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Village Dreaming with Mara Ripani
1.1k Plays7 months ago
I just polished off my last jar of blackberry jam and it’s only April, which is why I need today’s guest to assist me in the finer arts of sustainable homesteading.
It’s Mara Ripani of Village Dreaming and Orto cooking school, a force of and for nature with a passion for greening cities, growing food, permaculture, preserving food, baking bread and sowing seeds.
Mara is about as earthed as its possible to be while still having a social media presence, propagating skills of from-scratch cooking, foraging, fermenting, soap making and seasonal attunement from her breathtaking solar passive farmhouse here in Central Victoria.
In this conversation, you’ll hear Mara’s alarm go off a couple of times telling her she needs to tend the bread, and you might too hear us chewing on dried plums, sipping on fragrant bay leaf tea that Mara poured for me on arrival.
This chat feels really apt as we move towards the colder months, one last hurrah of abundance and colour and harvest before we drop all our leaves, exposed and ensconced for winter.
Mara’s home on the web ~ Village Dreaming
Floral syrup recipes (including Mugolio ~ pine cone syrup)
Take a tour of Village Dreaming
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Transcript
Introduction to Resculience and Indigenous Wisdom
00:00:06
Speaker
Hey, this is Katie, and you're tuned into Resculience, a podcast about skills, the resilience they bring, and living closer to the ground so we don't have quite so far to fall if our fragile modern systems fail us. I'm recording on unceded Jara country, lands of the Jaja Wurrung people, who know better than to call this month, April.
00:00:30
Speaker
This is Warrak and Boracal season. Banksia and Parrot. The dry heat of high summer finally quenched by cooling rains. Parrots feast on flowering eucalypts. People sip Banksia nectar.
Seasonal Living and Self-Care Practices
00:00:45
Speaker
It's a good time to collect sap from silver and black wattle. It's a good time to find fungi erupting from piles of dung. It's a good time to see adult rain moths, the size of sparrows crawl up and out of the underworld from where they've spent years munging on tree roots as grubs to finally emerge for one wild day of sex and egg bombing. It's also a time of year that a lot of locals think about leaving.
00:01:13
Speaker
I remember being at an airport in South Korea at the beginning of winter and seeing racks upon racks of black and white puffer jackets. They weren't for sale. They were stowed and awaiting the return of their owners who'd flown off to tropical destinations.
00:01:30
Speaker
I imagined each tanned and sun-drunk traveller, some weeks later, reunited with their puffer jacket like a penguin coming home to its mate, picking them out in a sea of identical apparel and vomiting pilchards into their pockets. Many of us southern folk have made winter migration a habit, fleeing north before the frosts claim our toes and the fog cloaks our mood, leaving the garden to fallow.
00:01:58
Speaker
But if you're not skipping town this chilly season, if you're staying put like a tree, like a rock, like a shucked puffer jacket, like an expectant penguin, I'm pleased to tell you that wintering is itself a worthwhile skill. Wintering, like the dandelion and burdock and oak demonstrate, is about drawing energy down into your roots where it matters and not worrying so much about how ratty you look up top.
00:02:25
Speaker
Wintering is saying no to parties and yes to sharpening your secateurs by the fire with Leonard Cohen. Wintering is about recharging the aquifers, deliberately resting through the discomfort of not besting your performance.
00:02:40
Speaker
Wintering is levelling up your skills in accounting, apportioning your chestnuts and passata and blackberry jams so that they'll tide you over till next year. Wintering. It's a word I heard from Catherine May in her book of the same name. She says that wintering is an active acceptance of sadness, having the courage to face the darker and more difficult parts of ourselves.
00:03:04
Speaker
When you start tuning into winter, she writes, you realise that we live through 1,000 winters in our lives, some big, some small. To get better at wintering, we need to address our very notion of time. We tend to imagine that our lives are linear, but they are in fact cyclical. Wintering is an act of resilience for body, mind and society.
Meet Mara Rapani: Sustainable Living Advocate
00:03:30
Speaker
I just ate my last jar of Blackberry Jam and it's only April, which is why I need today's guest to assist me in the finer arts of sustainable homesteading.
00:03:40
Speaker
It's Mara Rapani, a local force of and for nature who I originally connected with years ago on the Future Studying podcast, dreaming into her stories during that interview and now finding myself part of her community. Mara is a wonderful storyteller and teacher with a passion for greening cities, growing food, permaculture, preserving food, baking bread and sowing seeds.
00:04:05
Speaker
Mara is about as earth as it's possible to be while still having a social media presence, propagating skills of from scratch cooking, foraging, fermenting, soap making and seasonal attunement from her breathtakingly beautiful solar passive farmhouse here in central Victoria.
00:04:23
Speaker
In this conversation you'll hear Mara's alarm go off a couple of times, telling her she needs to tend the bread. And you might too hear us chewing on dried plums, sipping on fragrant bay leaf tea that Mara poured for me on arrival. This chat feels really apt as we move towards the colder months, one last hurrah of abundance and colour and harvest before we drop all of our leaves, exposed and ensconced for winter.
00:04:51
Speaker
I might take a little break, not for long, perhaps a week or two, to collect myself and check in with how this podcast is tracking. So it's a great time to send me feedback or guest and topic suggestions, and you can do that at katie.com.au.
00:05:08
Speaker
or leave Rescilience an iTunes review, which helps people settling in for a winter of listening to find us. Thank you for listening and please enjoy this conversation with Mara Rapani of Village Dreaming.
Homesteading: Knowledge Sharing and Community Building
00:05:27
Speaker
It's quite nice.
00:05:30
Speaker
not knowing you very well and not having been here before because I can ask these questions from a place of like real genuine curiosity and aliveness because I just rocked up in your driveway and I don't know what I've stepped into. Is it heaven? It's so beautiful. What is this place?
00:05:49
Speaker
Thank you. I really love what I've created here, actually, what we've created here, because I'm here with my partner, Ralph, and it's a 15-acre property on beautiful volcanic soil.
00:06:05
Speaker
I often say to people who come here that I've been here or will be here for a tiny microsecond of time in comparison to those who came before me. But it's a Queen's School, it's a place for sharing all that I've learned. I just love what I've learned and I just want to share it so much. I've collected, all of us really, are collecting experiences and skills and knowledge and the opportunity to then pass them on is for me
00:06:34
Speaker
very exciting. I feel like I stepped into this world of colour and beauty and abundance and everything. I can feel the living spaces and the materials obviously.
00:06:53
Speaker
such a high quality and gleaned and harvested from the natural world. How have you gone about creating these buildings and these gardens? What's been your process?
00:07:05
Speaker
It has been a whole range of experiences, including wolfing experiences, living on permaculture farms. It's my own heritage, my partner's heritage. I came here from Italy in 1981. My partner's from Germany. Before buying this land, we'd just been to Europe. So we found ourselves even without really meaning to, we brought some of those sensibilities into this space.
