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Living a Radically Simple Permaculture Life on 1/4 Acre

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On a quarter-acre in the hills above Daylesford, a family has quietly built a life that runs almost entirely without money.

Happen Films’ documentary short “Living a Radically Simple Permaculture Life on 1/4 Acre | Creatures of Place” follows Meg Ulman, Patrick Jones, their son Blackwood (“Woody”), and their dog Zero — collectively known as Artist as Family — on their roughly 1,000-square-metre block in Daylesford, Victoria, on Djaara Country. What started as a standard suburban residential lot has been converted into a working homestead the family calls the School of Applied Neopeasantry at Tree Elbow University. The film is a close look at what they term “permacultural neo-peasantry”: growing food, skipping the car, and trading inside a gift economy instead of a cash one.

• Meg Ulman, Patrick Jones, son Woody, and dog Zero run the property on Djaara Country in Daylesford, Victoria, teaching visitors under the banner of the School of Applied Neopeasantry at Tree Elbow University.
• The family produces most of its household food on the quarter-acre plot through intensive polycultures, no-till growing, and composting, supplemented by foraged weeds, wild mushrooms, and materials gathered from surrounding public forest.
• They live without personal motor vehicles, using bicycles for regional transit, keep municipal waste near zero, run on minimal grid electricity, and collect rainwater — funding their life mainly through local gift and non-monetary exchange rather than conventional wages.

Turning a Suburban Block Into a Working Homestead

Most quarter-acre lots in regional Victoria hold a house, a lawn, and maybe a Hills Hoist. Ulman and Jones treated theirs as a design problem instead, stacking functions the way permaculture practice recommends: growing space, composting systems, and living space layered onto roughly 1,000 square metres. The result, captured in the film, is a property where almost every square metre is doing productive work — a contrast the documentary leans on hard against the standard suburban block. Readers who’ve followed the broader trend of reworking a lawn into growing space, as covered in how to turn your lawn into a vegetable garden, will recognize the same underlying logic here, just taken to its most committed conclusion.

The name they’ve given the operation — the School of Applied Neopeasantry at Tree Elbow University — is only half a joke. Visitors and volunteers who show up learn permaculture design, seasonal preservation, and what Ulman and Jones call “accountable living” skills, essentially treating the property as a functioning classroom rather than a private garden.

Food, Foraging, and a Household Running on Almost No Waste

The family’s food system leans on intensive organic polycultures and no-till beds rather than the till-and-fertilize model most home gardeners default to. Composting closes the loop on kitchen scraps, and what the property itself doesn’t produce, the surrounding public forest often supplies — wild weeds, mushrooms, and other foraged materials fill in the gaps in their diet and their tool kit. It’s a foraging habit not unlike the mushroom-focused approach detailed in cultivating gourmet and medicinal mushrooms, applied here as one piece of a much wider self-sufficiency puzzle.

That same discipline extends to utilities. The household runs on minimal grid electricity, collects its own rainwater, and keeps municipal waste output near zero — numbers that would be remarkable for any household, let alone one raising a child.

Life Without a Car, Without a Wage

Ulman and Jones don’t own a motor vehicle. Bicycles handle regional transit, a deliberate choice that shapes how far they’ll travel and how they plan errands. Rather than holding conventional jobs, they earn their keep largely through local gift and non-monetary exchange economies — trading skills, produce, and labor within their community instead of running it through a bank account.

Woody is unschooled, learning alongside the volunteers who cycle through the property, and the whole arrangement functions less like a hobby homestead and more like a small, self-directed institution.

David Holmgren, co-originator of permaculture, called the family’s DIY minimalism a powerful portrait of living in intentional relationship with land, kinship, and local community.

A Permaculture Pioneer’s Endorsement

Holmgren’s name carries weight here — he co-developed the permaculture concept itself, and his read on the film isn’t a casual pull-quote for a press kit. Him singling out the family’s relationship to land, kinship, and local community as the throughline of the documentary lines up with what the film actually shows: a quarter-acre lot doing the work of a small farm, a family doing without a car and a paycheck, and a household that treats waste as something to be designed out rather than hauled away.

Happen Films has built a catalogue of these short profiles, and Artist as Family’s episode fits the pattern — no dramatic reveal, no renovation budget, just a quarter-acre in Daylesford run on bicycles, compost, and forest foraging instead of a car and a supermarket run.