Things have been busy and our directors meeting got put off until today. Linda and I have these annually to discuss where we are going with the Choko Tree Farm and how we are going to get there, to analyse successes and failures and come up with new ideas for the next twelve months.
So today we reviewed the documentation we have been generating over the last 12 months on how we will run the farm –
-
Missions Statement – succinct and to the point, but more importantly still relevant, so no change.
Vision Statement – Again, we went through it and apart from identifying that while we were doing well, some areas were not being addressed. Also one (highly embarrassing) “to” instead of “too” and a bit of punctuation left out causing a sentence to be a bit clumsy. These were corrected.
Goals – We have goals for energy, water, waste, food, community and livelihood and these were reviewed and considered to be still appropriate, but Linda wanted to add a new one under Time Management - “Work towards making use of time more effectively, developing time and space for relaxation”. That will be included in the goals.
Documents for the two remaining sections of the document hierarchy – Strategies and techniques – will be completed during the next 12 months.
Next we worked our way through what we had done and any new directions. By and large we had done pretty well and were able to tick off over a dozen items from our “to do” list. The two big winners were –
1. High efficiency irrigation techniques in the front and back yard – While taking quite a bit of time, research and effort they have proved themselves well worth it. There are currently only 3 patches in the back yard (1 x 2 metres long and 2 x 3 metres long) without irrigation and I should have that corrected within the next couple of weeks. The new irrigations systems have allowed me to reduce the amount of water being used to less than 40% of a full watering as well as being much quicker.
2. Going Off Grid – this required some investment in new nickel iron batteries, controlling electronics and some extra solar panels but it is now in and operating. I flicked the changeover switch today and we are off grid with the exception of the aircon and the electric boost for the solar hot water. It would have been just too expensive to size the system for these rarely used large loads, so they will remain on the grid, but taken care of by our 1 kW back-to-the-grid system.
For the next year, two new things came up which we are going to be working on –
1. While we have about 12,000 litres of water storage it is not enough so we are going to be looking as increasing that. We are going to be reviewing our options but don’t have a lot of extra room so we are going to have a look at the under-the-house style bladders and fence tanks, among others.
2. To increase our resilience and spread the love we are looking at going in with some friends to grow food on their land and then share the harvest. We are looking at tomatoes and a complex of sunflowers, drying beans and wheat to give us an oil, protein and grain crop.
So this year has been a big year and it looks like next year will be even bigger, and even more interesting!
