Planting Milkwood

Links for 2008-12-09 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0600

A Low Impact Woodland Home
hobbit to the max... but well done, and cheaply, too - Wales.

Links for 2008-12-08 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0600

City folk find a milky way - Good Living - smh.com.au
Rentachook (what it sounds like) + Herdshare (raw Milk collective) both in Australia
Facebook | herdshare.com
Herdshare on facebook

Links for 2008-11-27 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0600

Growing Power
"Growing Power is a national nonprofit organization and land trust supporting people from diverse backgrounds, and the environments in which they live, by helping to provide equal access to healthy, high-quality, safe and affordable food for people in all communities." Based in Milwaukee, USA
Slow Food Triangle Blog
Farmer's Daughter: Carrboro, NC
"Farmer's Daughter is a farm-driven artisan food business celebrating the flavors of the South and the soils of the North Carolina Piedmont while gaining inspiration from authentic food cultures worldwide." April McGreger - this chick is killer. Great recipies, lotsa ferment

Links for 2008-11-26 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0600

Vinegar Connoisseurs International
"This is your Grand Central Station for Vinegar Information. Learn how to make use and enjoy vinegar."
Make Your Own Vinegar at Home - Naure Moms
Vinegar can be made from apples (cider vinegar), grapes (wine vinegar), berries, other fruits, or even from a 10 percent sugar solution. Most homesteaders who make vinegar make cider vinegar.

Links for 2008-11-26 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0600

Vinegar Connoisseurs International
"This is your Grand Central Station for Vinegar Information. Learn how to make use and enjoy vinegar."
Make Your Own Vinegar at Home - Naure Moms
Vinegar can be made from apples (cider vinegar), grapes (wine vinegar), berries, other fruits, or even from a 10 percent sugar solution. Most homesteaders who make vinegar make cider vinegar.

Links for 2008-11-24 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0600

Food to Go - Landline - ABC
Rather embarrassing article on food miles + exporting, with the Aus Ag Minister saying some truly dumb things about how we/they must fight 'consumers' in their seemingly deranged quest for local food...

Links for 2008-11-23 [del.icio.us]

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0600

Vandana Shiva: MANIFESTO ON CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE FUTURE OF FOOD SECURITY
This Manifesto is based on inputs and discussions at a meeting of experts and commission members that took place in Florence at the end of 2007 under the auspices of ARSIA and the Region of Tuscany and incorporates subsequent contributions from group members. These inputs were merged and streamlined into the present document by an editorial team composed of Debi Barker, International Forum on Globalization (IFG), Vandana Shiva, Research Foundation for Technology, Science and Ecology/ Navdanya, and Caroline Lockhart, Coordinator, Commission on the Future of Food and Agriculture.
Terra Madre notes: Vandana Shiva rocks the house | Gristmill: The environmental news blog | Grist
Terra Madre notes: Vandana Shiva rocks the house A food/climate manifesto presents new visions for responding to climate change Posted by Tom Philpott at 10:43 PM on 26 Oct 2008
Tagari: Permaculture Practical Certificate Course Jan 2009
With Bill & Lisa Mollison, Greg Knibbs and Dave Spicer. "Gain the confidence to put your Permaculture Design knowledge into practice. Monday, January 12 through to Saturday, January 24, 2009."
Grist: Environmental News and Humor
Sweet Potato rolls + Sweet Potato Cinnamon Bread
looks damn fine

Basecamp Garden: plan for Summer

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 00:36:40 +0000

Basecamp gardens plan - click for enlargement. As for my illustration skills, that's what happens when you spend your life on a laptop - you draw like a 12 year old...

Planning, making and planting the gardens around Bascamp has become one of my favourite parts of the week, and we are finally starting to feast on the results! I really cannot believe that i didn't garden for the first 30 years of my mishappen (but oh-so very full) life... what was i thinking? This is great! And you can eat it! Yum.

I started planning the Basecamp Garden as a result of a kick up the bum, thanks to some Canadian friends who stayed here over winter, and who sort-of barged in and constructed a no-dig mainbed next to the caravan. As I've mentioned earlier, up until this point we were trying to keep the Milkwood Kitchen Garden going while living over the hill... and it just wasnt really working. Start at your front step, work from there. I should probably get that statement tatooed somewhere...

So following the Canadians de-planting (from the Milkwood Kitchen Garden) and re-planting (in the Basecamp mainbed) all existing living vegetables, we had a starting point at the end of this winter past. And then we found out we were pregnant, and I had the standard pregnancy freak-out about shop-bought fruit and vegies (regardless of how pure their label says they are)... add to this we had always been planning to eat off Milkwood as much as possible, we just hand't gotten into the swing of that aspect of things yet... building somewhere to live and establishing hydrology will do that to you... but enough of the whys and wherefores... the point being that we have begun, and it's looking better every day.

