Every year we host a tour or two, to talk with you about all that we have done, all that we have learned.

Our home and farm stay are built from straw. Our land had not a single tree and now it has many.

A wetland we made with hundreds of aquatic plants making it my favourite place to swim! It is my mini barrier reef! Full of wildlife and birds and the orchestra of frogs.

Our fruit orchards, berries, olives. Our poultry and geese. Our kitchen garden which supplies us with an infinite feast!

The farm stay provides an ongoing income stream and the guests that arrive make me want to sing!

We bake bread and make yogurt, we make soap and ferment. We harvest flowers and dry them and drink them for tea.

Homemade pasta is easy to make and cakes are easy to bake.

Ralf builds and maintains, I cook and I teach. Together we thrive on this parcel of land temporarily in our reach.

Below a selection of photos from our time here.

Using traditional soap making skills, it is possible to make a years’ worth of soap in just one day.

We will make two batches of soap: One using plant based oils and the other using lard.

Both make wonderful bars of soap. I will teach you to use online soap making calculators allowing you to make soap from any oil or fat.

We will discuss colour and fragrance. Hot and cold process soap making and how to use cacao, calendula and other home based ingredients to decorate your soap.

To purchase tickets please visit https://villagedreaming.com.au/workshops/

Beautiful you.

About to turn 20 or 20 something. Just finishing high school, university or a trade. Leaving home for the very first time.

You are looking…looking for a new home or your first home, for sometimes the home where we are raised is no home at all.

Lin Ying Zhen says that travelling and meeting new people has given her the opportunity to be playful and to test her femininity, something she has always been uncomfortable expressing due to the expectations placed on young women to be something other than themselves.

Leaving to look.

For a safe place.

Where you can be…U.

The very best U.

Where everything inside you can be expressed and honoured.

All your colours released.

This post is dedicated to Lin Ying Zhen, our current traveller and volunteer fairy and to every young person we have hosted and will host.

I asked Lin Ying Zhen to write down some of her Australian experience and this is what she wrote.

“Hello! I’m Lin Ying-Zhen, from Taiwan.
I’m a photographer, a chef, a barista, a student studying permaculture.

I play piano, I do massage for people who in needs, I write in order to preserve my life, I draw things show in my head, I’m going to learn scuba diving when I get back to Taiwan.
Currently volunteering at Mara’s ORTO farm.

Meeting Mara is really beautiful, she’s always curious about my story, we have so much in common so sometimes we can’t stop talking, and we forgot time, every time when her alarm rings again I know I should stop start another conversation.

I love how she organize her life in her dreamy village, love the way she see things and people, being in this paradise I can learn things in a really exciting way, I love nature and have strong eager to connect my life with mother earth.

I came to Australia about two years ago, I came here because I want to experience different culture, learn English and also pay off my debt of school tuition. At first I worked at a tomato farm for four months to get my second year visa, it was a really heart-broken experience for me. It’s more like a factory not like a farm .They hire lots of backpackers from Asian country, they set up different rules for Asian people. Most of Asian people don’t speak English very well, not even stand up for ourselves, my English was really poor as well, barely understand anything. But I always remember how stressed it was, supervisors stood behind me, and threatened me “if you can’t go faster there are heaps of people want to do your job”

Sometimes we have to work 16 hours one day, sometimes 60 hours per week without overtime pay. Those four months I live like a surviving stray dog, I have to shut down my feelings in order to keep going.
This experience also taught me how cruel the world is, some people they born in a different country without a good economic condition, if they long for a better life or an opportunity to change, this is the reality they have to bear first.

In that work environment, I forget about kindness, love, sharing, caring, instead it’s all about efficiency, money, competition, survive and feeling unfair.

But every experience has its importance, as an individual I also learned to be tough and resilient, it traumatized me but also brought me to see the real world.