00:07:27
Speaker
I really love wood and my partner loves wood so it was inevitable that we would use wood a lot in our buildings. I studied horticulture and I've got a huge passion for the way horticulture has a very positive impact on our lives and therefore there's the buildings which are straw and wood and then there's this very live, a live garden which I've created over the past
00:07:53
Speaker
eight years and I'm trying to cover every wall that I can with a climbing plant or with a shrub or with a tree. I want it to be an oasis of beautiful plants and of course because these plants help create a cooler microclimate for summer hot summer days. So yes I've nestled the skills that I have which are cooking skills, artisanal cooking skills, food preserving skills, sourdough bread baking with wild yeast
00:08:22
Speaker
Pastor making skills. What else do we do? I always forget what I do. But all these skills together in this one place that I can share with others who come to visit, including the Dream Team people. That's my new name now for people who are travelling, who come and stay with me.
00:08:39
Speaker
they are a dream team, they help and support the work here so much. I can't do it without them because having 15 acres, planting trees, all the things that happen on a site like this are very labour intensive and hence to have someone help plant while you're staking and tree guarding makes it all so much more, so much faster and so much better. Yeah, I really want to dig into how you create this
00:09:08
Speaker
welcoming and nurturing space for people from around the world because whenever I speak to someone about you and Village Dreaming and Orto, the nourishment and warmth and safety of the spaces that you create is unparalleled. So I'd love to speak to you more about
00:09:24
Speaker
that level of facilitation and holding that you do and I think you're so known for in this community. So I'm just going to put that there as something to come back to and touch on. But before we get to kind of philosophical and deep into the reeds and the weeds, what we're speaking about off air was that sometimes we lose those
00:09:44
Speaker
the details and the examples and the lived reality of your day. So I'm wondering if you could talk us through even what you've done today as a bit of a slice of life. Oh yes, today was interesting, yes. So today was starting off by
00:09:59
Speaker
So we made some sourdough bread last night, too tight to bake it, so put it in the fridge, took it out this morning to bring it to room temperature. Then this morning there's always feeding of the pigs, feeding the chickens and the geese, getting them back into their area. But I dropped in on a neighbour to drop off some bread for them because they had helped me yesterday with getting pigs back into their enclosure.
00:10:26
Speaker
And I was so grateful that I could call on Pete as my saviour when my partner was away. And so I dropped in bread to them and they said, oh, Mara, there's some free straw down at Vic Park as a result of Chilout Festival. I was like, free straw? Oh my God.
00:10:41
Speaker
literally raced home, hitched the trailer onto the back of the car, asked Selena and Moon, who are currently with me volunteering, we jumped into the car and made our way to Vic Park to see if the straw was there. But of course it's Thursday today, the festival ended on Sunday.
00:11:00
Speaker
as if there would be any straw left, but I hoped because straw is my absolute best friend in the garden. I cannot grow things without it. The mulching value is incredible. So anyway, there was no straw. It had all been taken. But I automatically put a date in my calendar for 2025, March the 10th, chill out or somewhere around this time,
00:11:22
Speaker
think of straw, sorry Chill Out Festival, I should be thinking only of the Chill Out Festival, but I'm thinking of the straw I might be able to grab at the end of the festival. And then on the way home I stop by to check on chestnut trees because I'm having a chestnut event and for it to be successful or you know in part it's about being able to forage the chestnuts at a dear friend who allows me to access his private property. The chestnuts are nowhere near
00:11:47
Speaker
knee ready and now I'm hoping that they will be in the next three weeks. Then we went by the tip, I hope this answer isn't too long but because we couldn't get straw it was like quick let's go to the tip and we just filled the back of the car with cardboard.
00:12:01
Speaker
Then we found some sheep's wool, a lot of sheep's wool. That makes amazing mulch as well. So we packed the car with sheep's wool as well. So, and then we stopped at my other neighbour's house to collect her trees are overflowing with fruit. There is so, so much fruit and it's not being harvested. There's just too much. And so we
00:12:24
Speaker
collected nashi pears and plums with the idea that we'll dehydrate them today so it was such a productive morning it's my absolute kind of morning i love it so much and not too long at all and that kind of specificity
00:12:40
Speaker
It's maybe good for us in this community and in this way of life to remember to all of the skills that we're utilizing every day, even in just one morning, because I heard this thread of resourcefulness, you know, like intercepting waste streams, something you're naturally doing.
00:13:00
Speaker
knowing when things are going to be ready to harvest and understanding how to get them before the cockatoos do. And even calling on your neighbour to thank them with a loaf of bread for helping you with something yesterday. There are so, so many hard and soft skills that I'm hearing in your answer.
00:13:19
Speaker
And I wonder, Mara, if you've always been really attuned to your place in that way and able to kind of intercept and redistribute and redirect resources.
Ecological Identity and Personal Purpose
00:13:32
Speaker
Or if these are ways that you've adopted gradually over time.
00:13:39
Speaker
My parents were a really good example of this. My dad was such, he would make conversations with complete strangers in the supermarket. And if they expressed any interest in anything Italian, be like, come over for lunch. I have really taken that from him as a way. And my mom, they were very, always very deeply interested in people and others. So I think I grew up observing that. And that was modeled very strongly in my upbringing.
00:14:08
Speaker
And as a result, it became quite easy. And I think, again, I'm just someone who really thrives on the stories of others and on having good, strong relationships. So it's really, I mean, it's gotten better and stronger to the point that, to what point? In some ways, no point.
00:14:30
Speaker
It's always been, yes, a part of how I thrive. There's a real clarity that those connections and resourcefulness makes me very excited. Finding something, a bag of leaves on the side of the road is pure treasure, you know, for me. And Narsi Pears, Leiden Tree, or I remember in Melbourne, Quince Trees that were sort of abandoned and on the way home riding and finding those. So being resourceful
00:14:59
Speaker
Absolutely yes, I mean I grew up in a household where my mum said to me
00:15:05
Speaker
From the age of four, I was switching off lights because my dad and my grandmother were very much that way in clients. So I learned very quickly. I feel like I've told this story before, but that's okay. That's what happens. That's a story before. Yes. Just, um, just, yeah, switching off lights has been as a way of being resourceful. It was really connected with me because if you're doing that at four, I mean, it really speaks to your personality. You can tell children's personality so quickly. And it was quite funny. My parents saying, yes, you'd switch them off.