Coriander flowering in the mainbed

I tried to design the Basecamp gardens with a couple of things in mind;

These gardens are temporary... a one-year-only affair, so there's no point getting terribly advanced regarding their establishment, beyond what is needed for the next two seasons.
They need to provide as much food as possible for two people plus extras, with surplus for preserving.
The water supply is limited to greywater from the washing machine, water-tank overflow, and a bit of supplementary tank water.
The site is quite exposed to the West (and to just about everywhere else, actually) so we need to use shelter, aspect and driplines from available structures to maximise growth.
The caravan, being exposed to the west and therefore the afternoon sun, could do with some protection in the form of summer growth up and over its western end.
It is very hot and dry here over Summer. eek.

And, in short, the above diagram (no comments on my illustration skills, please) is what I came up with. So far, this plan has been working out really well, due to basic attention to the above factors, particularly utilizing aspect, shelter and driplines. All beds are no-dig beds, which is a good quick method outlined here. Oh and of course, extra heavy mulching of all garden beds to guard against evaporation... no soil is visible anywhere in the Basecamp garden, it is all safely 20cm or more under a nice thick mulch of straw, which builds soil as the garden grows. Our yeild is currently such that we are eating out of the garden every day, even though all beds except the rip-roaring mainbed are yet to produce anything of edible size (due to the late frosts here - the growing season is, infact, only just this week starting to get going). There's a couple of features to this design worth noting:

Utilization of greywater + water tank overflow: on the western side of the caravan are two beds that have been build on contour with the slope of the site. Above each bed is a trench path about 30cm wide and 20cm deep, which runs the length of each bed on its up-slope side. Each trench is filled with sawdust. The trench of the upper bed gets a direct output from the washing machine in the Woolshed, and this weekly influx of moisture fills up the trench and proceeds to slowly filter downhill through the bed, and all the vegies in that bed go suddenly wild with delerious thanks for the extra moisture arriving directly at their root zone. If we do two washes, the moisture continues into the trench below it and into the next bed below that.

The second trench, directly up-slope from the mainbed, is lined up to receive the overflow from the water tank which collects off the Woolshed roof. Overflowing water tanks around these parts are an infrequent occurrence, true, but you gotta use whatever water you can, whenever it appears. On the rare occasions when the tank does overflow, the same thing happens - the trench fills up, and the moisture filters slowly down-slope through the mainbed, and all the vegies in that bed similarly go crazy. N.B. a system like this depends apon you using a very greywater-friendly washing agent in the smallest amount possible. Knowing you're going to consume the (filtered) outcome of your washing does wonders for your awareness of such things...

Trench-path beds - the angle of slope is sorta to the right of image - the sawdust holds the moisture in longer, giving it more of a chance to trickle through the soil of the down-slope bed

Aspect: This is making a big difference to what grows successfully where, given the unrelenting sun. For example, the bed which is against the woolshed is the most protected from the north, which means it is the most shaded. So this bed is primarily planted with greenstuffs - spinach, lettuces, the more tender herbs, and basically everything that will get petulant at being constantly bombarded by full sun. This bed is also down-slope from the washup area, and so gets a residual (again, small but significant) amount of moisture from the leaky pipe coming out of the sink, and the garden tap.

Driplines: This is one of those highly residual factors that Permaculture emphasizes so much - the collation of a heap of 1% advantages that coalesce to form a sizable advantage... in this case, the advantage of better plant growth due to that itty bit of extra moisture in the form of driplines. In this context, a 'dripline' is the perimeter around a structure where the dew drips off the roof or the eave or just the wall and hits the ground below it. On a farm, (or in a city for that matter) you can see these everywhere if you look closely - it's usually signified by a slight spike in plant growth... either in the height of a line of grass, a different species popping up in a very confined area, mossy patches, etc etc. If you see one of these near a structure, look up. And you'll usually see that there's something for a drip to descend from. At Basecamp, there's a dripline all the way around the caravan, and a particualrly good one off a certain corner of the Woolshed roof. I've made all the beds around the caravan extend under the van, past the dripline. This way, that line of moisture passes into the bed. As for the Woolshed drip, that's where I'm planting my sugarbaby watermelon, which loves all the extra water it can get (apparently, according to its packet).

Other than that, I'm watering everything every second sunset (never in the daytime) and planting twice a week... and it all seems to be working! Stay tuned for recepies on 61 things to do with silverbeet...

The herb garden, slowly beginning to gather steam after being planted 2 months ago... note that garden bed extends under caravan to pick up that dripline...

