New Brochure, wet paddocks, and warm Earthstead.

Wwoofer Matt has been working hard on a promotional brochure for our homestay / B&B, spending many hours in front of the computer and consultant with Ali and I.











We are thrilled with the result, and have been using this brochure to promote our homestay property, Earthstead, in the local area. Our website will be ready in the next couple of weeks, and we will be working hard to get all the information, links and photo's loaded. The brochure shows off our brand new logo, which we are so proud of. Local graphic designer, Lee Hanson and his team did a great job, and we are thrilled.







On a less happy note, we have found the very expensive Italian sealer we used on our precious tiles was not protecting them as well as we had hoped. We were seeing some oil marks and food stains on the tiles, so we decided we needed to reseal them with a tried and true traditional recipe, - bees wax mixed with citrus turpentine. The result has been wonderful at a fraction of the cost of the Italian sealer, so good in fact that we decided to apply the wax to the outside tiles also. Here Doreen and Matt work happily, cleaning the tiles very carefully and then applying the polish.
The inside tiles were expertly waxed by the super team of Jenn and Gee.






We have had a very wet spell of weather lately, and parts of our paddocks are under water. In this kind of weather, pasture damage and "pugging" can be a real problem. Moving the cows often onto new grass is very important, and minimises damage. Grass is not as plentiful during the winter months, so we need to protect and manage it very carefully.







Since our earlier problems with shorts in the electric fence, and Angie breaking through the fence at will, we have decided to check the voltage level each time we move the cows,then any problem can be quickly sorted out before Miss Angie or any of the others decides to go walk about.








We are also very careful to make sure our stock have clean water to drink, and routinely bucket out the troughs before the cows are put in the next paddock.








Ali has been busy getting the underfloor heating going in the Earthouse. All hot water for the Earthouse can be heated three ways - firstly via solar, secondly via the wetback on the fire, and lastly by electricity. We have found that on a fine sunny day in mid winter, the three solar panels are heating the water to 50 degrees, which is perfectly adequate for showering and washing etc. However the underfloor heating is much more greedy as far as temperature goes, so our efficient fireplace and wetback are taking up the slack.









This fireplace is specially designed for this purpose, and puts 30 percent of it's heat into the room and the rest into the wetback, heating the underfloor to a cosy twenty degrees.








As these photos show, our Earthouse is designed for solar gain, north facing, with high and low windows allowing the sun to stream into the house, warming the walls and floor.







Earth walls naturally soakup and store this heat, and very slowly release it over the next 12 hours. We are thrilled with our Earthouse's performance over this first winter, - even though the house is unoccupied most of the time, and the fire is used intermittently, the air temp in the house has not fallen below 16 degrees, with no use of electric heating.