After I got my second year working holiday visa, I sent many resume to different cafes and restaurants, luckily I was found by my biggest life saver Christopher Odrowaz who owns the Mainstreet café in Warragul which is where I worked for fifteen months almost spent all my time there. My English was not good enough to serve people or even communicate well with coworkers, but Toffa is the kindest boss I met in the world, he listened to me patiently and taught me lots of Aussie slangs, brought me into his family, since then I have my second family in Australia. We went down to Phillip island, Mum and Dada have a beach house there, we went swimming with our Labradors, went surfing with friends, one day we brought knives and went snorkeling harvesting some urchins and abalones from the ocean. I had so many important memories with Odrowaz family.

They rebuild my kindness again, they make me trust that there are still lots of beautiful things to expect in the world, as long as we keep doing things right and share what we have with people genuinely, everything will be better and better.

In these fifteen months, I’ve learnt how to cook as a chef because I met a generous, kind soul, vegan chef Benny, he taught me all the skills and trained me as a chef in the kitchen. We have many things in common, sometimes we couldn’t stop talking after work but we knew we both need to go home and rest. He is a very special individual in my life. And also my English was improving quickly, I started writing in English, tried to express myself accurately in different ways, one day I suddenly realize that I can think and speak fluently in English, I can talk to people without hesitation, although sometimes I still need to check some words but it’s alright.

When covid-19 hit into us, I moved to Melbourne, and spent my time in lentil as anything as a volunteer. At that time, it felt uncertain and didn’t know what would happen, I wasn’t sure about going home, just wanna stay and connect with people, see how everything goes here. Luckily my housemates were wonderful artist, we spent lots time playing music or house party, I started doing some drawing and learning piano, juggling, making music video for a band, Easy Brown.

Always so much fun when you’re able to play with lovely people.
And also I finally have time to sort out all the pics I took in past few years, I made a photo album for Odrowaz family as a gift, I made a 40 days drawing challenge in first lockdown.
When I volunteered in Lentil As Anything I met lots of great souls, I spent more and more time there, painting on the wall, knitting, practice hand poke tattoo, lentils is like traveler’s home. I feel accepted and loved when I was there, I had lots of special journey in lentil as anything. Then I met Jasmina in lentils, she brought me into permaculture field, we experienced the magic of soil and compost, we danced around in a veggie garden. I’m fascinated by understanding how ecological cycle system work on the earth, and all the knowledge about how to build up a sustainable living environment.
I feel like I can make the earth healthier for human beings as long as I keep learning, and that’s the reason Mara found me, we found each other.
We just want a better environment for everyone.

Well you know all about it. Like me your year has been challenging and strange. For me it has been quite a change. Normally every weekend we have up to four couples visiting and staying at our farm stay. They punctuate my week with chatter and new stories. I really love these visitors. I love talking and sharing with them. I love the tours I give of my garden and all the conversations about everything from love and relationships to growing radicchio.

And then the gastronomy classes I usually run. The immense joy that happens when we come together to learn more about the things we love. To learn about ways to make raw ingredients into fantastic meals. How to ferment and bake, and knead and shape pasta. All those classes have been put on hold.

Humans how I have missed you!

I have missed both your company and your help as it has been almost seven months since we have shared our home with a travelling volunteer, a willing helper, a story sharer.

It is spring and I have been collecting sheep manure by the trailer load.  Gardening friends introduced me to a shearing shed. Under the floor boards a monumental supply of lucerne and manure. I collected a very large load and worked my arms beyond their limit. By the end of the week my arms were on fire, my muscles overworked.

It is spring and I have applied a very late dose of lime to all my growing areas…I should have done this years ago…my soil is naturally acidic and I have not, over the past four years applied a single dose of lime. Wood ash is what I have been using because it too is a great source of calcium and calcium is what my soil needs.  However wood ash also contains nutrients that are already abundant in my soil such as magnesium and hence adding more will only create problems.

My first harvest of asparagus happened this year. I sowed asparagus seeds into trays about three years ago. I dug a trench and filled it with manure and straw and now I harvest!

And artichokes are bountiful and so I have been making artichoke broths.

Then there are the ornamental habitat plants such as Hardenbergia, fox gloves and straw flowers.

The garden is alight with life and in the absence of delicious humans, the garden is keeping me fed.

