National Sustainable House Day 2012

National Sustainable House Day is celebrating its 11^th birthday this year on September 9. This annual event is held Australia wide and gives people the chance to visit houses that have been designed, built or fitted out with sustainability in mind and talk to owners, receiving unbiased advice.
As was the case last year, we are running a tour of Tenderbreak Permaculture Farm as an ancillary event to Sustainable House Day.

Our summer garden

Features explored on our tours include:-

• Passive solar house design using thermal mass to control temperature
• Earth bermed walls, mudbrick construction and radial sawn timber
• Oat roller and home motorised grain grinder
• Designing houses to resist fire & numerous bushfire defence systems including a fire shelter
• Solar power system that provides power to our house (No mains grid connection)
• Grey and black water worm farm treatment system.
• Wood stove for cooking, heating, ironing and hot water supply
• Fresh water and garden irrigation reticulation systems
• Large organic veggie garden and use of compost to build soil depth from 10mm to 300mm.
• Seed saving and companion planting.
• Organic orchard with over 100 varieties of fruiting trees and bushes
• Less common plants include yakon, medlar, lemonade tree, white sapote, shatoot mulberry
• Our flocks of free range hens and ducks
• Fences, gates, trellises, hothouse and outbuildings made from recycled materials.
• Our plans to use a steam engine as a back-up power supply for our solar system
• Fish stocked multifunction dam, and much more

One of our tours

Our property is in the Yarra Valley, 65km from Melbourne. If you would like to join our tour you are very welcome. Bookings are essential as we have a limit of 20 people. The tour runs from 1:30 to 4:30 and the $15 per adult cost includes afternoon tea. Email us for more information at tenderbreak@bigpond.com.

If you cannot make it on that day, email us, and we will let you know when the next tour is on.

Of course there are plenty of houses open on the day in every state in Australia. Details of these can be found on NSHD website www.sustainablehouseday.com .

National Sustainable House Day

National Sustainable House Day (NSHD) is celebrating its 10^th birthday this year on September 11. This annual event is held Australia wide and gives people the chance to visit houses that have been designed, built or fitted out with sustainability in mind and talk to owners, receiving unbiased advice.
For the first time we are running a tour of Tenderbreak Permaculture Farm as an ancillary event to Sustainable House day. This occurred quite by accident. We had already set September 11 as our next tour date and a friend suggested we link up with the local Sustainable House Day activities. We followed up this great idea and this lead to one of the local papers (Yarra Ranges Weekly) asking if they could include our place in a promotional piece they are putting together. So last week the reporter, Natalie and Lucy, the photographer came out and had a chat, a coffee and a short tour. The article should appear in the week prior to September 11.

If you would like to join our tour on that day you are very welcome. Bookings are essential as we have a limit of 20 people. The tour runs from 1:30 to 4:30 and the $15 per adult cost includes afternoon tea. Email us for more information at tenderbreak@bigpond.com. If you cannot make it on that day email us and we will let you know when the next tour is on

Of course there are plenty of houses open on that day in every state in Australia. Details of open houses can be found on NSHD website www.sustainablehouseday.com. If you live in the western suburbs check out Gavin’s house, which is a terrific example of how to incorporate sustainable ideas in housing, the backyard and most importantly in the way we live. See Gavin’s blog at www.greeningofgavin.com for more information about his place.

For more details about the tour of Tenderbreak see the “Ancillery Events “ page of the Sustainable House Day  website.