracy – calling for seed sovereignty, water sovereignty, food sovereignty and land sovereignty. 

To provide a place where people can come to immerse themselves deeply to learn about these ways of seeing the world, the paradigm shift needed and to gain practical skills, she has created the Earth University in India, connected to Schumacher College. She encourages us all to become activists for Earth Democracy…

“Become the seeds of change in any place in the food web which is so rich and complex – become a seedsaver, an organic farmer, an activist, a chef, a nutritionist …”

Back in 1992, I was volunteering in the Himalayas at the Ladakh Project with Helena Norbert-Hodge of ISEC and Vandana came up to Ladakh for a week to help establish a community seed-saving project. I watched as the mothers and grandmothers of the community were so empowered by her – they mobilised their community networks and created the seed exchange network within just a few months.

Since then I have crossed paths with Vandana on many occasions – at Schumacher College in England, and more recently at the launch of Slow Food Bali’s community seed saving project.

I look forward to spending the evening with Vandana surrounded by my dear earth activist friends.  Who knows what will emerge from a gathering like this.

Maia and Hugh also attended Vanadana’s talk at Slow Food Bali’s seed project launch.

• The Vandana Shiva Reader (2014)
• Making Peace with the Earth (2012)
• Soil not Oil (2007)
• Earth Democracy (2005)
• Stolen Harvest (2000)
• Monoculture of the Mind (1993)

The post Making Peace with the Earth and Becoming Seeds of Change appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

If you relate to more than half of the above, you possibly could have already been labelled a ‘hippie’.  I reckon though, the real hippie days are long gone.

It could be said that a lot of the actions and values I’ve described above have been influenced by the radical hippie movement of the 60s and 70s – living and working for social change, peace, freedom and the environment –  but there have also been many other philosophies, discoveries and ideas that have contributed to this way of thinking and living over the past 40 years too.

Am I a hippie?

I relate to all of the above points, but I don’t identify as a hippie (I’m too young). I particularly try to avoid the hippie tag because of the negative connotations that typically come with it – I don’t smoke or drink or have never been into drugs.  I try to avoid other tags too – it becomes to easy to be parcelled up and dismissed. Tags and labels seem to close people’s minds to new possibilities and interesting ideas that are worth exploring.

I know I hold a bit of fear of being labelled a hippie. Considering where I live and what I do, I am an easy target. A recent article about my way of life had the title “Earth Mother, Eco-teacher“. I admit I shuddered when I first read the words ‘Earth Mother’ describing me. It felt like a hippie label, but when I read the article, I realised the title had been given with much respect not condescension.  I think in that moment, I let go of some of my fear and I felt encouraged that this way of life is seen as a positive aspiration.

I love my work, particularly the Nature Kids and permaculture programs I run for kids and the community.

I am not trying to drop out of society. I have my whole life been dropping into living a positive, healthy, community-connected, earth-connected way of life. This feels purposeful to me and brings me a deep sense of joy and meaning. I live in an ecovillage, grow food, teach permaculture, live simply, dress simply, homeschool my kids… Does that make me a hippie? No.  I perhaps embrace a number of hippie culture qualities – love, peace, care for the earth, care for people, living simply and ethically – but I’m just me – me in relation to my community and environment.

Relaxed and happy – barefoot in the garden spreading compost, mulching and planting.

Labels are a great way to be boxed, dismissed and/or marketed to – best if possible to be avoided! Be free, be open, live well, love life, connect and make a positive contribution.

The post Are you a hippie? appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

This morning I met for morning coffee with Rhonda Hetzel, local bestselling author and award-winning blogger, who last year graciously offered to mentor me as a writer and blogger. With her support and encouragement I have felt brave enough to begin writing regularly. I am so very thankful to her for taking me under her wing.  Rhonda’s blog about living simply, Down to Earth, is read across the globe and just clicked over 20 million pageviews. Rhonda has just returned from a road trip to launch her new book, The Simple Home. It’s in the window at Rosettas Bookshop in town. It was just so lovely to catch up with her, to share adventures and future plans.

with Rhonda Hetzel for morning tea in Maleny

The post Community Connections and the Beauty of Small Towns appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.