Village Homes Realty
Sustainable House Day was a huge success – not only for us as the Ecovillage, but especially for our over 100 visitors attending the day. We opened up 8 houses with different building materials, one of them the first ever short stay accommodation in the village located overlooking the central dam. We are happy to say that the feedback given by future residents and potentially interested folks ranged from “it helped us a lot to understand which kind of material and style would suit us” to “we enjoyed getting to know people from the Ecovillage to realize this is where we want to live”. Once again, we are very thankful that we had such respectful and appreciative visitors walking through the open houses – the vibe on the day was one of a kind. Read more about the day in one of our latest coverage articles in “The West Australian”.
On that same day, we ended up having a big party with all residents. Accompanied by our talented musicians in the village, we were celebrating our double win at the UDIA National Awards. Missed the news? Read more about it here.
Aurora Australis and Meteor Shower in the Ecovillage
On 10th April, a couple of Ecovillage residents witnessed the Southern Lights – within the cosiness of their homes. Yes, you heard that right: No one needed to head out to find a darker environment, given that one of the difficult achievements of the Ecovillage team was to get permission from the Shire to only install our discreet little path down lights throughout the Ecovillage–not overhead streetlights on every corner as is usually required. The main goal was to keep light pollution to a minimum, which is certainly proved to be working!
Thanks to resident Jeannine Penniment for this incredible shot over the central dam.
Just a couple days earlier, I realised that a huge meteor shower has been announced. I was too tired to head out in the middle of the night, so I asked my friend and new Ecovillage resident Roger Essig to take some pictures – and he delivered! Check out this fantastic timelapse taken straight from the village:
Gardening Workshops in the Ecovillage
Another perk of living in the Ecovillage are the budget-friendly (even free) workshops provided by Mark Tupman, our former Horticulture Manager and long-time supporter. Our residents have been spoiled with gardening workshops in the last couple of months, learning how to prepare for autumn planting, how to create a veggie patch (from scratch), how to grow your garden organically as well as how to compost and make a worm farm. If you’d like to learn some autumn gardening tips, you can find the latest article by Mark here.
Photos: Clara Evelyn Fischer
Saving birds’ lives with stickers
We have had a couple of incidents of birds flying into our big windows at the community centre over summer–luckily all of them survived after a bit of TLC from the team. Many birds can’t interpret reflections of the sky or surrounding greenery in large areas of glazing and aren’t able to understand windows as a barrier. When I was a child, we had bird stickers on our windows to make them more visible. Applying quite a few of them on the outside of the community centre’s window seems to be helping them to avoid collision1and they are casting cute rainbows into the kitchen! We’ll keep you updated on this and see how it goes!
