At the village we have at least 2 working bee’s a month. With so much land to maintain, council requirements for use and to get ready for building there’s always something to do.
The major working bee’s normally tackle the hard work. The type of work is determined by our Site Management team and could involve:
- Chainsaw work from any of members that have completed the chainsaw safety induction course
- Tractor duties from our members that have completed the spectacular tractor course at Tocal College.
- Loading green debris into our chipper
- Deconstructing the buildings we have approval to start taking down
- General land clearing such as the work shown below.
There are other working bee’s instigated by various teams such as the Land Team who are getting buildings and spaces ready for planting or propagating plants and tree’s for our landscaping among other things.
And of course there’s plenty of light work or work suitable for a single person. This could be as simple as clearing cobwebb’s from common area’s, sanding new balustrades or lawn mowing.
If you’d like to come along to one our working bee’s and get to know both the members and the land a little more then please let us know on info@nararaecovillage.com
Here’s some highlights from one of our recent working bee’s.
Managing the Dam
Take a stroll to our lovely dam – member volunteers have removed the vegetation from the wall and then continued on to the spillway.
The spillway area has to be maintained free of any obstructions. As part of our dam management we have to keep this section cleared. We felled a few trees, the team filled a tipper truck with mulch and it looks fantastic! Those ‘dam’ volunteers, we just can’t keep them away.
Glassy-eyed deconstructionists
We had a lot of rain earlier this week but that didn’t stop our demolition crew and others. The focus moved to sorting out our metal recycling area.
- 1st load was about 600kg of bulky white goods. Members took fridges, freezer & stoves to the metal recyclers.
- 2nd load was all the accumulated stainless steel and aluminium that was recycled.
Wednesday it was back to deconstruction and continued with building 6, the row nearest Post Harvest shed. This is where the 8 x 1 bedroom cluster houses will be built. The major focus was removing glass. One of our members was the supervisor and is a qualified glazier using suction caps to remove the glass. These glass panes are allowed to be disposed of in the co-mingle waste bins as long as the ratio does not exceed 25% of the bin capacity. The rest of the team focused on removing wiring and copper pipes.