We were in Dubrovnik, Croatia when we started looking for our forever home. It was November 2017 and Mark and I had been traveling since we left our jobs and packed up our central Sydney apartment in February of that year. For us travel was a way to forget everything we knew about ourselves and take the time to figure out what kind of future we wanted.

We have lived with Alexa and Google Nest devices for several years now, and we’ve got used to using voice commands. Our kids have always lived in a home that had these devices, in fact our three-year-old is almost able to say “Ok Google”. To be honest we don’t mind if it takes her a little longer yet to figure that one out.

There are a few commands we use every day that have made our lives easier.

This weekend we spent a lot of time in our food forest: weeding, planting, playing and even eating. It’s early days in our syntropic gardening journey but we’re already reaping the rewards. All the hard work was worth it to hear our daughter proudly proclaim that we were having a feast when she sat down to eat blueberries and raspberries from the food forest.

If you’re a great plant parent, you won’t need this. But if you’re like me and guilty of killing a house plant or two, you might find this little tip could help you go from overwatering or neglecting to water your plants to watering them the exact right amount.

The first summer we lived at our property we had a newborn baby so didn’t spend a lot of time dining outside. With no mature trees we didn’t have much shade, though in the cool of the evening we’d sometimes cook on a little Webber coal BBQ in the shade thrown by our North-East facing barn as the sun set.

Since we bought our property, we’ve spent countless hours imagining our ideal outdoor dining and entertainment areas.

The Bath House is one of my favourite spots on our property. It houses our Stoken Stainless wood-fired hot tub and provides the perfect shady spot to hang my hammock while we wait for our big trees to grow.

Learning is one of Mark’s superpowers, he can consume, understand and apply large volumes of information about a range of topics. This has been a huge asset for us as we’ve developed our land and our home.

Last year, he focused on syntropic gardening – a method of cultivation that aligns closely with the natural processes and symbiotic relationships found in ecosystems.

Our kids eat all the strawberries we grow as soon as they’re ripe. A lot of them don’t even get the chance to ripen before they’re plucked by hungry little fingers.

The good news? You only need four strawberries for this delicious daiquiri recipe. Our kids had a sleepover at their nana’s this week, which gave me an opportunity to swipe a handful for frozen strawberry daiquiris.

If you have been thinking about switching to a robot lawnmower, do it. When we bought our acre and a half the kikuyu had well and truly taken over. There were no visible fences and when Mark walked down the boundary line in search of them, he sunk to his hip in the overgrown grass.

Starlink has been a game changer for our internet connectivity. When we first bought our property there was almost no mobile signal, we had to go up the road to the top of the hill to be able to send messages and make calls. We couldn’t be HiTech Hippies without good internet access.

One of the best presents I’ve ever bought myself is our Stoked woodfired hot tub. We originally planned to install a pair of outside baths, but then Mark discovered the stainless-steel hot tubs made in Wanaka.

Starting a veggie garden was something we’d always planned to do at some point, but the question of access to fresh food was top of mind at the start of the pandemic, so as soon as we could buy plants, we got planting.

Our water source was one of the first things we thought about when we bought our property. We knew there was no access to town supply, so securing our water source by getting set up to collect rainwater was a top priority.