boundaries and resources

Boundaries

I can see the boundaries of this design so far as;

The design must fit in with the atmosphere of the surrounding community and likely customers. The immediate neighbours may also be a limiting factor; one family seems to be a little unhappy about a cafe moving into the neighbourhood and has started complaining about cars being parked on the street and about the colourful sign being outside. Not upsetting the neighbours any further will need to be taken into consideration.
There is no budget to finance the project. We will be responsible for either contributing or raising the money needed for whatever we require.
We have a very specific time limit. The opening party, for when all work needs to be complete and in place, will be in early July. The first meeting we have organised with Lisa is for the beginning of June. Added to this is the constraint that living and working full time in a permaculture learning centre; we have two days per week when we are not working on the farm and can come and visit the cafe. From the beginning of July we are also running a series of workshops at the farm which will need the full attention of all members of the community. This leaves us with two consecutive weekends for visiting the cafe, and then a final weekend to implement the design. A very short time frame!

Resources

So, what resources do we have so far?
We have..

Making compost at Panya

Compost; we reguarly make 18 day compost in big piles in Panya, using all our food scraps, layered with brown woody plant waste and green cuttings.. we will need this for potting up all the plants and making garden beds. And we have just enough time to make some. Great!

Some of the materials we can use at the Free Bird

Materials at the free bird; scrap wood, plant pots, a big pile of pebbles.

Mich harvesting Bamboo

Support from the Panya community; we have devoted some work mornings for the entire community to help prepare for the project, in whatever ways will be most beneficial.

The workshop in Panya

Access to materials at Panya; tools, scrap wood for furniture making,, a plentiful supply of bamboo, a well equipped workshop with hand and power tools, ladders, stones from the local river.

The Panya nursery

Plants from Panya gardens and nursery; so far we have been able to take, aloe, lemongrass, chillies, beans, onions, spinach and basil.

Choosing plants with the group in the nursery

Support from within the group of main and secondary designers; working together and assigning roles we will hopefully be very productive and efficient.

Working with the support of others in the community is a very valuable resource. I am very used to doing all research for a project myself, whereas here it is possible to delegate tasks to others that may have more time.
Here is the research on Feng shui that we asked a volunteer to carry out for us.

Notes on Feng shui from our volunteer

We found that although this was fascinating stuff, the garden didn't correspond to Feng shui like we thought it would in most ways that things had been placed. After talking this through with Lisa we all decided to not tie our plans to this too strongly, and to base our designs fully on sound permaculture design.

Financial resources..?

One resource that we found ourselves lacking is money. If we had a longer time to prepare we could start all plants from cuttings or seeds,, and we could most likely make or find other things, such as the trellis and hanging baskets, and even the thatch roofing. But with our short time frame it would be much more practical to visit the garden centre and buy semi-grown plants. Also as the opening party of the cafe is so soon, it would be very nice for the garden to be filled with plants that are already looking semi established.,
Firstly though we can take some measures to keep costs down to a minimum.

We can visit the recycling centre to possibly pick up pots and materials very cheaply
We can source as many plants, cuttings, seeds and seedlings from Panya as possible
We can borrow any equipment that we may need, either from Panya or from our neighours Punpun (such as ladders which we don't have)
As this is a Panya project the community itself may be able to contribute some money towards the design costs.

This still may leave us short, so we have designed a fundraising website (on 'Indigogo'), sharing information about what we are doing with an option to donate money. Three days in and we have $100 already.. Hopefully this will raise the extra cash that we will need.

Please continue here to the analysis section, where we will try to make sense of all that has come so far..