Well, we did it! With a great amount of help from you generous readers, of course. We managed to pay for the website for another year!

I want to thank the folks who donated, it all added up to a couple of bucks shy of the price but we filled in the gap. It was a worry though, we were flat broke and the time was rapidly approaching when we needed to find some more money to keep things going as they were.

So we risked an appeal. Not a GoFundMe kind of thing, but just a direct request for our loyal readers to see if you could help out. And you did!

We have a strong belief in privacy, especially financial privacy, so I won’t be publishing a list of folks who helped but they can expect a heartfelt thank you email in the next couple of days.

This website is a real labour of love for yours truly. It is as much a diary of our learning as it is a record of what we know. It started as therapy for me and has become what you see today. For some reason, it’s not gaining much traction in the turbulent world of the internet, but we’re really not much into the whole ‘look at me’ screaming that we would have to do. Slow, organic growth is best in our book. Sure, we’ve tried a few things to promote it all, but we never felt comfortable with any of them.

The option to communicate, comment, donate, or subscribe is always there, and some of you have taken advantage of those options, and hopefully, many more will in the future. This way, we have stayed under the radar of scammers and the slick, shiny evil that exists out there.

Even better news is that, seeing the amount of support we received, Jelina has decided to take a more active role on the website. She has lent her artistic skills to page design and layout, making the place look and respond better. Easier-to-read layouts, easier-on-the-eye design and more mobile-friendly pages are all being feverishly worked on. I’ll still be doing the bulk of the writing, but Jelina is creating beautiful templates for me to use in new posts and pages and to apply to the existing ones.

I’m responding by going deeper into the herbal and bushfood pages and slathering on the information. We’re working on a downloadable version of each page, plus ebooks on mushroom foraging, each area of kitchen herbalism and local bush foods. I’ve been practising the ebooks for a while but was never confident of my graphic skills, especially after looking at some of the slick, more professional stuff.

I suppose that the biggest bonus though is that Athena has volunteered to have many, many more photographs taken. Everybody wins.

Let us know of any links or pages that don’t work. We don’t get them all right the first time. Anything that doesn’t look right or work as it should can be reported to us via email or Instagram chats.

Keep on coming back to check out the progress!

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