00:15:34
Speaker
and your sibling would switch them on. There was just this difference, you know, these different approaches. But so I guess, yeah, it's always been there, really. It's made me tick, always made me tick that kind of way of being. Yeah, and those things that we know about ourselves from the earliest days of childhood,
00:15:57
Speaker
often remain and we actually have to remember our way back to really tune into what our maybe instructions are for this life or our niche really is. Do you have a sense of what your ecological niche is? Can you tell me more about what you mean by that? I like using that term over like purpose or career because I feel like we're actually creatures in an ecosystem and I am enjoying thinking about everything being really naturally
00:16:27
Speaker
giving its gifts, whether that's a bird pooing on the grass and helping the nutrients cycle to the body of a fish being taken into the mountains by a predator and helping that nutrient. It feels really natural that we have these gifts and niches and things we do as a matter of course in our life that then actually sustain the systems that we're part of and it stops me feeling so overwhelmed in this world when it's
00:16:55
Speaker
it can seem like our careers, you know, and our professional taglines are so removed from the living world. So I try and think about, yeah, what is my niche? What are those things that I loved as a kid or that I do really naturally that I'm giving to my community and place? And so I wonder what your sense of, you know, niching is and what your particular gifts might be. Okay. I think
00:17:24
Speaker
I think I really value the opportunity to, they're simple gifts, the opportunity to see people. I think I grew up with some adults who were not good role models. Some were amazing, but there were quite a lot that weren't. And that was, it allowed me to see how powerful it is to see people.
00:17:49
Speaker
I want to be able to see people. That's what I hope. That's my purpose in life, to really value the people around me, to value every interaction. Sometimes, again, when you state something, you don't want it to be black and white because there will be times when I don't see someone, but that's what I strive to do.
00:18:10
Speaker
I know that every interaction you have with every single person you come across has so much meaning in it. It can be the kind of interaction that makes someone feel appreciated and can make their day go in one direction or in a completely different direction.
00:18:31
Speaker
I hope to as often as possible be able to contribute positively to an experience because I know how much that is meaningful for me and
00:18:46
Speaker
And so my purpose is as simple as that and that is the foundation and core of everything I do and everything else, everything on top of that is layers of the cake and the icing and being with the classes. One thing I love about the classes is I'm someone who actually learns quite slowly. I'm not a very fast learner, a range of things.
00:19:13
Speaker
And what I found value in that is that because I don't get this super quickly, it means I am
00:19:21
Speaker
so much along the way. So when someone comes to me who's having problems with making bread, let's say, wildeasted bread, this wonderful, simple, exotic, intoxicating skill, I find I can really help them and give them an answer because I've come across all those challenges and barriers and have worked it out and have come out the other end. So these skills which are
00:19:50
Speaker
which are yes soft skills as we describe them but only because it's interesting also that language but really enjoyable valuable wonderful meaningful skills yes yeah thank you so much for your answer because that is honestly
00:20:13
Speaker
like my religion, this idea of why do we overlook what's right in front of us and that potential that we have to, as you said, really change the course of someone's day. I'm so glad you're here doing this work. I suppose when you were speaking about your upbringing and the kind of frugality that was role modelled to you, I was wondering then how you help people who come to this place who haven't had
00:20:43
Speaker
such a kind of wholesome start. How do you go about leading them towards this gentler existence? I think that the most horrible thing that can happen is when someone feels judged. And there's no perfection. And whenever I discuss this topic, I'm acutely aware
00:21:13
Speaker
of inconsistencies and contradictions. I often say to people in comparison to how my parents lived, I am a complete glutton. I mean, the wealth that we have in this generation is quite extreme in comparison to those that were born in the 40s and 50s. So even those of us who are conservationists are still using far more resources than those before us.
00:21:43
Speaker
And look, it's a beautiful thing. I just do my thing. I really love it. And then people who come to me are coming. It's funny because you don't want to sound like a cult, but people coming because they want to experience a kind of what I guess we describe as more of a down-to-earth way of life that is less consumeristic and less wasteful.
00:22:10
Speaker
I really love the rule, starting from rule. That's my favorite. It's just what I love. And so it's not...
00:22:19
Speaker
Even if climate change wasn't happening, even if there weren't those issues, perhaps, I suspect I would have loved that anyway. It's just such a thing that makes me tick to transform something from its raw ingredient or its raw material into something to the final steps. Because of this, we talk about stories often, but yes, there are stories there. There is a story in how that happened and how you collected it that is so enriching. And a story much bigger, I think,
00:22:50
Speaker
then you just picked it up off the shelf and it was already done and you just ate it and then you threw away the packet. I had this wonderful woman here who was trying to decide whether she wanted to quit her job. She had been working as a teacher in that role for 40 years. She was trying to imagine what did life, I think she was trying to imagine what could life look like outside of full-time work.
00:23:14
Speaker
40 years is such a long time. Oh my gosh, you're going to go crazy with all those alarms. Actually, that's what my life looked like, by the way. It is a lot of alarms that go off for bread or for this or for that. In fact, I have to pause because I just have to get the bread out of the oven.
00:23:34
Speaker
But yes, it was lovely to see someone being able to come here and reimagine what their life could look like and realizing that it can be so incredibly rich, whether it's working full time or not, it's so abundant, the opportunities that we have in this place, not just, I mean, my place, but in this place that we call Australia. So she had, it was being really wonderful. I've received several messages of
00:24:01
Speaker
from her saying, thank you for allowing me to see what I could be, you know, what life could look like beyond this. I hadn't even fully realised that she was on that journey when she came, but it became clearer and clearer as she was literally trying to decide, am I going to quit my job? Am I going to quit? And on the day, the day before she left, she said, I'm going to do it. And so she quit her job and
00:24:24
Speaker
and has started her new life. Now of course she was in the position where she could quit a job and therefore she did. So sometimes you are in that position but there's fear that you're not sure what's going to happen afterwards. Other times there's lots of imagining of what you could do but you don't have the option of quitting your job. But in her situation she had the option and she just had to visualize what life could look like. She was able to do it and off she went. So that was exciting. I'd actually love even more of those opportunities
00:24:52
Speaker
But then they're happening a lot, they're happening all the time. I mean Moon who's here at the moment, she would like to set up a place like this, so she wanted to experience. When I was traveling at 20 years of age and I was woofing, I was collecting bits and pieces from everywhere to put it together, to go, this is the life I want to lead.
00:25:12
Speaker
Yeah, so we're all doing that for each other really, aren't we? We really are. I mean, every interaction we're grabbing what we like and maybe what isn't working for us and putting it together to bespoke our existence. Knowing you, I feel like you're not one to just give unsolicited advice and a template, but if you were to guide people through that transitional process, what are some of the considerations? Like you mentioned that
00:25:38
Speaker
financially we can be in different positions to make big or smaller changes. But what can people start considering if they are feeling that that yearning to do life differently? I've always earned a very, very low income and that's always suited me because it's given me this life and I just enjoy this life so much. So I've given
00:26:03
Speaker
So I've made do without that, without the holidays overseas, the constant holidays here and there, because this suits me. So what is my life? I work full time on my property and being on my property full time means that
00:26:20
Speaker
to a large extent, I'm running a small business for the first time in my life, took me a while to even realise that's what it was, it was a small business. And with that, a small business is a place where there's a lot of ups and downs economically, like income is always changing and non-predictable, going from a government job that I had one of my previous jobs, or any other job really prior to this one, has a consistent pay element,
00:26:50
Speaker
In this, in a small business, you run the emotional rollercoaster that is, yay, oh no money, yay, no money, you know, just, or very little money, very little income. So, and so much of what I earn, I was talking, we were talking yesterday, we were saying, okay, actually I'm earning an okay amount, it's not even the minimum wage yet, but it's an okay amount, but it's just that I'm still spending most of it, and what am I spending it on? I'm spending it on,
00:27:19
Speaker
straw and plants and compost when I need extra compost or it just goes on a property like this. I'm on 15 acres. I'm trying to revegetate as much as possible. Irrigation, you know, just all sorts of things to keep a place like this ticking along. You're always managing that classic
00:27:40
Speaker
Boring statement, time and money. It's like, okay, today I'm going to go out and spend the better part of the day collecting cardboard so that I'm not buying another $300 worth of straw because that $300 and I have to make that $300. So I'm trying to be again a bit more resourceful in this time that things have gone a little quieter economically.
