Blog
31 stories from our journey of blending technology with slow, sustainable living in Whangārei Heads.
Food
I’ve fallen in love with courgettes this season. Thankfully ours are growing well this year since we gave each plant a stake to climb. Last year we had several plants in our garden, but I feel like I wasted them. I’d regularly forget to go and check for fruit under the huge, s...
22 January 2024
School Gardens
Last year I joined the Board for Oke Charity, an inspiring organisation that create outdoor classrooms for schools in Aotearoa New Zealand. I hadn’t heard of Oke before I saw the board role but the more I read, the more I wanted to get involved.
22 January 2024
Slow Sundays
Over the summer we have made a conscious effort to slow down and enjoy time with our friends and whānau. We also wanted to enjoy our place, Āhuru Mōwai, the sheltered haven we’ve worked so hard to create.
20 January 2024
Food
Sustainable fabric grow bags are one of the easiest ways to create more growing space. While our property has lots of space for us to turn into growing areas, it can be a bit of effort to set up new spaces. We experimented with planting rambling crops like potatoes, kūmara and...
19 January 2024
Cocktails
Fresh raspberries have to be one of my favourite luxuries. I look forward to raspberry season every year and try to wait until the prices for the little punnets come down a bit before I indulge. The Clover Club is the very best way to use fresh raspberries.
19 January 2024
Water
Mark grew up on a farm that relied on bore and tank water. Water was a vital resource. Showers were quick, and if anyone took too long his dad would turn off the tap from the wetback to the hot water cylinder to cut off the flow of hot water and cut short the person’s shower.
17 January 2024
Uncategorised
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 a...
16 January 2024
Home Automation
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...
16 January 2024
Syntropic
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 havin...
14 January 2024
House Plants
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.
13 January 2024
Outdoor Living
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...
13 January 2024
The Bath House
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.
12 January 2024