This raised bed sits in front of our bathroom window. On the other side of the glass is our bath tub looking out onto lemongrass and brussel sprouts.

In this raised bed nettles grow. They are a wild edible that has made its home in this bed. I am extremely happy with it because it’s life cycle perfectly suits my needs. While I wait for the brassica to grow, I get to harvest fresh soft nettle leaves for our lunch and dinner. I simply confidently hold onto the nettle head and cut just below the top leaves. I have added these lush green leaves to risottos, stews and pasta dishes.

It never fails to make me feel really good, this cycle of germination. Every year sowing and planting is an exercise in hope. I have two steel racks above one of the greenhouse beds. All the water from the seeds above, feeds the plants below.

There are many different types of wetlands. There are natural wetlands such as damplands, sumplands, ephemeral wetlands, springs, marshes and swamps, rivers and streams, floodplains and billabongs and artificial wetlands such as sewerage ponds, rice paddies and constructed habitat ponds just to name a few. The definitions in Nick Romanowski’s book, Aquatic and Wetland Plants, illustrate the differences in water levels between the different types. For example, he defines damplands as having water mostly underground, but rising with seasonal rains so that it is just below the surface in wetter months. Sumplands are similar, but here the water rises higher so that the ground is waterlogged at times and pools of standing water are common. The water level just below, just above or flooding the soil determines the type of vegetation that will thrive and the type of animals, insects and amphibians that will make the wetland their home.

Our wetland is a constructed habitat pond. It collects a body of water in low-lying ground. It is flooded in winter, but in summer the water level drops. It’s often extremely low, say ankle-high, with some patches of soil completely exposed. It was designed to wet and dry in a way that mimics natural wetlands in the surrounding landscape to provide natural habitats for the local flora and fauna.

Ralf and I were introduced to the beauty and ecological importance of wetlands back in our 20s, when we both worked for a revegetation company that specialised in wetland ecology. Our job involved collecting seed from grasslands, marshes and swamps, propagating the seed harvested, and planting out seedlings in newly constructed wetlands. Our employers at the time, two young men just a few years older than us, were passionate about the role wetlands play in supporting fauna and flora biodiversity. Their passion was infectious and, as Ralf was studying environmental engineering and I environmental policy, it felt like we were destined to translate this experience into practice.

When we bought our acreage, at the very top of our list of reasons for constructing a wetland instead of a dam was biodiversity.

The primary objective of a dam is to store as much water as possible in a given area of land, so that this water can then be used for irrigation or drinking water for stock. Hence, dams have steep gradients and deep centres to maximise the amount of water captured. And, as their purpose is water storage, they are rarely planted with trees or aquatic plants.

Where a dam is on pasture land, cattle and other grazing animals are almost always given access to the whole dam for drinking water. As a result, the dam edges get highly compacted and the soil is constantly disturbed, making it difficult for plants to establish. The water quality in dams used by animals can also be very poor as the water can get very turbid due to the constant disruption of soil by hooves, so little, if any, aquatic life survives. To prevent this dams can be fenced so that grazing animals only have access to a small area, or water can be pumped to a drinking trough.

Essentially, a dam acts as an open rainwater tank and serves a single purpose: capturing water either for use in irrigation or as drinking water for livestock.

A wetland, however, can serve a multitude of purposes and values. At the core of these values are ‘ecosystem services’: the direct and indirect benefits humans experience from living in a well-functioning environment. These include such things as clean air and water, mental and spiritual wellbeing, and access to a range of food plants, pollinated by bees for free. 

A wetland does this by changing just one factor: the gradient.

By designing for a shallow gradient and increasing the area that wets and dries as the water level goes up and down , it is possible to plant a broader diversity of trees, sedges, reeds, rushes and aquatic plants and provide a greater diversity of habitats. These varied plant groups need differing levels of soil moisture to grow. Some, such as grasses and sedges, thrive on the very fringe of the wetland. Others, such as azolla, a floating fern, sit on the surface of the water, while some species in the genus Maundia can be found growing in waters 50cm deep. In between are a variety of plants providing highly valuable habitat both above and below the water. These include sedges in the genus Baumea, such as the twig-rushes, or those in genus Bolboschoenus. Carex, a large genus of grass-like sedges, are mostly dry-land-lovers, but some are found in waterlogged soils. Rushes in the genus Juncus or the club-rushes also grow in waterlogged soils.