00:28:03
Speaker
And the joy of that, though, is going back to those permaculture roots of being really resourceful. While there was a period of going, no, I'll just buy it that way. I don't. I can just get on with the planting. Because, of course, if you're collecting, then you're doing less planting. So there's all this. If you get the straw delivered, you can focus on the planting, put the straw on, and get on to the next lot of planting. So you're always tossing things up like that.
00:28:31
Speaker
I think, yes. Often, yes, this lifestyle comes with less income. But another neighbour I was talking to today, we were both going, there's no way we could go back to an office job, even though at times they're like, oh, maybe I should go back to an office job for a bit of extra of that income stability, and then go, no.
00:28:53
Speaker
how often do you feel like you're kind of at that balance point on the wheel? Because I love, I don't know if you know Susan Weed, she's that cantankerous witch from the States. She's old kind of hardcore weed medicine woman. And she always says, there's no such thing as balance. Think about, you know, when you're riding a bike, your legs are going up and down, the wheels going around and around. It's actually, you know, tracking between extremes rather than this state of, you know,
00:29:21
Speaker
She said, if you're balanced, you're dead, you're flatlining. So I often wonder if other people experience those oscillation, life as a series of kind of oscillations rather than this ongoing sense of harmony. What's your feeling around like time and...
00:29:37
Speaker
the kind of skills you're learning and your state of confidence.
Financial Balance in Sustainable Living
00:29:42
Speaker
I don't know, like are you feeling at that sweet spot? I feel like everything is perfect. Except, no I know you're going to think, oh come on, everything is perfect. Except the income. I just want the, I want, oh well okay.
00:29:58
Speaker
I wish there were three of me but I always wish that because I also would love to do more dancing and more singing. I'm really just enjoying all the activities I'm doing and it really is at a point just where I would just like to be able to earn more income so that my partner can work less and I'm not, I'm just not there yet. I don't know if I will be, I don't know if that's possible and so therefore
00:30:25
Speaker
It's the first time that we've touched on this, my partner and I, in a while, where it's like, okay, how is it possible? How can it be possible for me to earn more so that you can actually stay home more? Especially considering he was the one who was like, let's go and live in the country. I'm like, okay.
00:30:41
Speaker
and then he has to spend a lot of time in Melbourne still. You made some really good points on the financial side of things though about actually clarifying where the money is going and how to circumvent some of those expenses because even
00:30:57
Speaker
examining our car usage and having a car at all. Like suddenly you could take 20 grand a year out of your budget if you were prepared to go without wheels. Oh my gosh, don't talk to me about cars, yes. I think absolutely yes and that's one of the challenges of living out of town and I've spoken about this before but just it makes us so incredibly reliant on the car.
00:31:20
Speaker
in ways that I never was back in Melbourne or I would have been if we'd lived in the heart of Dalesford. Absolutely that would be for me such an easy giveaway because we've got two cars at the moment and we could easily just have one
00:31:37
Speaker
For Ralph's work, I don't need a car at all. But being here, no, it's not possible. I do the pickups and my daughter catches a bus on the freeway, so I have to make my way to the freeway to collect her.
00:31:54
Speaker
the back roads are really really rough so I've got an electric bike the idea being being able to use it but I it's too rough on the bike it's just damages the bike and I don't want to be on the freeway so but yes but what you say yes there are so there are a lot of those opportunities sometimes go unseen even when you actually they are genuine opportunities for me here that example a specific example can't is not an opportunity but if I was living
00:32:21
Speaker
closer to town. And for a lot of people who are, it's a genuine chance to get cars that are incredibly expensive to run, to buy, to maintain. My daughters just moved to Melbourne and I said, if you can, we've got the car that we've had since 2006. It's really old. It's really, really old.
00:32:44
Speaker
and has done a lot of kilometers and i said if you can just don't don't even take it to melbourne just leave it here for when you're here but do without it because it's so it's such a money waster a car and you've got access to transport you've got a board or a bike the first thing i gave her when she moved out just use the bike you'll get so fit you'll get to know melbourne inside out
00:33:07
Speaker
And there's no car fines, no petrol, no registration, no insurance, no gym membership. It just goes on, yes. Sorry, deja vu as well, because we've talked a lot about this in previous podcasts. But it's really good to repeat, because we, I think, are oriented towards more. And if that's, you know, financial sense, it's how to earn more, which is legitimate. But there's so many things we can
00:33:34
Speaker
you know cut yes but we don't like doing that as much because it's not as sexy as getting more but i think it's a good practice to eyeball everything yes yes it is a good practice and i think again the cardboard is is is an example of that for us this morning going okay maybe i can do without the straw but straw you are such an amazing thing i have to say though you've got air pockets inside you which and you're fluffy and you
00:34:03
Speaker
place yourself in such a way that it creates this perfect moisture hub at the base of a root so I am really in love with using straw in my garden I have to say but no not for a while I'm going to restrain myself from buying more straw
00:34:19
Speaker
Well, we were some of the lucky ones who got a few bales from Victoria Park. Mick at Meliodora came back with his Ute load of straw and it was honestly like Christmas. It was the best day ever and I was just mulching, you know, ad infinitum to the garden yesterday. Even things that didn't need mulch was mulching the goats, mulching the veranda. It's like, yeah, what can I put this on? This is incredible. We're going to have compost for years from this and bedding. And yeah, so it's funny the way that
00:34:49
Speaker
your values kind of shift and the fetishes we have really shift as you pursue this kind of lifestyle. But as you were speaking to about, I guess we're talking about the cost of everything, the cost of living, I was reflecting that my biggest expense beyond my car is food.
