A little bit about ourselves
We lived in the tropics for a long time, but the temperatures up North became too much for us and we decided to move to Tasmania. We bought a five acre block in the Huon Valley in 2004. We built a house ourselves, just the two of us, and we wrote about this adventure on our other website. In 2001 we established our small business Kavenga Publishing in Townsville. We write and hand-bind personalized children's books. Torsten writes and illustrates the books. Silke customizes, prints and hand-binds them in hardcover. We sell our books over the internet on our website www.kavenga.com and on our stall at Hobart's Salamanca Market. Our books are set in Australia's unique landscapes: the rainforest, the Great Barrier Reef,  Tasmania's Styx Valley, the wild southern ocean. It is our mission to bring a little bit of nature into the world of the children, to help create awareness. It is quite labour intensive to make our books, and it's more than a full time job for Silke. Torsten works in glass, too, and makes glass pendants and other glass art for our market stall. 

In the past Silke established a Permaculture garden in Australia's dusty outback and a City Permaculture garden in the tropics, but gardening in a cold climate was completely new to us. Our goal now is to be self-sufficient in everything that can possibly be grown here by us. "Us", that's not just the two of us, but also our daughter Britta and our son Klaas and his wife Kristine. They all live in Hobart, 60km from Abels Bay and often visit. They all have been vegetarians for many years and we provide them with food from our garden. We are very green at heart and want to grow our fruit and vegies organically and concentrate on non-hybrid organic seeds where possible. It's a journey that includes trying out many things and making a lot of experiences on the way. We firmly believe that the only way of the future is to grow organically as much of what we consume ourselves as possible. We want to show that this is possible, even for people who can only devote some of their time to gardening. We want to share our experiences on this website. 

Why would you grow your own food?
Why would you even consider growing your own food? It's cheap enough in the supermarkets and the times when people had to supplement their meager incomes by growing vegies in the backyard are long gone. In the industrialized countries of the world living standards are higher than ever before. Houses are bigger, cars are faster, you can buy electronic gadgets of all kinds and capture your life on digital photos. But what is really documented in these photos is mankind's total addiction to processes based on an unlimited supply of cheap fossil fuel. In the 21st century people now suddenly realize that this Brave New World we have created for ourselves, is not sustainable and that our children's children will not be able to live the comfortable live that we enjoy. The unlimited cheap supply of fossil fuel has suddenly become very limited and very expensive. We are polluting the world and realize that we have to change our ways if we want to survive. But what can we do? We all have to answer that question individually. Some will ignore these issues completely and loose themselves in the latest Hollywood movies. But those movies always end and the reality is still there. For us personally the answer is quite simple. We just try to do what we can do. And spreading the word about growing your own food is our attempt to show that it is indeed possible to grow a large proportion of your own food while still being a part of today's society, while still working in a full time job, or in our case, running a business.