At the end of this week we will be closing the gates of Milkwood Farm until next Spring. It’s been a massive year of building, growing, learning and doing. But now we’re about to go into winter mode here at the farm.

We’re farewell-ing our Autumn interns, packing up the woolshed and slowing things down until September rolls around once more…

First of all though, an Open Day! This Saturday April 30th we are opening the farm for two tours: at 1pm and another at 3pm. If you would like to come, please rsvp via our contact page here, and check the Open Day details, including how to get to our farm.

Kade and Bel making a mini rocket stove

The intern process at Milkwood Farm has been an evolving one for the last two years. Interns come for 2-3 months between Spring and Autumn and are involved in every aspect of Milkwood Farm, and also Milkwood Permaculture (depending on the interests of the intern).

It’s been really interesting to refine this process over the last season (with the help of our interns) to create an equitable scenario that suits both our farm, and the people who give their time and effort to come and intern here. It’s pretty interesting stuff getting the balance right – it’s community in microcosm.

During this season we did many, many projects for the farm and wider community that couldn’t have happened without our intern’s enthusiastic input.

We’re retro-fitted kitchen gardens, built gabion walls, toured international regenerative agriculture experts, made biofertilizer, learned how to cell-graze sheep, built aquaponics systems, harvested umpteen tomatoes and enabled vastly more knowledge transfer into the community than if Milkwood were just me and Nick doing this thing all by ourselves.

So a big fat thanks to Adam Kennedy, David Welsh, Andrew Yates, Alexe Serri, Floyd Constable, Ryan Rutley, Dean Driscoll, Christian Tyler, Belinda Joy Sheekey, Kade Smith and Amelie Bischof.

It’s been amazing to have you all here at the farm this season. Thanks for your huge efforts, suggestions, your help and hilarity. We hope your future permaculture journeys go well.

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One of the things we’ll be doing this winter, apart from teaching in Sydney every 2nd weekend for our part-time winter PDC, is designing and releasing our intern program for next season.

If you’d like to stay in touch about the upcoming internships, please join our mailing list here and we’ll let you know when the new internship applications (with specialties like horticulture, permaculture media, etc) are made available.

Thanks again, 2010-2011 Milkwood intern crew. You rocked.