THE Urban Bush-Carpenters returned to Stewart Lodge, hitherto the site of our finest hour, the walk-in chook house. And we topped it.

Over the course of four weekends, we constructed a hybrid compost bay/deep litter chook-feeding system. In the absence of naysayers, we consider it to be a world’s first.

As seen on TV, Stewart Lodge is a residential care facility for people with acquired brain injury. The garden co-ordinators, Robin and Nattie, had strict design requirements for us to meet. They wanted the Lodge chickens to have access to the bays – that way, the chooks could scratch around and feed on the kitchen scraps, all the while adding their own nitrogen-rich deposits to the mix. But the design would have to be as simple as possible, so the residents could use it. No heavy lids or complex mechanisms.

Unfortunately, these demands postponed Geoff’s longstanding desire to construct a chook-powered conveyor-belt and elevator contraption:

This sketch was better:

After a frank planning pow-wow, we settled on the perfect design. We would build the bays with tall posts and doors that hinged at the top. To give the ladies access to the veggie scraps, we’d extend the run all the way to the bays, and wrap the frame in chicken wire to prevent their escape.

We’d been collecting materials hither and thither for a couple of months. My mother’s friend Pretam is renovating her home around the corner from Stewart Lodge, and we were able to construct the bays almost entirely from material she kindly donated – her old hardwood framing timber, floorboards and even a classy wire door. Late one night we scavenged sheets of tin from a footpath in Carlton North, and motored nonchalantly down a main road with several sheets protruding savagely from the rear end of a hatchback.

And so, to the construction: together with volunteers and prodigal bush-carpenter Dale, we worked on the beast. We’d confidently predicted we’d have it done in two afternoons. It took four weekends instead, including one dawn to dusk session by Geoff and Andy under a giant tarp, while the Gods wept bitter tears.

But here is the magnificent finished product, which makes everything (almost) worthwhile (maybe).

The final afternoon, as we basked in our own self-satisfied glory, one resident approached with food scraps to feed the chickens. “Put it in the compost bays!” I suggested, and tried to explain our grand plan.

She was unconvinced. “How are the chickens going to get in there?” she said scornfully – and perceptively. She may have a point.

A FEW months ago I wrote a column about Fowlers Vacola bottling kits, and a week later, I received a letter, via The Age. It is my all-time favourite letter. The writer had cut out the header of my article from the newspaper and adhered it to the sheet.

The handwriting was cursive like my grandma’s. “Dear Sir,” it began. “Last week you wrote a very interesting article on fruit bottling. I have the complete works, several dozen bottles and instructions. I would like to find someone interested as I am now retired and no longer do any bottling…”

Margaret included her number, and when I phoned, she called me “Mr Green”. We spoke a few times, and finally, a week ago, I drove to her house.

She was waiting by the door when I arrived. I guessed she was in her late 80s, but her physical presence had not yet diminished. She gave the impression of height. Her husband had recently passed away and she had been sorting through their effects. Over the past weeks, she retrieved the Fowlers bottles from the garage, washed them and stacked them for my arrival. There were rows and rows of them – too many to transport at once – as well as the big electric boiler and boxes of lids, seals and paraphernalia.

Margaret told me that she and her husband had both worked full time. In late summer and autumn, they would arrive home at six o’clock and begin bottling. They bought cheap boxes of fruit and stored enough to last through the year.

When she told me about her husband, she spoke slowly and looked away, towards where the wall and floor met. She had no next of kin, she said. It was a lot to do, to organise and discard their possessions, but there was no one else. She was glad the bottles, at least, would go to someone who wanted them.

We stacked the jars in the car and I arranged to visit again in a couple of weeks, for the dozens remaining. It was a grey Sunday afternoon, windy, and the jars rattled as I passed back through the suburbs.

A couple of days later, I rode to my friends Helen and Sam’s house with half a dozen jars in my bag. They had a box of apples ready, some gleaned from a tree in their street, others from a neighbour’s sister’s yard. In a small production line, we peeled and cut them, and packed the jars. Helen made syrup, three parts water to one part raw sugar. We clipped on the seals and lids, brought the water to 94 degrees, and held it there for 45 minutes. We nattered and joked and listened to music; we were productive and joyful.

I’ll take Margaret a jar or two, and a story to preserve, when I return.