Sustainable Food Production and Foraging Creativity
00:35:08
Speaker
And even though I earn a very small amount of money in dollar terms or wealth in dollar terms, I spend so much proportionately on food. And I think that's the way it should be unless you're providing the bulk of food for yourself. So I wonder, Mara, how much food you produce here and also how you
00:35:29
Speaker
run your household to kind of economise but also celebrate the beautiful food that we obviously both love and value. During the summer month I produce a lot of food and that is very exciting. We've been having meals constantly from the garden for months now so it's cucumbers and eggplants and zucchinis in all sorts of different meals and
00:35:50
Speaker
beautiful pumpkins, a gorgeous harvest of these beautiful orange heirloom pumpkins that you can cook in five minutes. So I produce a lot of my own food. I'd like to produce more in winter. I do a huge harvest of garlic every year, so there's no, the garlic is completely
00:36:10
Speaker
abundant in our meals and it's really lovely to be able to use it as much as I like and so I'm quite self-sufficient in
00:36:23
Speaker
artichokes, asparagus, pumpkins, garlic and usually tomatoes. But this year, no, it doesn't look like there's going to be a lot again. And last year we had a poor season. And then, as I said this morning, I just got three bags of fruit that I'll dehydrate. I love being able to have a larder full of dehydrated foods. So we made nasi pear paste two days ago, which we'll have with cheese. My ideal
00:36:49
Speaker
is to be able to serve a platter with food all made by me because there is pure joy for me and others. People love being able to have something of this place and so that's what I strive for as much as possible and yes, but see that's another one of those wants where I want more. I want to be able to produce even more than I do
00:37:11
Speaker
And I'm working on that, actually, and that's something I've spoken about as well, that I want him to have one other person live with us permanently, so that there can be more consistency in the food production, because often there's big gluts and then a bit of a quiet spell. So I'm working on that.
00:37:32
Speaker
Berries, we've got a freezer full of berries because I work really hard to establish to maintain the berry orchard. So we've got beautiful boys and berries and currants and joster berries and the freezer and so cakes are being made, all sorts of cakes with berries. And yes, there's quite a lot being produced.
00:37:49
Speaker
Oh what I love too is the additional kind of magical elements that you bring to the culinary arts like I was on your blog which is just a thing of beauty and you are making syrups from Kalistaman and Melaleuca and lilac and pine cones and
00:38:08
Speaker
You also mentioned this idea of the story of their harvest and processing being part of that experience. I'd love to hear a little bit more about your favourite odd and enchanting condiments and things that you're foraging that we just wouldn't think are edible.
00:38:24
Speaker
Yes, well I think because you brought it up, Mughalio was very exciting to discover a couple of years ago to realise that those green pine cones could produce this very beautiful syrup. So I started making that a couple of years ago and the process is incredibly simple because you're essentially, it's really wonderful learning a little bit of the chemistry of food and food tech people who study this would be all over this but
00:38:49
Speaker
essentially realising that something as basic as combining either fruit or in this case pine cones with sugar, letting them sit in the sugar. The sugar just draws out all the flavour and all the liquid present in the pine cones and that makes a drink called Mughole or an Italian drink which is pine cone syrup and it keeps very well especially if you do it at sort of a hot water bath afterwards to preserve it.
00:39:15
Speaker
And it's this lovely, surprising drink that you offer to others and they have no idea what it tastes like. They've never tasted anything like it before. And there you've got pine cone syrup. How brilliant. Calistem and syrup. I had to be careful there at one stage. I was getting a bit overexcited with the floral syrups. And I remember one day, and I should barely admit this, but I
00:39:39
Speaker
started playing with a particular blossom like acacia blossoms without, I just started getting overexcited and thinking oh I can make syrups out of everything but no you can't, you cannot, you have to remember to stop and research whether you actually can make a syrup out of that blossom that looks divine. So I made it and then we're
00:40:02
Speaker
On a second, what happened to step one, research whether this blossom is actually edible? Hmm, it is, but not this particular one I've harvested. Let's throw everything out. But yes, there's so much out there to play with. It's really fun living in country Victoria, between the forests and all the trees growing
00:40:24
Speaker
around the town of Dellsford and on farms, there's a lot to play with. Yeah. Do you have a calendar of what's coming up or is it in your head or you're having, you're referencing seasonal indicators? I give everything, everything including, yes, conversations with friends and neighbours to someone posting something on Instagram that reminds me, oh my gosh, it's chestnut season. Quick, go out and have a look if the chestnuts are abundant in your particular area.
00:40:51
Speaker
or persimmons, someone's stringing persimmons up. And yes, is the persimmon trees producing. So it's everything around me. That's a tree yard. And in November now, I've got a permanently scheduled sagra, a garlic heartless. So I know November's going to be always a garlic season. April is chestnut season, end of April early.
00:41:16
Speaker
May is wild mushroom foraging season. It has become much more a part of me now as well, that those rituals have become quite embedded in my day-to-day as a result of being here now for quite a long time. Yeah, that embeddedness feels so, I don't know, right for a human.
00:41:44
Speaker
And it reminds me of the seasonal calendars that we are so lucky to have access to from different first peoples, whether that's Wurundjeri people, Ninam, Melbourne, or the Jaja Wurrung. And I know Tanya Lu is a local naturalist, has just a beautiful little book about, you know, the seasonal wheel of this place and actually how much more
00:42:11
Speaker
How much more useful it is that April is the Chestnut apex as opposed to April? That's just this kind of redundant word. Oh, I totally agree. I like that. Absolutely.
00:42:23
Speaker
it stays with you much more strongly than that's right, a month, another month in the calendar year. But to be able to talk about the chestnuts you harvested, the quinces, the persimmons, yeah, May for me is queen season. That's what May is. So yes, it makes for a much more gratifying exploration of the year. Yeah. You mentioned a little while back that you consider yourself a slow learner. So in light of that,
00:42:53
Speaker
How do you persist through that slowness and any associated frustration or difficulty to actually hone this large body of skills that you have now and that you pass on? What is your process of learning?
Embracing Slow Learning and Realities of Homesteading
00:43:09
Speaker
I think I know that I'll get there in the end because I have enough experience behind me to know that eventually, even something that was really hard, I eventually get there. So that gives me a clear goal that there is an end result. I remember we started bread baking at times thinking, oh, come on, come on, how is this? How is this taking so long?
00:43:33
Speaker
and now just therefore blissfully enjoying where I'm at now. If the journey hadn't been so long, it probably wouldn't have been as meaningful. Again, I think Orin I would have skipped some of the awareness around the possible obstacles and barriers. I was talking yesterday about how I was asked how I'd learned to do photography and how I'd learned to use
00:43:57
Speaker
photo editing software. And I said, oh, I just had this wonderful experience where I bought this book that I could never have imagined would have been funny. It was a photography book that taught you how to use Lightroom. And at first, when I looked at the program of Lightroom, I thought, oh, this looks so complicated. It's all over the place. And then this is, again, great teachers. This person was such a good teacher who had written this book. I was laughing at a technical know-how on how to use this software.
00:44:26
Speaker
and would sit there night after day at night going through each chapter and slowly following literally step by step guidance of how to do something but it was really rewarding because you know sometimes when you try and learn something you're given step by steps but they don't actually match the software you're learning or whatever you're doing this actually matched it was like yeah
00:44:47
Speaker
Yes, and so the feedback loop was really strong. Do this, this and this and you'll get this outcome. I would follow those steps and the outcome would come. Therefore that was very rewarding and possible. So I think I'm okay. I guess also I'm okay with slow because that's very much the whole sort of synopsis of my life, which is trying to do slow. Although as we all know, and again, something else we were talking about this morning with my other neighbor was it just doesn't exist. Slow,
00:45:15
Speaker
does not exist. It feels like you're letting people down when you say the only way slow can exist is if you're, no I was going to say the royal family, but they're incredibly busy as well, but if you have extraordinary wealth or lots of free labour, people who, because this life is inherently
00:45:34
Speaker
in being rich, it's also just full of activity and if you do want to preserve your harvest after growing 40 different fruit trees, even if you want to harvest only from five, that's a lot of work to harvest, wash, clean, cut, slice, dehydrate for 20 hours, pack into jars. It's not, yes, slow doesn't quite exist, it's like, yes, no.
