My long long time at Bells's Retreat

While we were hard at doing the container at Mischa's there were periods of time where he had work commitments down in Melbourne and rather than twiddle my thumbs on the longer gaps (and to give Mischa a break from WWOOF hosting) I shared my time with another host close to the "notable town" of Maldon. One of the first things Mischa suggested to me in the first few days with him was that if I wanted to see a great example of permaculture (1.2 on my list!)I had to meet his friend Cheryl Dingle. So at the first opportunity I headed over and with introductions made I spent 3 days on my first visit being blown away by the raw energy that Cheryl (at 61) has in working her garden, yoga classes, and her family research!

Bell's Retreat is proud home to an old weatherboard church relocated to their Maldon property and lovingly restored into a function venue and yoga studio and for my first visit, my sleeping quarters! The rest of the property includes an amazing food bowl (akin to food forest but making great use of the natural landscape for water and soil fertility)with an eclectic mix of perennial crops, fruit trees and berries as well as a range of not so common plants. My head was truly spinning as I tried to keep up with the list of amazing plant specimens that Cheryl would rattle off as we toured the garden.

On successive visits (4 in total) I proved useful helping Cheryl to scan, sort, and upload close to 4000 family photos dating back 4+ generations that had been salvaged from her mother and aunts collections as Cheryl pieced together the amazing tale of her ancestors time as rubber merchants in Malay in the early 20th Century. Just when I thought I had come WWOOFing to escape office work, "wet days" with the cold rain driving down outside were spent typing up handwritten memoires from her aunt and others. It was on one of these earlier trips that Cheryl had been invited to visit the UK to attend a family reunion and so all haste was made to complete the research and have the photos collated and up online in preparation. Needless to say I became very well acquainted with the scanner and all things computer at Bell's Retreat.


My fourth stay at Bell's Retreat came at the end of the container project and has been considerably longer (almost 8 weeks) as I was asked to stay and help keep the farm running while Cheryl and Mark went on their trip to the UK for 3 weeks. This time my accomodation was in the old converted WWOOFer bus Luckily with the photos done my tasks were more garden related and along with Max (from France) and Rachel (from UK) as well as Cheryl's twin sons Harley and Joel, we have built new garden beds, spirals, tyre retaining walls, repaired and revitalised chook sheds,, incubated eggs, propagated seedlings, built pathways, constructed stairs to the new house extension, painted signs and kept up with the string of Farmers Markets. (Amongst other things!) Not to mention the numerous "manure runs" to a sheep farmers shearing shed where the manure has been falling through the floor boards and piling up for close to 40 years. As disgusting a task it may sound to the uninitiated to climb under a shearing shed and scrap out sheep poo, pile it into the trailer as well as bagging up more to sit on top, this is the kind of hard manual work which in itself is invigorating and well rotted sheep poo actually smells quite sweet. Poo collected its home to unload onto the compost piles, build new ones with more silage hay, shredded materials etc etc and keep them aerated by turning them. The sale of this compost helps keep the farm finances going and also helps to explain the amazing growing power of Cheryl's garden and why water reaches the roots of plants here while neighbours struggle with dusty paddocks.