I’d like to bottle some more fruit, over Easter. I’d especially like it if I could use fruit that would otherwise go to waste – so if you know of any overburdened trees, please let me know!

A couple of weeks ago, I got a message from a woman called Anita, offering some timber to the Urban Bush-Carpenters. She lived in Brooklyn, in the western suburbs, out of bike riding range. I called her, planning to say thanks, but no thanks.

But when we spoke, she told me about her dad, Ricardo, a lifelong builder and tinkerer. “He re-used everything,” she said, “to the point where he made a wooden base for a broken wineglass.”

So on the weekend, I drove west to pick up the timber. Four years ago, when her parents became unwell, Anita had moved in next door to her childhood home. I knocked on the door, and she welcomed me into her house. Most of her belongings were packed away in boxes and the garden was bare – the place was well cared for, but with the air of a waiting room.

The yard next door was teeming with life. Above the fence line, I could see several fruit trees: stonefruit, citrus and olives. It was an abundant garden, with veggie patches near and far.

“When I was younger, an ex-boyfriend once told me he always knew I was a wog, because we grew vegetables in the front yard,” Anita told me. Both her parents had passed away, and the two houses had been sold. “Living here is just too emotional,” she said. She was about to move suburbs.

Ricardo, a carpenter by trade, had emigrated from Italy after World War II. He was lean and poised, and he liked to present himself well. In the photos clustered on Anita’s table, he wore a suit and hat.

Anita put on her gloves and helped me move the timber. She told me about how she’d grown up learning how to do things with her hands. In her street “there were Italians, Greeks, Aussies, Polish, Germans and even a French family”, and many of them shared the DIY ethic.

Recently, she and her siblings had cleaned out Ricardo’s collection of useful materials. “We grew up reusing and recycling,” she said. “I can’t tell you how much it pained me when the skip came and we threw away so much of the timber.”

Over decades, he’d built two houses and two extensions. He built the “taverna” as well, the small brick building where he cooked family meals and smoked meats. Anita showed me a photo of its interior, pointing out the sinks and stove and bench top. “Everything was salvaged, second-hand, re-used,” she said. Then she pointed out a pattern of white tiles on the floor, which formed his initials. “The man had an ego, too,” she laughed.

“He was always doing something. He carried had a notebook in his top pocket, with a list on it. But the list never ended, it just went on from one page to the next. Even as he was dying he didn’t want to stop. He said to me, ‘I can’t die yet, I’ve got too much to do.’”

WHEN I first wrote about the Urban Bush-Carpenters, I described us as “a revolutionary organisation”. Scratch that. Now we’re celebrity revolutionaries.

Two weeks ago we found out that not only we had been nominated for the Earth Hour Awards, in the ‘Future Makers’ category (by Andy’s wife, Josie), but that we had been named as finalists. Gosh. You can vote for us here.

(Otherwise, I suggest you vote for Beyond Zero Emissions, an extraordinarily effective volunteer group, which has produced a blueprint for Australia to convert to renewable electricity by 2020.)

Associated with our unexpected nomination, we have done some media interviews. We appeare on The Circle, a morning TV show on Channel Ten. We sawed and hammered, and carried chickens for the camera. Un-missable TV.

But enough of that. You’ll be relieved to know that we’ve also been keeping it real, salvaged timber style. We built a schmick planter box from a pallet and a bed base, for the Where the Heart Is Festival, a celebration for people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness.

And last week we constructed a frame and lid for a bathtub wormfarm for a community garden in Clifton Hill. We picked up the timber – old hardwood framing timber – from my mother’s friend Pretam, who is renovating her house. She had a pile of the stuff, all in great condition. (She also gave us dozens of apples from her tree.)

We made the frame with a three-part lid, each a neat prop, so the gardeners can feed their earthworm livestock in stages. Geoff described it glowingly, as “maybe the second best thing we’ve ever built”. Andy wasn’t so sure:

But the bathtub wormfarm is so alluring, in fact, that it was all we could do prevent the Lovely Melissa from planting herself on top of it for all time. The revolution I spoke of is not a violent one. We originally described it is as the three S’s: salvaging, socialising and sharing. To that, we now add a fourth: sex appeal. (Note the matching red sock on the clothes line.)