00:45:59
Speaker
I really want to go deeper into this because I have a great feeling of devastation because I was hoping that I could come here and get the secrets, unlock some kind of magical portal of productivity and equanimity
00:46:15
Speaker
because this homesteading lifestyle is absolutely packed. It is so packed. And I feel like the slow living mantle that people kind of hang on their door, I'm like, really? It just doesn't feel honest to say that because I'm busier than I've ever been. So busy that I stood you up yesterday because it's just crazy, especially this time of year. And so I wanted to ask you, like, what do you,
00:46:39
Speaker
let go of like what balls do you drop what do you say no to if anything because i just
00:46:46
Speaker
I don't know what to focus on. And I think other people share this struggle of, yeah, where do I put my energy? And I get so angry at these guys writing books about sitting on a park bench and dreaming an idea into being and taking your time. I'm like, I bet you're just getting Uber Eats and you have someone at home cleaning your toilet. That's not possible.
00:47:10
Speaker
I remember also looking at, do you know that video of this beautiful Chinese young woman who makes these extraordinary films in China and she documents everything from harvesting the cabbage right through to making the final meal and it's showcasing sort of traditional China in a lot of it and at times I'd have someone here look at that video and say oh my gosh look she's doing everything she's doing this she's doing that and
00:47:38
Speaker
And I look at it and go, no, it's not possible. She would have to be working 24 hours a day to actually produce this video and to do this thing. And look at her garden. It's meticulous. There's not a single weed in it. That means there's someone constantly weeding her garden. I think the choices I'm making is friendships are very important, community is very important, but not even a but. I bring the community to me as much as possible because I can't
00:48:08
Speaker
This homesteading life is very much based here. And if I'm absent from the property too much, it just doesn't work. So I don't want to sacrifice relationships. So tomorrow I've got lunch and I've got five friends coming over for lunch. So I do that quite regularly. I invite people over for lunch as a way of staying connected to community.
00:48:30
Speaker
but it means I'm not out and about as much. I couldn't go to chill out because that's when my work mostly happens on weekends as well, my paid work, not my every other day work. So therefore I miss out on a lot of those community connections that happen over weekends.
00:48:46
Speaker
And I, yes, by being here, I'm not going out as much for sort of drinks or for theater. But that would be another chapter. We're actually quite fortunate because we get to do chapters. This chapter, though, is very much about this place. And I want to see just the most, I keep going back to this just very lush, verdant space. I'm really quite attached to making this
00:49:14
Speaker
parcel of land as biodiverse as possible and I haven't stopped growing. I want to do lots of wildflowers under the olive trees. I had a moment last week I was thinking, oh am I going to be able to achieve that? I had actually a moment of doubt because I'd planted 20 and they were completely devoured by rabbits.
00:49:30
Speaker
But that was because I got a bit overconfident and forgot that the reason why everything else didn't get eaten is because I was tree guard everything, but I had skipped that step. I'd gotten a little bit, oh yes, of course I'll be fine, but no, I have to guard everything or fence everything in order for it to survive.
00:49:47
Speaker
But slow, yes, I think slow can only exist if you've got a huge abundance of money and getting a whole bunch of people to do things for you. Back in the feudal systems, when people had peasants and someone got to be the Grand Duke and watched their land being super productive while everyone else did the work, well, that's not possible and not fair and not a realistic scenario.
00:50:14
Speaker
You could say peasants, but could also say slavery, because that was a form of slavery in itself. So it's so personal, of course, and subjective as to what you will do. And what your heart tells you, you might find yourself doing something and finding it. The pool isn't quite there to do it more and more. The pool is to produce what you're producing now, these beautiful stories,
00:50:40
Speaker
packages, parcels of people's lives so therefore you let go and we all are, I mean everybody is letting go of something that they would like to do but can't do because they can't fit it in so we're just having to make those personal choices. I was thinking about togetherness as you were speaking because you mentioned wanting to bring maybe someone here permanently and having
00:51:09
Speaker
a bit of a rotating door, people coming in and out and I'm curious to know how you sit with having so many energies in your life and in your space and in your home and what parameters you put around that and how you make sure that people coming in are the kind of people you want to relate with. What does that look like?
00:51:31
Speaker
Yes, I've been really lucky. I think 99% of the people that have come here have just had beautiful energy. I articulate my thoughts and needs pretty clearly on my website. Recently I took off
00:51:47
Speaker
a little bit of detail, and I thought, careful Mara there, because what's made it work is the detail, the fact that you literally state, this is what time we're getting up in the morning, this is what time we're going to bed, and that can seem so prescriptive. And it is, it is, and it makes it work, because then people have a very informed idea of what they're coming to. Oh, they go to bed really early. Oh, they don't smoke, and they don't drink very much. So if I'm a heavy smoker, that might not work, or I have to put a pause on this.
00:52:15
Speaker
I recently had someone who was a bit tricky and wasn't the right fit and it was a situation where I picked up that that might not be the right fit and I might not be, I would not be the right fit for them through their first email but I had on one other occasion
00:52:34
Speaker
picked something like that up and then thought come on give it a go and then it turned out really well so on this occasion again I thought no no give it a go and we did but you know within four or five days we both realized we're absolutely not each other's right feet and so it came to a close very naturally because our energies were so clear that we were doing a lot of silent communication
00:52:58
Speaker
I'm not talking about passive, I guess, that were passive-aggressive at all. It was just this clarity that it wasn't working and so then it came to an end two days prior to the agreed time. But in most cases it works because the only way it wouldn't work is if
00:53:19
Speaker
Well, in this recent situation I felt very judged by the person. I felt that the difference between us was that this person was wanting a very, very, my impression of the situation was sort of like this person wanting a very pure existence and almost like a monastery-like space. And I thought, oh no, I cannot offer that. That's just impossible. And so in that situation it didn't work.
00:53:49
Speaker
Many, many years ago I had someone here who I then realised once they were here, it was someone who thought Hitler was an incredible person and as I got to know them, I realised why they'd gone down this incredible space of thinking that what they were reading on the internet was true about Hitler and I realised that had a lot of trauma and that trauma was very much affecting
00:54:15
Speaker
their capacity to think strategically and to put more than one story together and to look at various references to Hitler and make sense of it. So their trauma was really impacting their ability to learn not only what they were reading on the internet, but even to learn some basic skills here. And that was a really deep insight in how deeply trauma affects your ability to learn skills as well.
