Skills + Empowerment = Resilience
In our workshop on making a swale without using soil we use compost lasagne along the contour to catch and store water and make new soil. We used lots of layers of old building waste – timber, a bit of biochar, ash, cardboard paper mache, grass clippings and leaves. This gave us a rich Hugelkultur method of creating soil.
In 1956 someone built a path. Not a lot of thought needed to go into the path. People trod this path every day back and forth people as they walked to the letterbox, to friends houses, to school, to uni, to work, to orchestra, to the buses, to the city, to the beach, and sometimes to the rest of the world. But the path had a dark side. It also worked very well to harvest water and direct it straight to the house. So, finally, we built a new path that is happily compacted and maintained by the foot-traffic and …