Feral Fruit Mapping: Update

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 00:39:09 +0000

About a year ago I mentioned here about the small but significant gesture that is Feral Fruit Mapping... and now it's that time of year again (southside of this planet, anyways)... things are blossoming left, right and centre, and it is therfore a most excellent time to get your Feral Fruit Map going and map out where fruit is overhanging fences and growing roadside in your area, in preperation for the potential harvest to come...

Since I posted about this subject last year, I've discovered a bunch of folks both in Oz and abroad who are collating and sharing knowledge on this sorta subject in a variety of formats, which is great! However, I cannot help but be a little amazed that it isn't happening more visibly, more often... ah well - perhaps one of the potential upsides to the recent economic downturn is that more people look to their back lanes and roadsides for some old-fashioned sustenance, rather than doing their hunting and gathering gathering only from their supermarket shelves...

At anyrate, here's what I've stumbled across so far in the last year - please let me know if you know of other examples...

FallenFruit.org - LA based fruit mappers/artists: "Using fruit as our lens, Fallen Fruit investigates urban space, ideas of neighborhood and new forms of located citizenship and community. From protests to proposals for new urban green spaces, we aim to reconfigure the relation between those who have resources and those who do not, to examine the nature of & in the city, and to investigate new, shared forms of land use and property." Go Kids. The site includes simple 'how tos' on mapping etc. Here they are on Facebook and even at Ars Electronica.

Urban Orchard projects - Loose but wonderful affiliations of residents who share and swap surplus fruit and produce once a month... sorta Feral-Fruit-Comes-to-U... You show up with lotsa lemons and you swap for apricots and some beans. Obviously the majority of the participants have their own tree of some type in their yard, but who's to complain if you show up with a load of fejoas that you gathered from that abandonded house next to the railway line? There seems to be a Melbourne contingent hosted by Ceres, and the Sydney one is starting up via Alfalfa House. Also, a How-to guide for setting an Urban Orchard up in your community...

Weedy Connection - Diego is a Sydney based artist who had created a damn fine 'useful + edible weed' database and regularly holds weed workshops around Sydney and beyond... he's apparently keen to start on a Sydney Feral Food map so I'm hopeful that mentioning it here will give him a proverbial poke. Remembering that a weed is, by definition, only a plant out of place, there's alot more to be gleaned in your local park than you might think...

And then there's folks like Leda who commented on the last Feral Fruit post with; I've been using the Google maps function on my iPhone to map the fruit trees here in Brooklyn, NY. I just bookmark each tree with a description and a pin on the map. Works beautifully! I also include a note about the date that particular fruit was ripe.

I've also hear rumours of State-based initiatives to map the feral food of a community for that communities use... especially in Melbourne - but as yet I have no proof that I can pass on. Oh and lastly there's the National Post of Canada, who decided to do an article on this subject and quoted us...

But surely that's not it? Anyone got any other leads? Or maps? Or community initiatives? Perhaps, as my own mother pointed out (who is a feral fruitier from way back) some folks keep the location of their secret peach trees to themselves... but I say that resource shared is a resource expanded so... any other leads on like-minded projects?

A suitable inheritance

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 02:15:16 +0000

Lianas and Beechwoods in the escarpment above Kiama, NSW

As a kid growing up on the seaside at Kiama (a pretty bit of the south coast of NSW) there was what would now be called a nature reserve between our house and the beach. When I was small it was just a bit of grassy space with a swamp at the end of it, and was where all the newly built households along that stretch came to dig out vast quantities of sand, to cart it back to their quarter-acre blocks for their kid's sandpits... despite the fact that there was are rather larger sandpit (ie a BEACH) right there for their kids to use whenever they liked... ever noticed how private pools figure largely in the backyards of beach-side houses? Same psychology, i think...

Anyway. My Dad decided that we would plant a costal forest on this sorry little strip of grass at the bottom of the hill, and endless sticky summer days were spent carting buckets of water to resuscitate all manner of seedlings that our family planted all up and down this open space - Norfolk Island Pines, Ti-trees, Coral trees, Banksias, more Banksias, more Ti-trees and later on a couple of Morton Bay Figs and even a costal Quince or two. This planting and watering cycle went on for most of my childhood, interjected with Dad rushing down the hill every now and then to intercept marauding kids who meandered up from the car-park at the other end of the beach and attempted to trash the plantings. Good, clean fun.

I remember Dad telling me once that the avenue of Ti-trees we had planted that day would one day reach far above my head and create a tunnel that I could walk through, down to the waves. And I remember thinking that there was NO WAY that could ever happen, as I looked at those pathetic little seedlings already half lost in the long grass - yeah sure Dad - and I moped off feeling both resentful and tired after a day of hauling water from the little swamp on my fat little 5-year-old legs.