00:54:45
Speaker
I'm making a big judgement about one situation but I thought the anxiety in this person is so high that even a basic task that I've given them is too much because they're actually well beyond this, they're trying to work out the meaning of life, they're trying to work out
00:55:02
Speaker
how to make sense of the trauma they've had. So digging a hole is, even just digging a hole is a bit beyond them because where's their home? They don't have a home. In the deeper sense of the word, they don't have a home. Your brief touching on the trauma and skills connection
00:55:23
Speaker
is really peaking my interest. We haven't had that expressed on the podcast before. I think, you know, we talk about our parents are our first love, our first meaningful, deeply important relationship. And in the case of some, I guess, even using as an example, this young man I had who came and stayed with me, he's
00:55:49
Speaker
And our parents are also literally the roots of our tree. And so with someone who's... And modelling, like, if you've had trauma in this kind of situation, you've got two adults who are constantly fighting and there is violence in the home and there is no room
00:56:18
Speaker
You're constantly in fight or flight mode. There would be so many young people at school.
00:56:25
Speaker
who are being expected to learn algebra and certain incredibly high functioning level skills. But they are not in a safe place to learn anything at all because they are in homes that are full of trauma of one way or another. Even if that trauma is parents who are really just struggling day to day, struggling with their self-worth and feeling like they have a place in the world.
00:56:54
Speaker
economic trauma or domestic violence is such a big thing that seems to be quite prevalent in Australia and not just in Australia of course but I think I've just become so aware of it as an older woman of 51 I'm just really aware of the situation for women and
00:57:12
Speaker
So those sorts of environments shut you down, I imagine, completely shut you down, so that how can you learn if you're shutting down in order to just stay safe and work out where's the safest place in the home, or not in the home, or how to be away from home. I mean, this young person who had left home at 16, that tells you everything. You just, you have no place that's holding you.
00:57:37
Speaker
and there's no way you can go through school in that situation when you have no home. I was talking to a teacher that was here also a couple of days ago, an Airbnb guest, and she was saying how she has a class of students of 20 and
00:57:53
Speaker
There are quite a lot of students, really, really high need students, and how impossible it is to do teaching in a way when you're constantly managing difficulties in the classroom. So I wish again that I wonder, do you feel like, I know the education system always cops it, usually teaches through, but this is not about teachers at all, but about the system. It does still seem
00:58:20
Speaker
like we just are still quite stuck in one particular model and we talk about neurodiversity and neuronormal and yet we're starting to think more more of us are starting to think actually I think neurotypical is probably less typical and neurodiverse is probably more prevalent and always has been
00:58:41
Speaker
We just weren't seeing it and acknowledging and had no language for it, weren't identifying it. But I do wonder if we'll get to a point where we can really tap into an education system that does really generally provide more broadly to our different
00:58:59
Speaker
humans all are different humans because at the moment we are just pushing it all together and the the idea behind that was so that nobody felt stigmatized by being put out into a separate group you're the neurodiverse and you're the neurotypical but it's still not quite working i'm wondering how we can there's there's still a lot of people going through a system that is asking
00:59:22
Speaker
for a really defined skill set, because think about it, very few of us will ever come out using some of those high level math skills. There's only small percentage, and yet we go into that high level maths, physics, chemistry, right from sort of, I think, E9, when there's so many people just trying to learn basic living, thriving skills.
00:59:50
Speaker
I don't know if we'll ever get there because we haven't really changed our education model very much at all. I often think how much unhelpful stuff was seeded in me from those years at school. Did you send your kids to school? Yes, I did. Definitely. Now, that sounds like a contract. Definitely. Look at me because it was no way it was going to work for us homeschooling, not even just for us, my girls. No, it wasn't. We had to do homeschooling during COVID. And the difference if I got my neighbour to teach my daughter, my daughter was like, yes.
01:00:20
Speaker
But the moment I stepped into a t-shirt, it wasn't going to work. For some time, these absolutely will work, but it didn't for us. So there's no way I'd be able to do half of the things I'm doing here either if I was homeschooling. And my daughters are pretty neurotypical. So in a way, though, for them, it is working enough. And overall, it's been
01:00:49
Speaker
okay but also with some big challenges for my first daughter and trying to find, it wasn't actually the, in that case I wasn't the curriculum so much as the trying to find your tribe within school that in itself can be
01:01:05
Speaker
tricky if you don't find your perfect tribe then that affects the experience you have at school as well. Maybe if we get better at acknowledging our neurodiversity in a way that is again equal to one is not lesser than the other then maybe we'll be able to be better at creating those pathways that are equal to as well rather than seeing them as odd alternatives. Your experience at school?
01:01:34
Speaker
I think I really thrived at school because I knew how to say the right things, write the right things, learn the right things, but I wasn't deeply engaged with the content and I felt I'm a very contextual person and I think
01:01:57
Speaker
Humans are contextual creatures, we live in a place and we reference the world around us and it's all relational. But I found school completely devoid of context, learning about history and science and maths. If only they'd said, this is how you can apply it in real life or in your burrow, like this is what it's gonna do for you. So without that context, and maybe kids these days do get that or certain teachers offer that extra dimension of contextuality
01:02:26
Speaker
I just didn't give a shit because I was like, well, what good is this to me? And so I unfortunately had natural aptitude for those kind of academic subjects, but I was just rewarded for being smart without ever learning how to learn or learning how to persist or
01:02:47
Speaker
being championed for my curiosity. It was just a black and white kind of fixed mindset around what I can and can't do. And as an adult, my whole thing has been, how can I learn to love
Education, Curiosity, and Community Workshops
01:02:59
Speaker
learning? Because I didn't learn to love learning. I learned how to win at the exam. It's tragic to me that although all that time I could have been like learning how to whittle a spoon or there was an absence of context. Yes, it's pushed. It was just so much that's been asked to cover. And again,
01:03:17
Speaker
Perhaps one day we'll realise that we're just going in too hard, too fast with details, like really strong details. And without the context, it's only going to be suitable for a very small percentage of people who go on to do engineering or medicine. But they are a smaller, perhaps, proportion than the major group. And yet it seems to be maybe that's what is being catered to, I'm not sure.
01:03:42
Speaker
Context is everything, it's the story. Where do you fit into the story?
01:03:48
Speaker
Yeah. So with this degree of thoughtfulness, how do you see this lifestyle, this life way informing your girls and their skills? And you mentioned that it's really tough to kind of hold that teaching space with your own children, but do you feel that they're absorbing? Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. Yes. I mean, I had, I'm so
01:04:15
Speaker
excited because my oldest daughter has just moved out of home for the first time and without that space, you know, when you're living together you're not sure of how much of the things that you value
01:04:31
Speaker
are being adopted outside of you. So when the child is away from you, do those things just drop away? And they were only sort of there because you were holding on to them. But I'm really excited to see that my daughter has began her first share household. And she's like, right, I need a calendar to make sure we can all write down on the calendar when we're in, when we're out, and when we're having dinner together. And we've got an organized sort of
01:05:01
Speaker
idea of, we're going to start a little vegetable garden, or not a vegetable garden, a herb garden, so I wanted to collect lots of pots and mum could you perhaps look for like a wine barrel for me so I could grow something in there and I was thinking, yes absolutely, although perhaps smaller pots, plastic pots might be better because you're going to be possibly moving every couple of years and a wine barrel is going to be really hard work.
