World Famous Permaculture Property Tour David Holmgren and Su Dennett's Melliodora

I'm Sue Dennett and this is my partner David Holmgren and we're here at Melliodora in Hepburn in central Victoria. So Melliodora is situated on the edge of Hepburn Springs which is a very small town of a few thousand people. So we're effectively in a suburban street but on two and a quarter acres just under a hectare of land. In building this house, for me, the thing that I was most passionate about was passive solar design. The idea that houses can largely heat and cool themselves in Southern Australian climates without the use of much in the way of augmented heating and no mechanical cooling. Building with natural materials was also, for me, a given. So mud brick as a material, very little in the way of embodied energy, great thermal mass, not such good insulation, but a great structure to hold up the roof. And the other was of course timber and my passion for trees, sustainable forestry. So, designing the house around those materials with passive solar design and to minimise the use of electricity, certainly no use in heating or water heating, and also to build in wood as the secondary form of energy for cooking, for hot water and backup space heating. The kitchen was an important place for me because I have a very strong focus on food. So the kitchen for me was was really good in terms of having a wood stove that gave me the possibility of learning how to use the wood that we had locally and that we could gather ourselves and I found that a very lovely family process to go out and collect wood a couple of times a year. Another feature of the kitchen was the cool cupboard instead of a big refrigerator. The cool cupboard draws air from underneath the house in contact with the ground which then rises by convection up the column of the cupboard and so it's a very simple technology. It's not a fridge but it means it's much more suitable for storage of many things and so we just have a small underbench fridge and that's been adequate for us all these years. Living a lifestyle like we do, a self-reliant one, means that you do many, many things and so you get pretty good at cutting the corners off, if you like. In building with a permaculture design framework we took it for granted that the area immediately around the house would be intensive food production. The primary vegetable growing areas, high value trees, maybe trees that actually need a special microclimate like kiwis and other things that will help the microclimate of the house and also that need a lot of attention that are a close to where you can see them. That also has the spin-off that that creates an environment which is naturally fire retardant. And it's also part of the microclimate modification. So the grapevine arbor on the north side is a critically important part of the shading structure which is there in the summer and the autumn, but not there in the spring and winter. So it works with the passive solar design. The main feature of Zone 2 is an extensive orchard of mostly drip irrigated deciduous fruit and nut trees. And it's where the animals range too, the geese that live in that orchard converting a lot of the grass to manure and eating a lot of the fallen fruit and helping control pests. It's also where the chooks get out from their deep litter yard on the edge of the Zone 1, Zone 2 system and get out to free range and also where the goats they can be in some parts of that at times too. All of that animal activity is managed from a sort of a hub of the small farmyard which is on that That interface between those two zones, which is really Sue's department. And it's my department, his department is plants and of course you can imagine there are tensions between those two so it's nice I advocate for the animals and he advocates for the plants that are giving you a service, you must also provide a service for them. It took me a lot of years to actually learn enough about goats to feel that I'm relatively on a par with what they give If they give to me, I can give back to them. Right from the beginning we identified there should be two houses on this piece of land. The second house which took till after the turn of the millennium to actually start thinking about implementing was variously called the cottage or the studio. The motivation for actually then building that was my aging mother coming to live with us. The other building on the property we call the tea house. Thank you for joining us. After the Japanese tea house style and size. But it's also a tiny house if you like. Brenna Quinlan, the illustrator of our Retro Suburbia book. He's actually the resident there currently and so yeah, there's now three semi-autonomous households sharing the gardens and sharing the facilities. So as well as the very early and substantial earthworks for the house, we did earthworks building two dams on the property in the natural gully that ran through it and that was critical for irrigation in the summer. So those dams and the construction were very early in the design process. In a lot of ways they preceded the house earthwork design because they are Determined by the shape of the land, one of those things about choosing this property is that it was surrounded by strips of land, road reserves they're called. All those areas just grew blackberries and weeds and we took on the job of managing those areas, of slashing them so they're fire safe, planting trees. I spend quite a lot of time with the goats doing fire vegetation management. That's a great pleasurable thing to spend that time with them to make sure that you have a fire safe environment in your primary fire sector. The blackberries were sort of 12-15 feet high in some places and the whole gully was full of them and it's much more park like now. That aim is to try and create a canopy of fire-retardant trees that will shade out the blackberries and allow ecological succession to move along to its next stage. We don't distinguish greatly between the public and the private and it seems that you shouldn't think that you have to own a piece of land to feel that you're part of it and to feel I feel duty towards that piece of land to try to understand its needs. and how they work in accordance with your needs. I think the biggest changes that we're seeing in permaculture now is the focus on people and people interactions. So the social side of permaculture. At the present time we have fossil fuels as our slaves and so we're not dependent so much on the interaction. And I think for me The most important thing is the behavioural adaptations, not the physical adaptations of buildings, etc. We don't need huge numbers of people to change the behaviour to make a big impact. That, I think, has been always underestimated.