Now whenever I go back to my parent's house I wander though this place, my favorite forest... the ground is deep in topsoil after 30 years of leaf litter mulching it, the trees stretch tall and there are many tunnels through which I can walk down to the waves. Under one of the special trees are the ashes of my Grandmother and also my Great-Aunt, with a legion of family dogs, goldfish and other little critters laid to rest here and there in the many groves. This little forest is a privilege and a pleasure to be in, and now that the ecology has found a kind of balance, all manner of native species are popping up, both plant and animal, that would have never, ever stood a chance here 30 years past, when it was just that little windswept strip at the bottom of the hill.

So lately what we have been mulling over is this: what is a suitable inheritance? What things can you bequeath to your children that will actually enrich the environment and deeply connect the child to country at the same time? The above example is one way. But here at Milkwood, we're planning for another.

afternoon above the studio site at Milkwood

I've been gathering a collection of flying rumors about trees as inheritance. Not the plant-a-tree-and-save-the-world type thing, nor the offset-your-guilt-about-X-by-planting-Yx100-trees type thing, though both those concepts have their merits. Im talking planting specific trees for a specific purpose, specifically for that particular child. For example, I've heard that in Poland there is an old tradition of planting a grove of trees apon the birth of a child. The species of tree is chosen for its superior qualities of structural timber. When the child 'comes of age', that grove of trees is used to build their house with. Or there is the Chinese tradition of planting a grove of trees for every daughter (on certain islands of the Yangtze), the timber from which will become her dowry. Or the tradition in the south of France, where a line of Lombardy Poplars are planted for every girl-child, for the same reason...

The reason I like this idea of trees as inheritance (not dowry, mind you, just inheritance) so much is that it ties the kid to the land and to the country in specific way. You grow, you watch your trees grow. You can sit in the middle of your own grove. You have stewardship of something and you have responsibility for something. The actual outcome and the implications of what having a grove means might not resonate with a 6 year old, but that's fine. They are just your trees. And one day when you need them, they can be turned into high-value timber; for you to build something, or for you to secure something else, depending on your needs and wants.

And when it is time to turn your grove into a resource, it's not just a matter of cashing in that long-term deposit. It's a process which is real and actually happening in front of you, and contains all the emotions of transformation from one state to another. You can see it happening, smell it happening, and most likely you'll be deeply involved in the whole process of taking this resource from tall tree to dressed timber. And though this concept implies a different sort of 'worth' from the usual forms of inheritance, but I thinks it's the one that we're going for...

As expectant parents (we're due at the end of Summer) we are about to embark on the process of choosing the species, location and other parameters of our first-born's grove... thinking, thinking... I'm all for Black Walnut (Juglans Nigra), Nick rekons Blackwood (Acacia Melanoxylon) would be better... hmm... we've got five more months to come to an informed and amicable decision...

Back steps, front steps

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 05:15:26 +0000

Milkwood basecamp with *new* no-dig herb garden, mulched path and puppydog

Vegetable gardens are the ultimate in complex, layered systems which have implications that flow through every corner of your daily life. And, no, I'm not being dramatic - I really believe this to be so... even more now that we've had to take a couple of major backward steps in order to move forwards with one of the basics of life... growing food to eat.

In Nick + my usual style, we appoached the Milkwood kitchen garden (Mark I) with much gusto. We chose a large area close to the studio site, sculpted beds, re-sculpted beds, planned the ultimate vegetable manifesto and then set about bringing it to life... and, also in our usual style, bit off more than we could chew.

This winter past saw the defining of what you could say as my 'comfort threshold'. And living in a teeny pop-top caravan with no insulation on a windswept hillside when it's -10ºC turned out, curiously, to be below that threshold. So we decamped to the current 'Basecamp' - a slightly insulated caravan behind the family shearing shed, over the hill from Milkwood proper. It's quite comfy - far from luxurious, true, but by the end of this summer we'll be in strawbale studio heaven (fingers crossed), over on Milkwood proper.

Which means that, amoung other things, that the Kitchen Garden is nowhere near our kitchen, until further notice. Which means in its turn that we needed to re-think our food supply for this coming summer. A Kitchen Garden that is nowhere near one's kitchen ceases to be an immediate growing area, and becomes a far-flung field... which is great news for the wood-ducks and the rabbits, who can munch happily without immediate fear of repraisal, but not so good for our tummies. So we're starting again on a vege garden over at Basecamp, and this time we're actualy going to follow that very profound, basic tenant of Permaculture - Start at your front step and work your way out from there - a simple idea, but hard to hear and even harder to stick to... which is crazy, cause it's the most energy efficient way of building a sustainable system.

