Introducing: Sakona

Welcome to our journey! We have decided to create this blog while we are creating our home.

We had moved to Northland, NZ in May 2017. H, our youngest was just 5 months old. Before then we had lived near B's home town in Australia for seven months. Before then we traveled round Europe and North America by car with our two children ages 5 and 3 and whilst pregnant for 7 months. We'd had quite a ride around before we decided to settle in New Zealand.

In December 2017, we were the owners of a perfect, beautiful piece of paradise. 14 Hectares of land overlooking the Te Puna inlet with views of calm, turquoise water and a backdrop of a wide open sky with multi-colored green rolling hills in between. At the very top of the property, the view spans 360 degrees of water on the Northeast and textured farmland to the southwest.

My partner B and I had a really deep conversation before we bought the property about whether or not we deserved this beautiful place. We had decided, why not us? We are planning to do loving, kind things to the land and create a space for our children to really get the most out of their childhood. We did decide, that whatever we did, we had to share this space.

Over the last two years, we have put a lot of heart and soul into the land. B was out there everyday planting trees. So many trees! Fruit trees such as: Peach, plum, apple, pear, apricot, tropical apricot, banana, guava, capulin cherry, avocado, almond, walnut, orange, lemon, lime, mandarin, mountain paw paw, fig, bay,  pine nut, cinnamon, inga bean, olive and feijoa trees. Plus honey locust, tipuana tipu, flax, jacaranda, and oak trees. During that first year of owning the land B drove 2 and a half hours, once a month to attend a permaculture design course and spent a week in Hawke's Bay learning how to build a straw bale house. The youngest of our three children had just turned one and I was spending a lot of time at our rental home trying to get our lives established.

The next year, in December 2018 we began designing our home with the environment in mind. We worked with an Eco-architect and after months of designing and redesigning we settled on a straw bale home designed to work with nature to create a sustainable home. We will have solar panels for electricity, north facing glass windows for solar passive gain, straw bale walls with clay plaster and earth floors for solar mass, a wood burning stove with a wetback for heating, cooking and hot water in the winter and a vermiculture waste system which will, through worm intervention, use our waste to create compost and use the water from the system as a fertilizer for our trees and plants.

As this is an introduction, I will come to a close and elaborate on different topics in different posts but most importantly: just a note to say, that over this past year, we have had many workawayers come through our space and have enriched our lives more than we could have imagined. This project has really brought a sense of community and like mindedness which has made Sakona feel like a home (even though we're not living there yet!). We have also met many locals with similar values that are always willing to lend a helping hand. We are so, so lucky to have the help, guidance and friendship of the people we have met so far. One of the reasons I want to get this blog going, is to get an online scrapbook of our precious time with our new friends.

See you soon!