Building Giant Puppets at Lofty Meadows

It doesn't happen everyday but we do occasionally build giant puppets here at Lofty Meadows. Unfortunately that can mean our deck and shed is overtaken by machines, material, paint, and giant pieces of puppets. A little bit of chaos for a lot of creativity! This is all part of living creatively-you have the joy of making exceptional pieces but the blood, sweat and tears of trying to make it all work. Keeping the space organised is absolutely essential but also really hard- "where are the scissors?", "has anyone seen the tape measure" are common questions. We are always on a quest to find the best way to organise equipment and materials and love it when we find a system that works.

Our most recent giant puppet project was building 5 metre Giant Medieval Court Jester and Greenman for the Medieval Festival at The Abbey Museum. Bonnie, Henry, Dave, myself and the full gang of Lofty Meadows Helpers worked hard for weeks. We could not have done this without Max, JoKo, Victor, Mathieu, Coco, and Emmanuel. So much work in building, painting, screen printing, sewing, construction, testing and finally performing. In the end Bonnie, Dave, Henry and I were away for the final performance and we were very lucky that our gang of helpers were able to help. They travelled up to Bribie Island for us, made the final adjustments and performed with the two giant puppets over the two day festival. This meant they had free tickets to an absolutely unique festival to run around with Giant Puppets-fun times!

Harvesting Sweet Sticky Honey..for the first time!

YUM! This was a very momentous occasion for Lofty Meadows-it took us quite a while to get to this place. Starting the adventure into beekeeping felt like we were sneaking into someones else's backyard. I felt that it is one of those skills that would be better left to experts or the dogmatic self-sufficinado that spent many years researching Earth Garden articles to pull it off. Jason and Lisa, our friends from school, helped blow off those hesitations. They have a suburban block with fruit trees, chickens and Kenyan Top Bar Hives...and delicious honey. Dave's DIY instinct kicked in and before long found some plans online and he had built our first top bar hive.

Confession time- some times the experts are right! Damn it! The next step was to buy a queen and Jason and Lisa gave us some starter brood and bars. We had to get the queen from a traditional Langstroth Hive keeper. Apparently they don't view top bar hives too kindly and then he pointed out that we were coming into winter and we were starting the hive at the wrong time. We ignored him but he was right-damn it!

Our first attempt was no good- they did not have enough time to build up the honey reserves in time for winter.The position of our hive may not have helped- under the banana trees so it would get very shady and cold in the winter. We felt terrible-like a bad bee mummy and daddy. We pretended it never happened in our shame and may have gone on to never try again. If it weren't for Jason and Lisa. No worries they said we'll just give you some more-SWEET! Given the second chance we started in spring this time and have enjoyed a good six months of bees pollinating the gardens. Yesterday we decided it was time for a small harvest day and Toby was bravely calm and helped with the harvest.

We just took the top off-gave them a sprinkle of icing sugar- used the hive tool to separate some bars lifted them out, dusted off the bees and then we had a container full of the coolest looking honey comb. So simple- although Dave did get stung a few times- Toby and I were fine with no stings. I love the fact that you don't need to smoke the Bees as they do with traditional beekeeping. It is all part of the magic of beekeeping-remaining calm with bees flying around-knowing that if you do get stung it is really going to hurt! I love the challenge of remaining calm in the face of pain. Anyway we had a little surprise - the bees had built the comb perpendicular to the bars- not how it is meant to be-and we think because we put too many bars in to begin with. But we were still able to harvest about six combs-which has given us about 2kg of honey! The cool thing is there is a lot left in the hive- we harvested not even a quarter and will leave the rest for the bees to make it through the winter. 2kg Lofty Meadows Honey-YUM!

Catch up time

Shame Shame!..almost a year since our last post- Time goes by and nothing stands still at lofty Meadows! We have had fun car trips to Sydney, attended a wedding on a tropical island, we have been given a sail boat and amongst other things built a 20 metre Rainbow Serpent Dragon. Perhaps we were also distracted by the many months of no rain..followed closesly by the crazy flooding. Once again for us flooding mostly means MUDSLIDES! and we had plenty of days of mud shovelling. Every hill that has had any type of earth works done is high risk of sliding and it is so important to stabilise these banks with planting. This can be tricky when dealing with deco-not very plant friendly but there are good species that are fairly adaptable to the hard soils. We mostly use lomandra, dianella and cordylines and we desperately need to propagate many more for more erosion control.

Storms and wild weather also can mean no power for us and in late January this year we had over four days of no power. In retrospect the romance of the situation is strong no computers to work on at night, a lot of guitar playing and cosy candle lit dinners. In reality I also remember many hours spent at the laundromat particularly as everything was covered in MUD! New planting are going in and fingers crossed they will keep the soil strong for the next seasonal deluge.

More updates to come on sailing, tiling and giant puppet adventures.

Bonjour!

Already two weeks that we are with Vanessa, Dave and their childrens as helpers. Time flied!

Once received very kindly by the family, we immediately began work with housing for an old caravan that was not without charm. We were very pleasantly surprised by their hospitality and the fabulous food that was served every day.

The family had a garden of 5 hectares at the foot of Mount Glorious in the humid forest, the work was not lacking. The vegetation is very invasive, weeding, slashing, cutting and planting were our most common activities. The garden has an incredible diversity of plants. After discovering the flora, native wildlife is quickly coming to us. Of the first day, a 3-meter beautiful snake had taken up residence in the kitchen.
We also everyday activities like picking fruits and vegetables from the garden, feed the animals of the barnyard.



Another activity that we could practice our greatest pleasure, is printing on clothing. In fact, Vanessa is very active in her association Upa tree that produces and prepares representations Puppets giants. To raise funds to make the pupetts we were introduced to create patterns on bags, t-shirt, ... The days were always very happy impressions and friendly. We were even able to attend the sale at a market and  attend one of the days when the association met to make the puppets.

This family very patient,  helped us to improve our English. Dave and Vanessa have also shared their lifestyle, their typically Australian expressions like "pardon my french"(expression peu glorifiante pour nous français; à dire pour s'excuser daprès avoir dit une injure). In addition, they took us with them to go to the "Sorry Day". In a public garden, music and testimonies were very moving. Being almost part of the family, we accompanied them at the violin concert of their daughter.

Not to mention the festive evening of Friday nights : ukulele, cocktail parties and giant Jenga!


Thank you for these two great weeks with you!

It's a delicious time at Lofty Meadows

After many months maintenance in the strawberry patch the rewards are finally starting to fruit. We picked quite a few kilo's yesterday and there are many more to come. The peaches are all looking sweet and plump. We have set up a fruit fly trap to protect our lovely harvest- a plastic bottle with a little bit of vegemite and water in the bottom and apperently it helps if you paint the doorway yellow. We have picked many kilo's of tomatoes and potatoes. Delicious roma and big plump cherry tom's. Fantastic in salads and also great for making chutney. My first batch of chutney only lasted two days before it was devoured by the hungry hoards.

Our first row of carrots is still producing nicely and we have planted a second row of both beetroot and red core chantenay carrots. The first of the corn silk has shown and we are following up with successive plantings. Our last helpers Alexi & Carol kept them selves very busy in the garden and planted a whole swathe of sunflower seeds and we are really looking forward to them growing.