The land

Our flock of goats and a few turkeys have joined the hens on TeMara. The garden is doing well although the abundance of rain and somewhat colder weather is making things slow to start this year. We got hold of a great many new heirloom varieties this spring which are all sprouting well. Most of the trees of the first years planting are now poking their heads out of the grass and it is good seeing some marginal land being reforested. We recently extended the Atamai land holdings by another 10 ha of adjacent land including some prime garden slopes which will allow us the increase the area under production fivefold.

Building projects

A number of cottages and temporary housing is planned to allow the first three families to move onto the land in the next three months and start building. The engineering workshop has seen some internal modifications done and will temporarily house the Atamai offices. Please note that from November both our physical address and phone number will shift to the Atamai site from Motueka. We will post the details on the web site.

Village community

Six of the twelve sections available at this stage (including the existing house we recently purchased) have now sold. We welcome Wulf Heinigen & family, Adrienne Henry & children and Kerry and Chihiro Marshall & children to the village community. Our spring potlock was great fun and we had a very pleasant evening with everyone.

Just as a reminder for the next potluck: 30th of October at Jack & Joanna’s place again. Jurgen & Kyoko will be moving onto the village site at the end of November and Geoff & Leonora are planning to follow early next year.

Business Opportunities

We are still keen to talk to anyone with machinery operating, building, joinery and related construction skills who would like to live in an eco-village. If you know anyone, put them onto us!

Contacting us

Apologise again for all those who had late email responses to requests made through the web site in the last months. Apparently we had three periods (2008, early 2009 and recently) where the email routing didn’t work as set up due to physical IT infrastructure changes. I hope I have now caught up with the email update list and once the main fibre optic link is in place and the village server is installed in its final location we should have no further problems of this sort.

New Staff

Kerry will start working for us in a variety of roles (landscaping, maintenance & building) in early November and Adrienne is already very busy tidying up the fruit tree terraces and planning the new community garden establishment next to the village site.

Planning and Development

The earthworks are now scheduled to commence on the 2nd of November and continue through to March next year, by which time all section platforms and access will be complete for stage one. This is now also our timetable for title availability of the next batch of sections. Detailed earthwork engineering plans are now available for all but sections 1-3.

New Web Site

Thanks to Craig and Tracey’s input our new web site is up and running. More pictures and updates will be posted in the next days. Check by the end of next week and it will look a lot brighter and more feature rich.