Reviewing your own online video archive is a bit like reading back through your diary. Except it’s all public. Eeek! Nevertheless, here is our new video page. This page is a collation of our sporadic video diary (you might notice the hiatus that coincided with parenthood). If you’d like to see the accompanying articles that…
School gardens are enjoying a growing revival currently, which is great because they have the power to be pretty transformative places. Since meeting Aaron Sorenson, I’ve begun to understand just how a good school garden can truly intersect with more aspects of learning than perhaps anything else that happens in a school day. At this…
This is the first post in a series explaining how we built our very first earthbag dome at Milkwood Farm. So if you searched for earthbag building australia, you’ll come to see that this is a natural building technique that uses bags of earth to build structures that have incredible tensile strength and a very low…
We were rather impressed with Joel Salatin when he came to Australia last year. So were one or two other people. Aside from being the most entertaining farmer that we’ve ever met, he’s really onto something. Multiple somethings, even. To call the Salatin’s farming practices at Polyface Farms in Virginia USA ‘innovative’ is a bit…
I am not a survivalist. Really I’m not. Despite growing up in a family that was so deeply concerned by nuclear threat in the 1980’s that we had pictures of mushroom clouds (framed) in my childhood lounge room, I refuse to concede that my family’s future may involve turning our farm into a stockade or…
Gravity and chickens are two of our favorite natural forces at Milkwood. Chickens scratch, poo, give eggs and good company, plus a trillion other benefits. Gravity draws things down. Great it you want stuff to end up down the bottom. Which, in the case of our gravity fed chicken house, we do! For the past…
So it turns out that aquaponics doesn’t have to be just a bunch of tanks and grow beds. Not that I mind ‘classic’ aquaponics setups. I just like to know there’s more than one way to grow a fish. And some salad. Recently we ran our first Aquaponics Workshop in Sydney, and it was a…
We’re bringing David Holmgren to Sydney shortly as a guest teacher on our Winter Part-time PDC. So we thought we’d offer up a dinner while he’s here. Would you like to come? Dinner with David Holmgren Saturday 21st May Peasant’s Feast Organic Restaurant, Sydney We’d like to invite our current and future friends, readers, students…
This tinyhouse building thing is taking ages. But we’re getting there now! For the walls, we’re planning on experimenting with double-skin wattle-and-daub with insulation in between. We started off planning for strawbale walls, but we’ve now decided to try wattle and daub to maximise the inside space. We don’t know of any precedents of doing…
A wicking box is a contained, portable way to grow vegies (or anything else) with very little water. Essentially, it’s a wicking bed in miniature. Very cool. Wicking boxes can be used either as part of an intensive water-wise growing system, or just a good way to keep those herbs alive that you usually forget…
I am now fully convinced of the glory of gabions. Not only can they create leaky weirs in dryland gullies, they can also liberate courtyards. Like ours, for example. After years (yes, literally) of trying to figure how best to create a low-cost, low footprint, 2m high retaining wall in our courtyard, we discovered the…
Recently I watched Tim Malfroy open and inspect a Warré hive that he installed in Sydney. Over 20 people looked on (it was part of a natural beekeeping workshop) as Tim lifted up boxes, pulled out combs full of honey and brood, and generally checked that all was well in the hive. What did the…
A couple of months ago we had the opportunity to build an earthbag dome at Milkwood Farm, and run a workshop while we built it. We jumped at the chance. We’d always wanted to try earthbag building, but where do you start with such a venture? And so it was that over six days, Neil…