So! No-dig garden bed time... and might as well get the herb garden in gear. Herb gardens are something that are essential to life. Herbs = flavour. Herbs = medicine. Herbs = diversity and lots of insects. Hooray for herbs!

At the moment, our gardens being what you could call itinerant, we definitely need FOOD but it is probably not the best idea to be building the most spectacularly intricate and permanent gardens that the human race has ever seen. After all, this time next year, we won't be living here at Basecamp. And henceforth, we only need gardens here that will see us through this summer.

So - this info could also be useful to you if you're: renting, squatting, long-term camping or otherwise in some situation where you will not be there forever, but still need to grow food.

No-dig garden beds are the answer! The no-dig method is, in short, a method of creating a garden where you make a lasagne of good stuff which will coalesce to form soil quick-sticks. In our case, we created the herb garden via the following method - and it took me about 4 hours:

loosen soil with a garden fork (or I tried to, anyways)
water ground
put down layer of cardboard (plonk it down on the grass that's there) + water well
slop on 20cm of wetted sheep poo or other well-rotted manure (wet down)
cover with 20cm layer of lucerne straw (this stuff has an awsome Carbon to Nitrogen ratio, and will break down into yummy compost all by itself, with a bit of watering) + water well (until stuff runs out the bottom of the bed)

Ta da! It's an itinerant No-Dig garden bed... then to planting:

make holes in mulch and slop in some compost / potting mix / growing medium of choice...

sprinkle on a mix of herb seeds (I used a bunch of different ones that are frost tolerant, plus some flowery type things)...

cover with square of WET hessian - this will keep seeds moist, prevent them getting blasted away when you water them, and generally protect them till they're germinated and off and running... then remove hessian and yr off to a flying start

And lo, for it was a herb bed, and that was that.

This planting method was assuredly more lo-fi than our usual methodical approach to all things green and growing, but I am wanting to make sure that lots of things get planted a.s.a.p. around here, so that we can start eating homegrown tucker... think of it as 'quickie gardening in transient housing'... and I'm sure that's a familiar concept to many.

In a way, I'm enjoying this interim time - I've always thought of gardening and growing food as a long slow plodding towards the promised land of abundance and fecundity, to be reached in many years time... but, as usual, I've been seeing it in an over romanticized fashion. Nature, on the other hand, doesn't give a hoot. Give her something to grow in, and she'll grow - so I might as well make sure she's growing what I can eat, rather than something i can't (or, in the case of grass, I could eat, but I'd prefer not to if there's an option)... I want to be overwhelmed in a surplus of organic greens by this time next month... fingers crossed...

Autumn adventures

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 11:38:38 +0000

Our Permaculture Design Certificate students planting trees on the main swale

'Twas an autumn of harvesting apples, and to a degree, reaping what we had sowed... we may not have brought a crop in at Milkwood, so to speak, but we sure did our Autumn toil.

To summarise the last period of time, Milkwood was awash in farmers, tractors, students, caravans and Keyline Plows. There was much planting of trees and eating of stews, and many, many pots of tea were drunk... a wood-fired shower materialized, a bigger (quite deluxe, really) Milkwood HQ caravan arrived. Landscapes were charted, courses were convened, hillsides were surveyed and many cakes baked...

The cause of all this kerfuffle was, in part, a bunch of courses we ran out of the family woolshed. I'll spare you the details (though they were all really fabulous, exciting and excellent) but suffice to say that they all went very well.

First up was a 3-day Keyline Design Course which was attended by 35 farmers and earthmoving operators from as far north as Maroochydore and as far south as Adelaide... Darren Doherty had them all enthralled regarding the potential of Keyline Design (I think - they looked pretty engrossed), which is a set of design parameters and techniques to hold water in the soil without large-scale, expensive earthworks, by working with the contours of the land. Photos.

Secondly, there was the Permaculture Design Certificate Course - a two-week, live-in, boots-and-all course attended by 15 brave souls from across the land of Oz and also from far flung places such as Vietnam, Japan and the US of A. Darren Doherty taught this one too (with Nick Ritar and Tom Bell contributing sessions) and goodness gracious but he was fine... two weeks of Permaculture Design Theory (supplemented with tree planting, surveying, compost making and propagation), followed by a substantial design exercise. This group took it all in their stride and came out the end of those two weeks far wiser than they went in... and slightly more sunburnt, too. Photos.

Lastly was a 3-Day course called Designing Water into Landscape. This was one we held off-site - Goulburn, in fact... 3 days with both Darren and Geoff Lawton, the affectionately dubbed 'earth surgeons'... and that was something else again.. whew-ee. Great stuff. Photos.

