1-Acre Property Transformed into Thriving Permaculture Homestead! – Limestone Permaculture Farm

I think we'll keep the skins on these potatoes too because they're fairly new potatoes. So lovely to have good, fresh, organic permaculture grown produce to work with every day. It's been a real game changer for me and my health, especially the health of our family, but with me coming back to good health after all these years. We're really looking forward to our event tomorrow. We've got I think about 60 people coming at this stage. They're coming here for a nice day of celebration of 15 years here on the farm, 10 years of teaching here at Limestone and celebrating us and the farm, but also celebrating them as well. Honey, are you there? Yeah. Hello. Can you grab me a few things for Sunday's event? Is that okay? Oh, I certainly can. Start prepping. So what I need is some pumpkin. When I first found out about permaculture, it was described to me more like gardening. And even to now, I would say it is. Gardening us, gardening your land, gardening your life, for sure. But I realised later as I researched deeper, it was so much more. It was the framework to your life. There isn't a part in your life where the fundamentals of permaculture and the ethics and the principles did not underline. One of the big gains from permaculture is the understanding of relationships and patterns. Everything, every part of our life, there's a relationship with everything and there's a pattern with everything we do. If you can understand the patterns in your life, you'll understand there's only really three. Beneficial, neutral and detrimental. And for my mind, I'm always trying to make the detrimental and the neutral into beneficial. In the natural world, it is all pattern. Hey, my guys. Got some turmeric leaf. Here we go. For us, myself, my wife, Nikki, my daughter, Bronnie and my son, Trey, our real journey started around 2002. We were living in Mayfield, a suburb of Newcastle, on a very tight urban block, 330 square metres, which meant we had like courtyard and a little front verge. And around that same time, Nikki started noticing issues with her health. Our awareness became acute on especially the food we ate. So one of the immediate changes we could make was to actually start growing our own food and being a little bit more organic in the way we ate. And that was the spark. That was the kickoff. And slowly but surely, we found out about this thing called permaculture. Food hasn't always been a passion of mine. Certainly not cooking. When I met Brett, I couldn't even boil an egg, to be honest. I learnt how Bronte learnt. You just keep doing it day to day and you keep practising. Living on a farm especially, I've had the opportunity to live by the seasons and I've been able to work with beautiful organic produce. Fast forward to 2007. We've been getting into permaculture a little bit, a lot into gardening, a lot into the community gardens. Five years has passed. Nikki has still got her health issues. We're still trying to sort that out. But our life is changing. We had a goal to move to the country and to grow more veg and to be more self-sufficient. And we always had a vision that once we knew how to do that, that we would share the knowledge with other people. Financially, we had to be very careful with a very tight budget and time. Both of us were working full-time jobs. So we had to find a place where we could still drive back to our jobs. And we finally settled on a place just north of Stroud called Stroud Road. So with the luxury of selling our house and then being able to move up and remove part of our debt, which was one of the big considerations for us, was paying less for the place and reducing what we owed. That was incredible. Hey, bub. I've got you the list and more. Wow, that's not a bad harvest, is it? Beautiful. Do you need a hand in with that? Yes, please. Okay, what would you like taking first? We brought learnings, research and understanding, all driven from permaculture. As part of that site analysis that we took for this property was scale of permanence. PA Yeoman, an incredible Australian, who came up with this scale of understanding what was the most important to the least important when you're first working with the land and with structure and all the rest of it, climate, topography. And so we used the scale of permanence and permaculture design process to then understand why this property was so special. So then when we inspected this property and we found it to have a gentle slope, had a beautiful northeast aspect, good in rainfall at around 1100 millimetres per year, that's pretty decent. So it was ticking a lot of those scale of permanence boxes, which meant that it gave us a chance to fast track our vision. And our vision being a place of green, a place of natural beauty, a place of wildlife and domestic life and somewhere where our children could walk through and feel like they're on something bigger than one acre. Medicine all around us, growing everywhere. Health, happiness, which would come naturally with living in a place like that. And there was another part to our story, and that other part to our story was we actually felt an urge to educate. I feel like now that my health has improved so much that I'm only just starting my journey as a teacher. All the things that I've learned over the years, my intention now is to share them with others as much as I can, to encourage others to take food and nutrition back into their hands. It's been foundation to better gut health. I mean, you build your soils up to grow nutritious food and you need to do the same with your own gut. Everybody has to have a starting point. And for us, when we turned up at this property, it was 4,240 metres of grass with a house and some sheds and maybe a couple of mulberry trees and a citrus. There wasn't much on it. Looking back at our urban permaculture journey, I can appreciate what I've learned from small space living. So it gave us spatial awareness, which is absolutely crucial. So whether you've got 100 acres or whether you've got 300 square metres, it does not matter. It's about what you get from the space you actually utilise. Part of our vision was to be relatively self-sufficient in many of the things that we need to do on the farm. But the importance of that self-sufficiency was to become community sufficient. So what could we contribute back to the community? As part of our community give back, we're hosting our limestone 15th year on the farm birthday, where we are bringing as many of our community in as we can fit. We can't thank people enough, honestly. I mean, this farm itself, you know, we'd plan and we'd produce and we'd keep the homesteading wheel turning. But without you guys, there is no heart. There's no pulse. There's no heartbeat. You guys are the heart of the farm and the heart of the farm, aren't they? You know, we could do what we're doing. But with you guys here, it makes just so much more special. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it. Thank you. Would you like to cut the cake? How do I feel now? 15 years on from the start of limestone, but getting close to 24 years or so, maybe a little bit longer in the full journey of meeting permaculture. Gratitude. I'm happy. I'm doing the things that I want to be doing. I'm in amongst people I want to be with. I'm educating. I'm being educated. Family is healthy. The fact that you can just stroll out and pick all kinds of food at any time of the year, sit on a milk crate and hang out with the turkeys. We don't want to be anywhere else. It's not an easy life, what we do. Moving to the country is, for us, is not the slow. It's a beautiful life. It's a very rewarding life. But it's exhausting. But it's that exhausting that you go to bed at night going, I've had a really, really full day. And I've lived every minute of that day as best and as intentional as I can.