Spiral Garden

💛Are you still waste-free?💛

We’ve been up to our elbows in work and life with teenagers, and all the things you’d expect from this season of our lives - and it’s mostly great! But we’ve been caught up in all that busy and trying to make ends meet so a couple of things have fallen by the wayside.

One of those things is social media - it’s looking a bit quiet around instagram these days! This has partly been intentional because social media seems to be doing more harm than good lately, and because there are just so many hours a person can give. An interesting side-effect of this quietness, and the understanding that we must be quite busy, is that we’ve had quite a few people ask: “Are you still waste-free?”

The short version of the answer is “Of course we bloody are!” We’re committed to this way of living for as long as we’re able (hopefully always). But we are living through a time where more obstacles to living this way seem to land in front of us every couple of weeks, so I thought it best to update you on HOW we’re living waste-free right now, and what’s changed (and what hasn’t) over the past 8 years. Read it over on our substack (link in comments - it’s free).

Image - an oil painting by eldest daughter titled ‘belongings’. Yes that’s our 6.5 years waste jar, immortalised in oil paint.

Just incase you're after a last minute gift... We have lots of signed copies of our book ‘A Family Guide To Waste-Free Living’, and 52 Climate Solutions art prints and tea towels available, as well as Living Landscapes card games. We’re shipping everything with a free express post upgrade before Sunday night, so it’ll arrive before Christmas. A perfect gift for gently encouraging some positive actions and conversations in the new year!

Or... if you’ve loved following our Substack this year (thank you!), you might consider giving someone a gift subscription... And if you’re after something completely different, maybe a secondhand record or voucher from our other project/shop, Suffragette Records!

You might have heard the recent news that REDcycle are no longer accepting soft plastics for recycling in Australia. In online forums we’ve seen some people express frustration, despair and and confusion around “what to do about soft plastics”. Well, there are many solutions worth talking about! We will be delving into this issue and sharing some perspectives (and solutions) with our zero-waste mates, Erin from The Rogue Ginger and Lindsay from Treading My Own Path tonight, via Instagram Live. Tune in!

This week is National Recycling Week in Australia. It’s a great time to make sure you’re recycling as effectively as possible, but it’s perhaps even more important to reflect on your reliance on the recycling industry and whether it’s really sustainable and effective. We've seen in the last 12 hours that REDcycle has needed to pause operations because that system is currently untenable. Other ambitious recycling programs have also had to close in recent months. We need to focus efforts higher up on the waste hierarchy.

One way to examine the issue on a personal or household level is to have a go at living so that you don't need to rely on recycling systems day-to-day. Here's a post we shared on our blog just yesterday, about living recycling-free. It's part of a series of climate actions you can make at a small scale while we rally for broader change.

27: Go Recycling-Free It's National Recycling Week, so we want to encourage you to consider whether recycling is something you can go (at least partly) without!

Thanks to everyone who put up their hands to win a double pass to see ‘GREENHOUSE by Joost’ on Thursday evening here in nipaluna/Hobart. We have randomly drawn a lucky winner who is looking forward to seeing the film. If you can make it to the State Cinema on Thursday night we highly recommend it! The film is excellent and will leave you feeling positive about how we can design our lives right now, for the future. Oberon will be introducing the film and moderating a Q&A session with Joost Bakker and Matt Stone (and maybe you!) afterwards, which should be super interesting. See you there!

Tickets here:
https://www.statecinema.com.au/movies/details/State/8020

It's been a season filled with lots of change and adventure for this little family. We thought it was time we said hi and re-introduce ourselves for the new faces. We're Lauren & Oberon and we've been living waste-free in lutruwita for 7 years. Oberon's an ecologist and Lauren manages Spiral Garden, while home educating our three kids. We love to learn, talk, and write about permaculture, climate change and small, low-tech solutions that can be implemented by every-day folks, alongside positive climate action. We wrote a book about waste-free living, full of our favourite recipes and ideas for this way of life that we find so simple, affordable, and joy-filled.

Around late 2019, a while after sharing our book, we noticed a big shift away from talking about waste. Publishers and the media felt it had been done to death and wanted something new. Then the challenges of 2020 shifted everything. We watched waste become a bigger problem than before. Algorithms made it harder to connect with people. Along the way, we felt burned out.

Our kids have done a lot of growing and we've found ourselves with some time to remember where we began. Our first conversation was about music. We’ve always made, listened to, collected and talked about it. We inherited our parents record collections and have slowly added our favourites. We've long felt that permaculture and waste-free thinking need to be applied creatively, beyond the garden and home, to have broader positive impact. So, we've embarked on a family project to address inequality in the music industry, while normalising permaculture and waste-free principles and ethics ... In a record store, celebrating music by women. We’re living our 90’s dream.

We spent winter pulling together a small shop and catalogue, filled with mostly pre-loved furniture, fittings, technology & records. We’re learning the ropes in an industry that surprisingly already values slow, low-tech, low waste, high quality, small and local. We continue growing a garden, feeding ourselves, enjoying the seasons and nature around us, and catching the bus to our new job, just down the road in a tiny record store with a huge ❤️ Suffragette Records

Our latest letter, all about art, why we need it, and a roundabout way of sharing our new family project.

The need for art in a climate crisis Can we still have nice things? We're talking about the need for art to create social change in a climate crisis. Plus a little personal update.

Winter solstice. Always a good time for letting go and moving towards a new season of life. Making space for what's next. We waved goodbye to our tiny house yesterday, and our beautiful lizards too. The lizards have moved on to the home of good friends, who have long hoped to adopt a couple of blueys. It felt right to let another family have a turn at loving them, as our own home's been feeling smaller and days have been busier as kids have grown older.

Similarly, it was time to hand over the tiny house to a family who needed its warmth and comfort. The little room where we wrote our book and ran our shop, where we escaped for quiet moments during lockdowns and watched birds land in the trees nearby. Now our kids sleep in longer, so early mornings are where we find our quiet time. And although we'd expected one of them would want to move into the tiny house one day, we've discovered we all really like living under one roof. Even if it is a bit small. So we're paring back, simplifying, re-imagining, and letting go. Welcoming a new season.

We shed a little tear, waving goodbye from the end of the driveway, but then whooped with gladness today as a load of firewood was dropped off where the little house had been. A perfect beginning for this new season, and a reminder that seasons can bring change and familiarity, and a mix of the two can be a great thing.

Happy solstice! May it bring the best kind of change and comfort your way. ✨❄️

Here's this week's blog post / love letter. It's full of gentle habits, slow rituals, projects, and lovely links. Stay snuggly this weekend, friends!

Cultivating quiet and slow in a climate crisis How little rituals and old technologies can help in a climate crisis. Lessons from an Edwardian Walking Skirt, how to make Sesamite, and a shop update + sale.

These are some of the people we’re voting for on Saturday. We’re also voting for those with less privilege than us and those without voices - like the plants, fungi and animals we share this earth with. We’re excited that one of the people in this photo will be voting alongside us this time!✊🍄🌿🌏❤️

Don’t forget about the printable DIY how to vote (your way) card we made, and links to help you research your local candidates, which we shared a few weeks back on Substack. Check the link here: https://spiralgarden.substack.com/p/get-political?r=1cun85&utm_medium=ios