But all seasons have their end (just as well - we were quite tired out by the end of all that). We're settling down for winter here - nearly finished the first half of the Kitchen Garden (stay tuned), propagating, propagating, propagating (just like last year), and wondering if one can plant too many turnips... I hope to be gathering 60% of our food from Milkwood by the end of Winter... hmmm... if only I could graft a green thumb onto my novice digits...

Vegie Garden: Autumn Report

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 00:00:01 +0000

Over the last few weeks we have FINALLY managed to begin on the vegie garden so I thought now would be a good time to start another Milkwood ritual - The Change of Season Vegie Garden Report!

Being on the bottom half of this great big beautiful blue ball summer has slipped away and autumn is upon us. The evenings are getting chilly already.

While we were digging our first dam, we got the local earthmoving company to bring in a gianormous yellow excavator to dig two big terraces just uphill from the dam. This is the spot we (hope to) will build our little strawbale studio, the first part of our future home. Trying to follow the "oftenest = nearest" permaculture principle we extended the terraces to the south east to create a very large space for our kitchen garden, only about 10 meters from our back door.

Each terrace is 20 metres long and 5 metres wide (65ft x 16ft) which gives us a collossus vegie garden of about 200 square metres (over 2000 sqare feet). Of course after the excavator had finished digging we were left with a lovely surface of clay and rock.. not exactly garden of eden material. Lucky for us there was quite a bit of topsoil left over after covering the dam wall, so we got Justin the driver to dump that over in the vege garden area and last week I started the serious labour of shaping this topsoil into the basic form of garden beds. Gotta love the burning feeling of geek body meeting spade and barrow. So far I've only found time to make 4 beds about 4 metres long by 1.2 metres wide (double reach beds)

Around here when we talk about topsoil what we really mean is powdery ash like clay of the sickly grey type. Really we are only expecting to use the 'topsoil' as a base for no-dig garden beds. So we piled on the compost that Kirsten has been making along with some well aged poo from aunty Linda's chickens and a very thick layer of spoilt oaten straw we got cheap from a local farmer.

Now the first frosts usually hit us in April so we only have two months at best to get any real growing going on. This somewhat limits what's worth planting. I want to put in a heap of broad beans and a bunch of other assorted legumes, even if we don't get a harvest from them they will improve the soil and produce a lot of organic matter. In fact I have planted a whole bed of mixed lab lab bean and cow pea. So far we have planted leeks, red onions, celery, chives, parsley, nasturtium and garlic chives. I'm even trying a few potatoes that started growing in the pantry. I also have to admit that I cheated a little and bought a punnet of rainbow chard (silverbeet) seedlings from the garden centre in town.

Autumn will be a serious season of planting, the summer has been quite wet so we really need to take advantage of all the moisture that is in the soil. Apart from the vegetables we want to get as many trees planted as possible so they can establish themselves over the cooler months.

With all the earthmoving going on it's taken us a while to finally plant some things in the ground, but it feels so good to have started... we really have begun Planting Milkwood. Oh I nearly forgot... WE HAVE CHICKENS.... and a chook dome for them to live in, in our next video I'll show you my attempt at making a movable chicken dome so we can kick start our food forest using CHICKEN POWER.

Whats been going on in your garden over the change of seasons?

Our first dam

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 06:47:13 +0000

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The studio dam, the one halfway up the ridge and in the middle of our system, was the first one we all sunk our teeth into. And boy oh boy...earthworks are something else... it's like having your skin torn off in large slabs, while someone tells you it's not skin, it's just butter. No problem...

Strange analogy, perhaps... but until I had witnessed these earthworks, the landscape of Milkwood to me was a solid and impermeable mass... something that you could get a shovel into if you were lucky, but essentially one big, solid object. And then the bulldozer showed up. And now everything looks like a completely different place.

We were actually really lucky with what is usually a traumatic time (don't get me wrong... it was still pretty scary) when setting up a property... hydrology earthworks are something that you want to only do once, if at all possible. Nick and I had chewed over the Permaculture earthworks design for months, and to add excitement to the situation, we invited the very fabulous Geoff Lawton to Milkwood to teach a Permaculture Earthworks course during the first three days of the madness that has been the terra-forming of Milkwood.

So then we had 35 farmers and earthmovers on-site at Milkwood for three days. The course was great, and many of the participants came up to me during or after to express thanks that such a course had been run... you have to understand that there are bugger-all courses or workshops in sustainable hydrology earthworks for farmers and earthmovers around... unless they want to do a PDC, which for most of them might be a bridge too far, for various reasons.

