January | 2015 | Gorgeous Green House

The Indigenous Garden Magazine inspires, informs and advises not only on indigenous gardening but the larger eco-systems they contribute too. Not only gardeners enjoy this publication as there is much to offer all people who have an interest in the natural world.

The Gorgeous Green House has been thrilled to share aspects of our gardening journey and the latest article features our vertical garden. Enjoy and sign up, its free and fabulous!

http://issuu.com/theindigenousgardener/docs/december_2014/1

Perfect Party House!

This post is somewhat later than it should be but I have the best excuse! We’ve been sharing this beautiful space with our overseas family (10 in all) for 6 weeks and have been incredibly busy chilling, having lots of fun and feasts and just joyfully hanging out.

A good test for a home is a lot of visitors for a protracted amount of time and I am thrilled to report that the GGH works beautifully. The kitchen and open space living area flows brilliantly and dozens of meals were seamlessly put together without bodies bumping into each other.

Thanks to our super efficient solar system we were blissfully unaware that Eskom (SA’s only power utility) gifted South Africans with numerous power outages during this time. We remained switched on, connected and cooking!

The natural swimming pool coped with the daily invasion of overheated, sunscreen coated humans and the fish, shrimp crabs, plants and birds seem no worse for wear for sharing ‘their’ space with us.

The large covered veranda is perfect for our African climate. It coped with many for several big celebrations (including Christmas Day) and all meals were enjoyed al fresco. This has been our first chance to soak up the beautiful garden within which, to date, we’ve enjoyed whilst hard at labour rather than relaxation!

The veggie garden, although not properly planted as yet, provided an abundance of deliciousness and a foretelling of how are food lives will be in ‘normal’ mode.

In celebration of the finishing of the house I thought it would be fun to document the journey with ‘before’, ‘during’ and ‘now’ images. At the beginning of this journey I wrote on my ‘About’ page that part of OUR MISSION was to provide:

…inspiration, information and motivation to others to follow suit. We wish to de-bunk myths such as ‘green is ugly’…….

I also shared in one of my early posts:

Several years ago when I started talking about my dream of building a ‘green house’ a friend said “oh I saw one of those … a kind of hobbit house…really ugly”. So the first misconception to clear up is that green design has nothing to do with the aesthetics of the house! Whatever your taste (hobbit-like or otherwise) one can incorporate green design principles. Essentially it means building in harmony with the natural environment and cooperating instead of fighting with the regional climate.

Now we are at the end of the project (at least the building part) I do so hope that these images represent a realization of that early goal. I look forward to your feedback.