So I'm here with Dave Rastovich and his wife,
Lauren's been working with them as well
on this beautiful project behind, it's a food garden.
And it's not just for you guys, is it?
No, no, well, the idea really Geoff is to be able
to feed our local collection of residents here
in this part of the coast.
This part of the bush right here, just South of Cape Byron.
And we have like six or eight families
that come and use this tiny little road right here,
that butts up against the property.
And so the idea is to localize, you know,
we were seeing how important
that is in every area of life right now.
And so we want to localize the food down to the closest
level, which is right here, where we're living and,
and that's for a number of reasons,
but really at the core of it is
to know where our food comes from.
You know, that whole understanding
that in Australia food has a travel
mileage of like a thousand kilometers or more.
And we live in the subtropics
where you can just about grow anything,
even a novice like me.
who's been able to grow food here for a few years.
So, so really there's that angle,
but there's also health for us and health with the ecology
that sustains us here.
So this place was logged twice and burnt
and cattle roaming all over it
for a long time, decades
of being basically neglected and mistreated.
So I really love the idea of being here
and putting some love into this place
and potentially having that come back
to us in the form of food and to strengthen our community
because we have all these beautiful neighbors here
that we don't see each other enough.
And so the idea of having a space here
that we all take care of, is going to open up the,
the relationship time to be together.
Let me throw a stone for this dog.
Everyone's going to be wondering what the panting is.
-Even Yogi. -Even Yogi.
-There you go. -You done it now.
So we put this in, it's been a fun thing already,
and we're putting water tanks on top of the hill.
We're going to get irrigation going.
Everybody drives past,
wants to know why there's curves while we're harmonizing,
with the shape of the land.
We like that sort of work because it reduces our work,
harvests water.
It pacifies the flow.
Luckily we've been working
with these awesome maps with Lidar
and satellite GIS technology.
And we can really see where the,
form of the land is.
And it's going to go on from here.
So all fun.
As long as we can sneak some surfs in between it all Geoff
and it's going to be all good.
Of course it's pretty close to the beach.
So that's increased my degree of interest and keenness,
but there you go.
And let me show you how it all started putting this
foundation down.
Hi Geoff, here, I'm around on the job,
designing and implementing food gardens.
Nadia is on the excavator out there,
and she's doing a great job putting these level terrace
gardens on this site where a friend of ours,
Dave wants to feed the eight neighbors
that live down this road.
And everybody's in support.
Let me take you over and show you some of the details
of Nadia's digging technique.
I've got the laser set up and we've pegged out contour.
And the slope changes because it's steeper in the far side,
than it is the near side here.
So the contours are fanning round
and she's putting in contour footpaths
and the material, the top soil is going to the lower side
to make the garden beds.
So this is the mainframe going in now.
And yeah, so far we've got four garden beds roughed out
and she's adjusting the, the beds.
Now we've got a skid-steer coming in like a little Bobcat
skid-steer to tidy up some of this work
and she's hooking out the contour.
So the contour footpath will pick up
any amount of surplus runoff soaking into the beds,
but it also can drain
She hates me being near the machine, she's scared,
she's going to squash me.
I'm the design team side,
and Nadia is the implementation earth worker.
And then together,
we help them establish these small acreage systems
that feed small communities.
Really its what we like to do.
Small earthworks implemented.
We don't mind designing bigger earthworks
as big as you like,
but like to implement a few,
and walk our talk and get them actually into production.
This is an interesting one.
Very close to the coast gets lovely rainfall,
very subtropical, and we've got a road.
That's got a privacy gate on it.
So everybody's on this private road,
wants food for their family.
We've got a road cut here
where the water coming in off the road,
we're going to direct here.
When we finished the main nerve splits,
we're going to direct that down to the garden.
And then we're going to have the option
to either bypass the garden
or give the garden extra rain, infiltration water.
This is a location that usually gets too much rain,
but we're going to compensate by allowing the water to pass.
And we're going to develop right the way down to open space
with chicken tractors on steroids.
So we're making our own compost.
We're producing 30 eggs a day,
and we've got a wet garden down the bottom
where it's really high water table.
And we're going to go into a few paddies as well.
So, stay tuned.
This is going to be something special.
Well, there we go.
Another great job.
Its going to grow a lot of food
and make a lot of people happy and healthy.
And that's the sort of what we like to do.
Good to share it with you.
got to speak in the microphone
Look at this friend here.
Yeah, that's a great job.
You like it.
Yeah, what it is is it's a great replica
of the lineup in Maui of Pe'ahi
Otherwise known as Jaws.
You can see the curves perfectly mimic the left
and right hander of that wave.
It's one of the scariest,
but most beautiful waves in the world.
I think you've done a good representation.
That's what we need scary and beautiful.
There you go.
Dave Rastovich and me doing something nice.