But back to our fabulous dam. The minute it was finished, the rain came down... which was not at all what we wanted (sorry, rain) because we wanted to mulch and plant out the dam wall first. At the final stage of the dam's construction, our earthmover re-covered the earthworks with the topsoil that he's scraped off at the start, before he began his digging proper. This meant that our completed dam was covered in topsoil, which meant that we could plant stuff into it, and reasonably expect it to grow. Not trees, mind you... taproots (ie most trees) and dam wall = bad. Hairnet roots (perennial grasses, clumping bamboos) and dam wall = good.

A couple of weeks after this video was made, Nick turned a neighbor's disaster into our Christmas present, and pumped the contents of a failing dam ('she's about to blow, boys!') across the valley into our dam with a fire-fighters pump and a very long hose. Despite growing up by the ocean and always eschewing muddy water when it came to swimming, I am in love with my dam! And I am proud to say we already have four froggy friends that have moved in, and sing us to sleep all this summer long...

Technical bits:

We sowed the dam wall with a 50-50 mix of Lablab and Cowpea seeds, both of which had been inoculated with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, which will help them grow (you just ask for the to be inoculated before you buy the bags of seed). Geoff recommended sowing at between 4-8 times the commercially recommended rate - the idea is to get that dam wall jumping with growth asap, and growing with the species you want.
Both these species are nitrogen-fixing legumes, which means they will improve the topsoil quick smart so we can plant some other things in there .
Over the top of the broadcast seeds, we did a 'feather mulch' of oaten straw, which we got cheap because it was all a bit wet and rotten. A 'feather mulch' is where you lightly mulch the ground so that you can only *just* not see the soil. This mulch holds dew, protects the seed from birds and increases the germination rate of the seeds, all without blocking out all the light.
We hit good clay in in this dam, which should mean that it doesn't leak much at all. We also hit a lot of huge rocks.
A dam this size when full, will hold just under 1 Megalitre. It took about 3 days (24 hours) to build with one bulldozer and Nick manning the laser level to check heights of various bits. The bulldozer (with a driver in it) cost us $150 p/h. So that's about $3,600 for this dam. Which is not much at all, really, for the multi-purpose resource that it will be for Milkwood.
In terms of dam size on Australian rural properties, this is a very small dam. We wanted it small and deep, in order to minimize surface area (evaporation) and so that it would be on a complimentary scale to the other elements in the system nearby.
By putting in multiple small, deep dams, rather than one big-kahuna dam, we are spreading the many benefits a body of water brings to its immediate environment around the property, hedging our bets in case one dam leaks badly or gives way all together, minimizing evaporation and generally creating diversity in the landscape. Diversity in a productive landscape = good.

Once we had all made it through the first four days of earthworks, things started hotting up with Nick and the Bulldozer... top dam, top swale, middle swale, bottom dam, studio site... it was on for young and old... at an hourly rate of $150 - yikes... and we've got approximately 3 weeks of work for the bulldozer.. so... better have a cake stall sometime soon, I think...

Surveying the site from scratch

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 23:01:59 +0000

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Having grand plans is all very fine, but there comes a time when one must make the first, single, decisive gesture towards action.

For us, this meant placing a small wooden peg, painted white, at the southern boundary of Milkwood. And then surveying a contour which continued aaaallllll the way around the hillside at the same height as that first peg, right around to the other boundary of Milkwood on the western side of the ridge. This first contour was important to mark out for a couple of reasons:

it will mark the 'level' for the middle swale of our Permaculture design, and therefore the level of the middle dam (and in turn, therefore, the position of the studio)
being roughly in the middle of the system, this contour will be used to define the placement of features above and below it (like greenhouse/chookhouse combos, the kitchen garden, the orchard, the bath house)
as swales are tree growing systems, this contour will define where a belt of trees (all productive, food bearing ones) runs through the centre of the Permaculture system
because you have to start somewhere

And so we whacked the first peg into the soil of Milkwood. Which wasn't too easy at the time, given the 6-year drought - the soil was quite un-enthused about opening up for our peg. But even the soil of Milkwood (in it's sorry, overgrazed state) was no match for our collective enthusiasm. And in a year or so, that soil will be hydrated, friable and hopping with life.

Following the experience of the Cowley level and the laser level, it was clear that the laser level was going to be an indespensable tool for the amount of surveying and earthworks we intended to carry out at Milkwood. And having one around would be quite handy for outside projects and teaching, too. So we went out and sourced a cheap laser level at auction, and now we are lasering our little hearts out. It's so good. You can re-check levels in the blink of an eye... and earthworks is like carpentry, only to the power of 10... measure twice, measure twice again, cut once.

One of the great things about surveying out a site is that you go through the entire landscape very slowly. You're looking in all directions as you move around the contour, and you begin to appreciate exactly what bits are level with what, and what features are markedly higher than others. And this makes a big difference, when you're trying to analyze how the rainwater runoff 'works' within a particular landscape.

