Getting the House in Order - A departure from Chaos

We are riding on a wave that has been carrying us for some years now. I am ready to get off it. In large part it has been in dealing with my in-laws multi-generation accumulation of physical, material possessions. To say the least it has had a huge impact on me.

I will call this Stuff. Not just any Stuff, but old Stuff, cheap Stuff, important Stuff, sentimental Stuff and what has probably become one of my favourites to deal with, stuffed Stuff.

Stuffed Stuff is easy. You chuck it or recycle it. Or in extreme cases dispose of it in the responsible manner required as in dealing with chemicals, poisons or medication.

Old Stuff and Cheap Stuff are happy companions. We dealt with some of these through garage sales, private sales, collectors sales and trailor loads of charity shop visits or their collection points.

Scattered throughout all the Stuff we would find Important Stuff. Paperwork, photos and official documents. I will also include in this hand written letters describing defining moments in the families history and other such items. This we have documented and stored appropriately in acid free paper or filed for easy reference.

Sentimental Stuff is challenging. Especially when it is linked to emotions that are probably best dissolved and moved on from. But it is hard for some people to do this and I know it has been extremely difficult for my mother-in-law. Some of this Stuff defines her. Some of it gives her reason and justification for being how she is. Some of it has claimed and consumed so much of her time that even in a state of Stuffed Stuff it is still somehow deemed worthy of holding onto.

I may not hold any professional qualifications but after years of dealing with this issue firsthand I will stand by a very resolute opinion that much of my in-laws ill-health and mental well-being is directly as a result of hoarding so much Stuff. Two houses worth of it. There was no escape from it except the odd stay with friends, family or in a hotel room.

The underlying chaos of having too much stuff.

Much of it was dealt with by myself. Mostly for the reason that I was the only able-bodied male in the family to be able to shift all this Stuff around and there came an inevitable point some years ago - which my in-laws did not heed my warning about - that my wife and I would soon be expecting our first child and neither of us would have the time or the inclination to deal with sorting out Stuff.

What has this got to do with Permaculture?

Everything. I will start with two major points.

How can you live any form of a sustainable life if you can't sustain yourself? That is your physical, psychological and spiritual well-being.

The second point is that in all my dealings with this Stuff I have seen so much time and money and opportunities wasted that I shudder to think of what possibilities might have existed for my in-laws and for us had none of us had to deal with this sort of Stuff in the first place. The extra time there would have been. The extra money to see to health issues and to enjoy holidays or to even renovate the family holiday home. Instead, the insidious disease of hoarding possessions held its firm grip over them.

I will chronicle some of my experience with this issue to share what I have learnt and to act as a warning. Not just to those that can benefit from this sharing, but also for my family to look back on so as not to repeat any of it. This is the story of how we got our house in order ...

Woolworths, Consumers and a bit of a Rant

Bare with me. Mr Petit Paradis is ticked off and I'm not happy.

WARNING! This post is littered with links so that you can fill out the big picture in your own time and get a sense of where I'm coming from.

I had a pretty good childhood. I was fortunate to have lived in a wealthy country (Australia), in a great part of the world (Perth, Western Australia). I enjoyed a wide-ranging plethora of activities. Particularly outdoor activities, though I wasn't your average aussie minor, I also enjoyed regular bushwalking and birdwatching. In my teens I lived on my mountain bike and my mate and I would traverse rather lengthy distances along the coast. Much of this area was sand dunes and scrubland heath. Today, from the view on Google Maps it is roof tops and bitumen. Such is change.

So much has changed in the world since I grew up too.

Home computers were just coming out. Commodore 64

Video was making it into the mainstream, albeit Beta then VHS.

There were 'mobile' phones the size of a house brick but this was fine when you look back at the size of the television sets in comparison to today.

My point, though probably poorly made, is that change has been rampant. So I look at some of the stuff my own children have and I'm partly filled with awe (there are some fantastic wooden toys on the market and the new Lego stuff is both amazing and unsettling to me). But I'm also saddened.

Some of the stuff is so cheap and nasty and so seemingly futile that it fries my mind to think of how much energy has gone into something made in China - and what it's going to be doing in landfill after the week it has been used and destroyed. This is a generous time frame by the way, some toys last only a day as I'm sure other parents can testify to.

It’s probably just me. Alone here with my thoughts on the subject. But, the recent offering of superheroes tokens for kids from Woolworths supermarket disturbs me. Immensely.

I was really taken by the offer of free fruit for the kids. Nice work Mr Woolworths and Jamie Oliver. There was something tangible and real, and kind of half nourishing about the thing.

