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So Winter is ending and Spring is on its way. We spent this winter just gone traveling to Sydney every weekend to teach Permaculture, which made us feel like short-range nomads very quickly. And the end result is now out there; 40 accomplished urban permaculture designers, who will go on to do amazing things. Not bad for one winter’s work.
Nick and some new friends from the creek
Recently we’ve un-ravelled one of the mysteries of nature that’s been plagueing us for years here at Milkwood. How is it that if you build a dam or a pond, in the middle of nowhere, that over time it naturally becomes inhabited with water-loving creatures like yabbies? How do they know the new water source is there? Can they smell it? Is there some sort of inter-species bush telegraph? This one really had us stumped.
But now, we’ve seen it for ourselves, so we can tell you too. In certain conditions, the yabbies just walk there.
We’ve always been all about aquaponics in theory: a closed-loop system that provides abundant vegetables and fresh fish – what’s not to like? But it wasn’t until Nick took some PDC students on a tour of this amazing bathtub aquaponics system in Alice Springs last April that the true wonder of aquaponics really began to…
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For the last 2 and a half years we have waited for the big rain which would test the capacity of our water-harvesting earthworks. And waited. We’ve had a bit of rain here and there, but the summers have been hot and dry these last two years, and we had gotten used to life with half-full dams and swales which were good roads, but rarely wet.