Each plant community provides a specific habitat or feeding role. Together they support a lush ecosystem of invertebrates, frogs, fish and animals. Think of each plant community as having its own architect and the architecture of that community catering to the specific needs of particular animals. The establishment of a vegetation ‘community’ of sedges, rushes, grasses and trees and its supporting wetland is a direct invitation to the animals including amphibians, birds and invertebrates that thrive in that specific combination.

In our case, by creating the wetland and establishing a vegetation community, we have created conditions for the arrival of black swans, pobblebonk frogs, dragonflies, swallows, herons and masked lapwings to name a few. Our wetland is still only a baby; all our plantings are no more than three years old. As the vegetation grows and swells, the number of birds, insects and animals coming to visit will increase as more habitat and shelter is created and as our trees develop expansive canopies.

What is its value? How can I explain the feeling I get when I see swallows feeding at dawn and dusk on insects hovering over the water’s surface, or the pleasure and pride I feel when I hear our choir of frogs? And when the black swans arrived, these large indigenous birds, and made their home with us for a few weeks, how full of joy and happiness I was.

In choosing biodiversity, we chose not to use our wetland as a drinking hole for grazing animals, even though we plan to graze pigs. Instead, we will provide drinking troughs for them. We have fenced off the wetland to prevent access by our future pigs: the wetland is closed off to pigs on the east, west and south, but open to the north to wildlife. My friend Damien, a botanist, recommended I leave a ‘flight path’ open for visiting birds, so on the north side I am only planting indigenous grasses.

I am doing the plantings in stages. Once the initial aquatic and terrestrial plants have established, I will go back and plant a greater diversity of vegetation. I save up to purchase tree guards, stakes and plants. Then, with my best friend, the mattock, I plant. In summer, I water, as I don’t want to lose plants to our unreliable rain patterns, after all the work I’ve done. The plant roots are small and shallow in the first few years. So, with our very old ute, a 1000L water tank and the help of visiting ‘workaways’, I water as often as I can, which is about three times during the summer months. I can’t manage more –  there are too many trees. Why not install irrigation? In the near future, the trees won’t need the support I am giving them now, so the cost of materials, labour and time for a short-term goal is not worth it to us.

The other wetland values for us are fire protection, recreation, swimming, aesthetics and as a cooling microclimate.

I can’t believe I have my own wetland; its habitat and aesthetic value is priceless. The sunset colour bleeds into the water’s surface to create vast beauty. It is a joy to walk around the wetland to observe the changing colours of the aquatic plants – they go from a lush green to a fantastic copper colour – and to observe visiting birds and dragonflies and discover indigenous colonising wildflowers.

At the beginning of summer when the water level is still high, I love to swim there. Flat on my back, looking up into the big open sky, I feel such happiness. I sneak up on dragonflies to admire their colour. The water is clear compared to neighbouring dams as the aquatic plants help to stabilise the soil. Decomposing plant matter, further protects the soil by forming a thick protective layer over it, and this in turn reduces turbidity. No crystal-clear swimming pool could ever bring me this much joy.

In the peak of summer, the combination of water and plants creates a cooling microclimate. Trees transpire releasing water from leaves into the atmosphere. The water body itself acts as a heat sink as water has a high specific heat capacity: it takes a lot of heat to increase the temperature of water by one degree Celsius. Hence, in summer, when the soil surface temperatures are high, the wetland temperature in comparison remains low and that difference in temperature is experienced by us.

I am so glad, so pleased, so ecstatic that we built a wetland instead of a dam!

Over the past three years a new relationship with fungi has occurred thanks to the passion and enthusiasm of those around me who have been dating fungi for a long time. Rain too has become a significant new partner. Her arrival a monumental occasion as she waters my fledgling trees relieving me of the task, inviting hidden mycelia to make an appearance.