But this tokens thing irks me. What is the message? “Here sweet child, take these tokens as a reward of your parents consumption levels.”

I look at a lot of stuff these days and think, “If they dug this up in some post-landfill era in the distant future (which, lets face it –they might, after-all it’s made of plastic), would they really care?”

I may remain a little bit isolated by my opinion on this subject and I’m not even offering up any solutions or alternatives in a nice, friendly pro-active way. Which leads me to speculate on what might happen if Woolworths didn’t even offer the nicely packaged tokens in the first place. The silence may continue forever, would anyone really care aside from Woolies executives?

For me it makes the lyrics from Peter Garrett's song It Still Matters To Me, rather more poignant.

We all take an escalator to that Woolies in the sky
To reprise Dante’s inferno no longer in disguise

Haunting. Sometimes it is as though we are already in a living hell. But that's getting a bit deep.

Here is what we don't see in our consumer society - and I suspect we don't think about it either.

• The pollution created to manufacture and distribute these plastic tokens.
• And what of the manufacturing of the individual packaging? How much more environmentally un-friendly do they want to be?
• What is the intrinsic, real worth of such tokens? I'm sure there are other more worthwhile things that parents and grandparents can give their adoring young-folk.
• Is it not encouraging a collecting and consuming culture in our kids? Like they need it!

For me the kick in the teeth is the utterly and completely pretentious 'worth' placed on each token. Woolworths gives out ONE token for every $20 spent in the store. You can look at this in two ways. Twenty bucks for a token might seem rather expensive when you come to think of it.

I don't know about you, but to me, one of those tokens should cost way more than $20 when you stop to take into account the real cost of bringing it to your local store and the cost to the environment, both now and into the future.

* 17th May 2017 - Even plastic in the shape of farm animals would be better than a token, surely?

The Rabbit Tractor Update

There was quite a bit of satisfaction to the day. It's dark now and there is a dog barking in the distance. There is a swelling of frog chorus coming up from the valley amidst the relative quiet otherwise. It’s been a productive day, though I only ever seem to scrape the surface of what I would like to achieve. However, the sun was out today and it got quite warm around lunch time. As has been the pattern for most of autumn which has been really nice.

I tended to garden duties with the aid of my 5 year old who has the task of feeding the quails, rabbits and guinea pigs.

Given the great weather I decided to continue with the rabbit tractor construction. It is becoming more of a priority as the young kits are growing so fast and although I moved them last week they don't appear to be far off needing a bigger space again.

So far I have managed to build it with materials that were readily available. The base is a mattress ensemble frame of pine. that was going to get thrown out. The slats are just wide enough to make a great bottom and allow some support to the structure whilst allowing grass to grow through. I have reinforced this with strong wire to prevent the rabbits from digging through and burrowing out.

The trusty old Black & Decker power drill has seen a few decades of home DIY.

Reticulation pipe added in for wire support.

Bamboo stakes secured with wire to add some framework for the wire covering.

I cut out some large holes in each corner and in the middle of the sides to put in some old reticulation pipe that I had from the dismantled aquaponics system from a few year back. I’d had to pack the system up for moving. I like aquaponics very much and I plan to employ a slightly different, more natural slant to the concept in the new garden.

I had a little bit of small person help for a while before it got a bit ‘boring’ and the Lego beckoned. Our boys are very comfortable in the garden, but they do get up to mischief and need to be watched, so it's always nice to be able to keep them entertained and close by.

Hammering in some nails.

Notes From Ground Level

An incredible diversity of 'weeds' covers the disturbed sand.

Here is a journal entry from 2012.


Today is Friday the 13th of April 2012.

One of the most significant changes over the last few months has been my natural leaning towards 'raw foods and wild edibles'. In retrospect it is something that has been coming for some time and for a multitude of reasons. It seems that now it is appropriate to give it a go. It is early days yet, but I feel like it is the most natural thing.

How it has affected things is interesting and I do hope to record them as I notice them because otherwise they will pass quickly and become second nature and I won't properly recall the transition that was made.

As I was watering the garden this afternoon I noticed to my delight all the weeds popping up with the autumn showers and the ample sun we have been having. I say with delight because I have been using many of them for green smoothies and in salads. Nasturtiums have been coming out everywhere after I left them to roam over summer and drop their seeds. Many of the new seedlings have been attractive to the cabbage moths and have the green caterpillars on them which I usually lift from the garden whole and throw in to the chook pen. The fresh, new autumn nasturtium leaves I have also been using in salads.

