Village Day in January

The Village kicked off the year with a new format for the monthly Open Days. Renamed to Village Days we are inviting you to join us for ‘a day at the village’ – we’d love you to join in the fun and comaraderie of a group of people working and playing together. During the year as we start to build our houses we hope you’ll enjoy that journey with us too.

Starting in the early morning the Natural Build team began work on the much anticipated outdoor kitchen. Many hands make light work and the team accomplished all they hoped for that day. This is an ongoing project so please let us know if you want to help with future installments. We’ll try and get a post up on the Outdoor Kitchen dream in coming weeks.

Lincoln, Brett and Mark all took the first tour of about 30 people around the village. Despite the heat they managed to find enough shade to share the great surrounds of the village. They did however come back with about the 1/3 of the starters as the peeled off to other events.

John and Lincoln took a small group to the beehives where we took about 6L of honey out from the amazing flow hives. I don’t know who loved eating honey “off the tap” more between the kids and adults. Still another 6L in the hive so stay tuned for next round!

Our local edible weed enthusiast Benjamin and horticultural scientist Trish took a group of keen adults and children around the site, showing off a few of the wild edible and medicinal plants who have decided to share our land! It’s interesting to see what comes freely and abundantly from the earth that we can use rather than import and buy. For example Plantain-the core ingredient being what folk buy as “Psyllium Husk”, an excellent remedy to stings and bites and the #1 go to for kids skinned knees!

At the tool shed Mike and the team worked on fixing up quite a number of old bikes, helped by the tire pumper extraordinaire James! Also at the tool shed we had Rob sharpening up anything that needed sharpening!

And we can’t forget the lovely members who manned the “Ask a member” table that answered any questions thrown at them from curious visitors.

We finished off in usual Village style with a community dinner with a large number of snag’s suppled by the natural build team as a thanks to the helpers. The kids were easily occupied outdoors as you’d hope – is this not the eco version of an Ikea ball pit?

Overall the day and the new format was a success and we thank Jeni, Vanessa and the team for bringing it together- 2018 is going to be cracker as we start building houses and sharing everything the village is doing.