As i write this, we have finished just about all of the surveying for Milkwood. Everything has been pegged, measured, and re-measured within an inch of its life. All of the swales, dams, access ways and structure sites exist in a language of little white pegs throughout the grassy hillside. It's all action stations from here on in... fingers crossed... bring on the bulldozers...

Milkwood - the Permaculture Design

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:13:57 +0000

Aerial photo of Kirwin, with Milkwood top left-ish. Taken in about 2002, we think.

Standing on a bare hilltop, with the creek below and a small creekflat to the left, it all seemed so easy when we first got here... all we had to do was figure out where to put some structures, avoid the big trees, and build a bridge over the creek to get in. Grow something on the creekflat, put in a vegie garden, and get water from the sky... and the rest of it all, all those complex ideas and fiddly bits, could just wait till we were nicely set up.

Close-up pf Milkwood - looking pretty dry...

However, the more we sat and looked, and the more we thought about it, we realised that establishing a well-functioning Permaculture system was going to take a bit of planning. Rushing in putting down a driveway, and putting up a studio, wasn't an option. So, we went back to the basics of Permaculture design: Water. Access. Structure. In that order. Hard to stick to, when it gets down to -17 here in winter... but we're still here, now on the sunny-side of that first winter, and we're now ready to implement our Permaculture design for Milkwood.

Milkwood - Permaculture Design

I know the above design may look fairly un-interesting at first glance - but I assure you it is TREMENDOUSLY EXCITING and, in addition, quite a damn fine Permaculture design, as far as designs go. The blue bits are dams, the dark-brown lines are swales, and the yellow thing is the studio, with the kitchen garden next to it (the little green bit). The lighter brown lines are the access roads, to enable us to get vehicles everywhere that we need to during system establishment, and the greeny-blue line is the existing creek.

The swales are the thing we are most excited about. Without going into a lengthy explanation, swales are water-harvesting elements (they look like long ditches), made exactly on-contour within the landscape. Basically, everything uphill from the swale (in terms of rain + nutrient run-off) flows downhill into the swale. At this point, the water is captured, and ends up sitting in the swale, rather than rushing off downhill to the creek. The swale then fills up along its entire length, until the overflow pours into the dam that is attached to it at some point.

If you have a series of these systems, you end up with long canals of water in the landscape, everytime you get a big rain. The water quickly soaks into the downhill side of the swale, making the downhill side of the swale a *great* place to grow trees. And your dams fill up. And your trees grow. And the whole landscape has heaps more water in it, not just on it - you want to store water IN not ON the landscape if you possibly can. Which makes the creeks flow for longer. Which nudges everything towards a more stable ecosystem. Which is not just good, but great. It benefits us, our food production, the wallabies and the water table. Hurrah.

Milkwood - Permaculture Design with Aerial photo underlay...

So that's it. Three dams (plus the one at bottom left, which is on next-door's land, but will feed our system), three long swales. Some access, and a studio-site. Which just happens to be right next to the middle dam. Which will provide thermal mass and temperature stabilization (not to mention reflected light in winter). And which will also mean that we can jump off the front deck of the studio into the water. To swim with the fishes. And the ducks, and the yabbies, and the frogs, and the turtles....

Now all we have to do is... do it.

Compost - and 2007 - finito!

Sat, 29 Dec 2007 01:09:58 +0000

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Friends, romans, countrymen, may I present to you... my compost. Living, breathing soil in just three weeks. What began as thistles, rotten veggies and election advertising (hmm... striking similarities there) is now good brown stuff that smells great and is going to make things GROW... And I've finished off my slightly dysfunctional but ultimately successful How to: make Compost series over in our resources page.

Can i just add that this post is a bit late due to a bunch of Permaculture courses we've been running in Sydney and here at Milkwood - most noticeably the 'Designing Water into Landscape' earthworks course last week which was a hoot... So the compost has, infact, been finished for weeks... it lies in wait for the formation of the Kitchen garden, a thing of beauty which will be constructed from January onwards...

We are off to wash the dust from our overalls in the ocean for a week. Some swimming, reading, eating and fishing, and a little bit of headspace to gee-up for the next year at Milkwood.

Thanks so much to all for your help and comments this year! The whole process has been both very exciting and rather tricky so far... it really is so different from where we were a year ago. Challenging (actually, terrifying) at times and sublime at other times, I wouldn't be anywhere else for all the tea in China.

And a year from now.. who knows? Hopefully we'll be pulling yabbies and fresh-water crayfish from the dam and making plum pudding from feral fruit while resting under shady boughs, surrounded by friends, ducks, chikens and goats.

Happy holidays to all and we'll be back shortly...