01:05:22
Speaker
But yes, and mum, I just realised I really don't like plastic containers, that these things are coming. Can you get me some jars? And are saying, well, you can go to Naturally on High and shop there.
01:05:34
Speaker
Friends of the Earth is a bit further away or one of the shops, a whole food shop and just her ethos and her sense of creating a family that was really really important to me. I loved creating a family where whatever share household I lived in and it took a while to find my people that went yes we're really into this kind of little family hub where we come to home together and
01:05:59
Speaker
and share the space in a very together way and she's done that straight away and she's got a lot more sort of
01:06:10
Speaker
She's a lot more empowered than I in some ways would have been at her age and had a lot more agency around those ideas and confidence. No, I'm really excited. So much so that I'm like, right, I have already got five pots with media in them that I'm planning to take to her next week.
01:06:33
Speaker
And she's got a wall that is just a concrete or a brick wall. I'm just like, right, we've got to have a plant growing up there. We can't just be looking onto a brick wall. And she's like, yes, that's exactly what I was thinking. We were all talking about it last night. I was going, okay, here's the selection of plants. You can use ficus pumula or maybe Virginia creeper. Any of those will at least cover that wall without us having to put any structure there.
01:06:56
Speaker
Yes I feel very much so Alia loves to cook and so she's already cooking and we filled the cupboard straight away with lots of beautiful fresh porridge juice and sending her home with a packet of garlic grown from here and she values it all very much and it's a real like okay yes this is this is really her then it's not me
01:07:20
Speaker
imposing or, come on, saying, but it is her now. She has got this. I thought there would be more of a gap of, often there's a bit of a gap where the child really needs their own space to experience her own
01:07:35
Speaker
journey before they sometimes come back to something to what you've offered. But I guess the gap happened during her time here because there was a refusal to a lot of things when Alia joined high school because the environment there was saying hey this is not what we do, we don't do this. So there was like so Alia really
01:07:57
Speaker
tried to really stop a lot of things that were part of this lifestyle from entering her school environment. She didn't want to differentiate herself. So I guess it happened then and now she's at the other end of it. Wow, that's a really affirming tale to hear.
01:08:15
Speaker
I'm really conscious of your time and as you know I haven't even looked at the questions that I had brought but I'd really like to hear at this point wrapping up the conversation what you're offering here
01:08:31
Speaker
what you're excited about, what's upcoming and how people can jump into this amazing world that you're creating. Yeah, tell us about workshops and how we can get more Maro. Thank you, Katie. Well, I have a beautiful... On my website, there's a calendar of events and the next coming event is a sourdough bread baking class, which is full and I'm incredibly happy about that.
01:08:56
Speaker
I really am loving my Sargro events. Sargro is the Italian word for a celebration of a particular seasonal food. So it'll be chestnut harvesting in April, we take them back here, we process them, take them out of their shells and bake them and make a beautiful sauce, chestnut sauce, to go with homemade papar deles all come together to make the homemade pasta.
01:09:20
Speaker
and then I have, I'm doing a lot of distillation so because we've got a lot of herbs growing on the property so we're harvesting lavender and distilling it to make essential oil. I run a soap making class which started because I realised there was an abundance of oils that could be used to make soap so that's one of the other classes that's happening.
01:09:41
Speaker
And there's always the opportunity to have a tour because people were called to have a tour of the property, people who usually were looking to buy land themselves and want to try and understand what's involved. And I really love giving the behind the scenes inside of what is involved so that people are as informed as possible.
01:10:02
Speaker
I really like giving people information about passive solar design which is sitting outside of that cooking school but it's the underpinning of a lot of what I do so that people can make informed decisions about how they retrofit their homes or renovate their homes. There's a lot of really basic information that is unknown because it's just not what the mainstream world is doing that makes people thrive in their homes so
01:10:26
Speaker
Yes, I think. Yes. That's really exciting. That's essentially, like you said, this behind the scenes, really juicy, lived, valuable, bundled up knowledge that you're bringing, not only from your professional past, but from your current lived experience.
01:10:43
Speaker
So does that look like a day where people can come and you're offering that sounding board and that advice? It's usually a one and a half hour tour and it can go longer if people want a longer session but there's literally the opportunity to book a tour, call me up and we make a time.
01:11:02
Speaker
or some of the other events are more sort of four or five hour events, but the tours are available at any time. It sounds like such an ad. Any time of the week, seven days a week, 30 hours a day? No, because I'm on the property, I like there's an opportunity. I've got a tour next Wednesday. I love the tours. I love the show and tell. This is how this has happened. Ask me any question and I will love answering it.
01:11:26
Speaker
I live to answer questions. I never tire. People say to me, don't you get tired of saying the same thing to volunteers over and over again? No, I do not get tired of it. It makes me tick. You're such a giving people person and I'll link to the Village Dreaming hotline so that people know how to contact you.
01:11:51
Speaker
Yeah, I'm just so grateful for this time that you shared. Oh, it just feels, yeah. Just for the therapy. Being here is so special as well. And I was actually feeling my mouth fill with saliva every time I thought of these pairs that you've got here sitting on this little plate. These are not mine though.
01:12:11
Speaker
This is mine and mine and mine and mine but not that one. These are from the local grocer. See of course they're the most juiciest. But I've picked this one already, that was the first one I ate. It's impossible to get this as a homestealer.
01:12:29
Speaker
Because I was talking about it to someone this morning about how to make this. The process is all the fruit is selected for size and quality, then dehydrated to a very specific point because I have the incredible technology to actually see what the hydration of the levels are of the pear.
01:12:49
Speaker
And then when all the water's stepped out, they put just enough water back in. And it sounds like I'm making this up, but that's the process. And they, of course, to get this perfect moist thing. But a home-dried one is never gonna be, well, if I make this less dry, which we doubt we've been, they will only last me maybe three months and then I'll go moldy. Yeah, that's a trade-off.
01:13:13
Speaker
wow i did not know that about rehydrating this is like the ear of a mythical candy beast but um with these did i detect a hint of garlic or something oh that's so funny or is it just because it's like on it's on a tray with garlic or something but i can definitely you're very good um i don't know how that's possible actually because i liked it no don't worry i don't hear any criticism but um i just don't know yeah unless this plate had garlic on it delicious
01:13:44
Speaker
So delicious. A huge thank you to Mara Rapani for having me at Village Dreaming to record my first field interview and to go ahead and nosh on the show notes to find all of Mara's glorious offerings and other stuff we've referenced. As I mentioned at the top of the show, I'll be pausing resilience for a week or two to go camping and recalibrate and I hope you too can lovingly drop the ball on a few to-dos slowly winding down for winter.