Fruiting bodies emerge and only regular visits to the forest or lush lawns of parks can produce a chance meeting.

Once upon a time a mushroom was a singular entity with a distinctive and familiar shape recognised by all. But a mushroom is and always was a fungal fruiting body with countless expressions.

And like icebergs what appears above the soil hides beneath it a vast network of hyphae and weblike mycelia.

When we deplete soils of organic matter by using synthetic fertilisers, when we choose concrete for neatness instead of gardens, when we build houses extremely big so that there is little room for soil and plants and when we sweep up tree leaves as though they are garbage instead of food for soil, we commit ourselves to killing what lies beneath: fungi in all its beauty and diversity.

We have removed ourselves, disconnected ourselves so deeply from the ecology that supports us, that I think most of us don’t know that fungi are essential for life on earth, and our life on earth. Mycologists know, biologists too, but so many of us, too many of us have no idea that they are decomposers making nutrients readily available to all living plants. Without them bread will not rise, and wine, beer and cheese will not mature. And climate change. With climate instability we face uncertain rain fall and the drier the continent becomes the fewer fungi there will be. The consequences in such a scenario are nothing short of devastating.

Macrofungi are fungi that we can see, visible to the eye without the aid of a microscope. And macrofungi are classified into two major groups called basidiomycetes and ascomycetes. And writing about them helps me to learn, familiarises me with new language and gives me a chance to practice the sound of the words. I really love learning and only wish I could be granted a wish…a photographic memory.

In the basidiomycetes group you can find the following fruiting bodies: agarics, chanterelles, boletes, polypores, tooth fungi, leathers, corals, jellies, rusts, earthstars, stalked puffballs, stinkhorns. In the ascomycetes group you will find: beech orange, clubs, cups, crusts, discs, morels, and pins.

My initial relationship with fungi was heavily weighted upon my desire to eat them, but as we all know a long lasting relationship needs a little more depth and hence over time it has evolved into a desire to simply get to know them better with only the occasional lustful feast.

I would like to thank Paul Ward, Patrick Jones and Alison Pouliot for sharing their knowledge with me, I look forward to learning more. And should any of the above photos be incorrectly labelled dear reader, do not hesitate to contact me. Arrivederci, Mara.

But for now I have not learned. So after making vast quantities of quince paste which I will share with farm stay guests, with friends and family and use for bartering, a full basket of quinces remained. I decided that I would dry them.

I left the skin on and cut them thinly, placed them in a very large bowl and added raw sugar until they were well covered. I added lemon juice because acidity always helps to preserve fruit although quinces are already very acidic.

I left them in the bowl covered for two days. Over this time the sugar wicks most of the water out and you end up with a really delicious quince cordial.

I strained the juice and bottled it in these fantastic beer bottles and placed the bottles of quince cordial in a pot big enough to cover them with water well and boiled them for 20mins. Once cooled they were placed in our larder to be enjoyed with warm liqueurs in winter and cool drinks in summer.

The quince pieces I’d sliced were placed on my dehydrator trays, touching but not overlapping and were dried for between 8-10 hours.

Dehydrating can be tricky for a home preserver not because it is hard, as it is very easy to do, but because you never quite know what you can get away with. How dry should you make the fruit. If you want to keep the fruit for a year as I often do then I tend to dry it very well. If you want to keep it for a few months you can leave a bit of softness to it. It’s trial and error.

The really great thing about home drying is that your fruit is sulphur dioxide free, in fact this is not the only great thing. What I love, what I really love about all this food preserving is the culture of it. The adventures that come with it. The trip in the car (or bike preferably) looking for trees, or the discussions with friends, exchanging favourite spots. Choosing which basket to bring, something wide enough so that the fruit does not sit on top of each other, the excitement of being offered a tree by a friend on Instagram with an invitation to harvest (thank you Part Time In Kingston), the possible recipes and exchange of recipes with friends and friends yet to make. The colours that fill my larder, the sweet fragrance of fruit and the enduring flavours through winter.

I really, really love this food culture and I am so appreciative of my cultural inheritance.