I don't use any chemical sprays in the garden so I know that the weeds and plants that come up are fair game. Now it is a race between me and the guinea pigs as to who gets to them first. I've had my eyes on a lovely little dandelion seedling forming under the choko and noticed instantly the other morning that something had eaten half of the leaves off it. The little pigs had beaten me to it. It seems absurd in our society to be gleefully watching a weed evolve so you can eat it, let alone being in competition with a couple of free range guinea pigs over it. With that said, can you even consider the paradigm shift that would have to occur for your average person to make that leap?

This new dietary shift will have it's implications on the garden for sure. For a start weeds will be allowed and encouraged to grow where they appear. If the situation is good they may be encouraged by picking leaves only, otherwise the whole plant will come out.


It makes for an interesting retrospection for me. My current practice has been to sieve garden soil from the chook pen to replenish the containers used to grow salad greens. I usually sow my vegetable seeds straight in and before they come up there is a diverse range of 'weed' seedlings growing. These get thinned out and either used for our salad with dinner or given to any number of animals for feed from guinea pigs to quail to rabbits or fish.

We have been harvesting abundant quantities of purslane from the other block. Following the initial earthworks, thistles and purslane popped up all over the sand which we harvested in late summer and chopped up for salads.

The New Transition to Paradise

The image above was taken just after moving into our house. I always knew the grass was going to go, and in time it did. Rather quickly in fact.  With the increased bio-diversity I noticed that birds didn't just move through our garden, they moved into our garden.

This is the garden around 2013/14. A magical playground for our two small boys who didn't miss the grass one bit. It was sometimes frustrating having unripe fruit picked, but it was a unique learning experience each and every time they ventured into the backyard.

This image above was from an early post titled Grass is for Parks. It is one of my favourite pictures of our garden taken in summer 2012 when our first son was only weeks young. It was a humid summer and the garden was just an oasis. Water chestnuts, bananas, squash, beans tomatoes, corn, berries, sweet potatoes.... fresh eggs....

This is the kind of little paradise I am hoping to transfer to the block in the image below. It is much larger in comparison, but still a modest size to manage the elements I wish to include, so as to provide for a growing family and continue my efforts at natural seed saving practices.

The underlying process that we initially used to set up the first garden will be adopted to set up  the next garden. The scale will be different, but there are more of us in the house now (increased food scraps) and we also have the addition of extra assistance in the form of chooks, rabbits, guinea pigs and quail. We only had guinea pigs early on when we set up the first garden. The chickens came much later. We will have the advantage of having them right from the start to get things going. My goal is to build soil rapidly and to document the process in more detail. As you may be able to see the basic structure is coastal sand.

Book Of Kin

The slope of rampant grass and stacked wood is soon to become our new Petit Paradis (or Kin's Domain).

About 4 years ago my wife and I were introduced to The Ringing Cedars of Russia series of books. We read the ones that appealed the most, at the time. I don’t recall the names, but I bought two books from the series for my wife to read while she was in hospital with our second child.

Part of what captivated Mrs Petit Paradis with this book series are the concepts of a Kin's Domain and a Book of Kin. Both are notions I have mused over previously, but in the series these concepts are written about through the context of a typically young, Russian couple who consciously set about creating a space of love for themselves and future generations. This space becomes the Kin’s Domain. They use their skills of observation and intuition to plant out trees and organise vegetable gardens, site and build a house and basically set things up to be happy, healthy and to their best ability, self-sustaining within a community setting.

I resonate with this idea. After all, it is basically what we are doing with our current house. The impact of such a thing is really starting to sink in though, as I refelct on what is occurring with our new build and the planning for the new garden. The house we are having renovated has been in my wifes family for a long time and we are the ones giving it an overhaul and bringing in a new and positive energy to it.

The garden is going to be started from the bottom up, so I am excited to teach my family the real process of building soil. I plan to document this process on this blog.

So, enter The Book Of Kin.

In the Ringing Cedars series they discuss a Book of Kin as being a journal that the family uses to record their experiences in building and growing their Kin’s Domain. My wife and I have used a garden journal to record the birth dates of pets, planting times of vegetables and extreme weather events and such things. Part of this is documented in this blog and I plan to continue this recording with renewed vigor. As I posted recently - this blog Petit Paradis, is virtually a Book of Kin for my own family, who will also be able to look back over the building process and the setting up of the garden. They will of course be helping alongside, but as our kids grow they will be able to look over posts like a family photo album and use it as a reference for future planning in the garden.

So, with these concepts in mind, this is the context for which the posts that follow exists.