Eagle Street Rooftop Farm is as good as city farming gets, in my book. If you want an example of lo-fi community food security that is blisteringly cool as well as being truly functional, here you are. What I would really like is that out of our urban-focussed Sydney Permaculture Design Certificate in January, multiple…
Last weekend Tim Malfroy checked Belinda’s bees at her small urban apiary in Sydney. This is the apiary we take our Sydney Natural Beekeeping students to as part of their course, so it was great to see how the hive had wintered. Spring has sprung in Sydney, and the bees were busily buzzing! Belinda’s warré…
I must say that while I’m finding this market garden experiment very exciting, it’s also rather daunting. What are we planting today? What are we planting next week? Where are we going? Who am i and where are my pants? The solution to all this is Allsun Farm’s planting calendar system. Joyce Wilkie devised this…
Roll up, roll up. It’s our very first film night in Mudgee! We thought we’d start with Vanishing of the Bees, an amazing doco about why organic beekeeping (and farming) is so darn important. And it’s free! Please join us for a local wine, a wood fired pizza and a great evening: Wednesday 5th October,…
We’ve just finished hosting our first Starting an Organic Market Garden course with Joyce and Mike from Allsun Farm, and it feels like the start of a quiet revolution. 30 people for 3 days, in our woolshed and down on our creekflat, learning the basics of growing good food well. Whew! I knew this was…
The Australian City Farms and Community Gardens network has just released a new poster for free download. And it is a beautiful thing. Chooks, roots, fruit, earthworms and of course community, all flourishing together.
There is nothing so joyful as a large group of people coming together to plant currants. Especially when they’re doing it in a forest garden, early in Spring, when the peaches and wattles are flowering madly and the sap is rising all around. As part of our first forest garden workshop here at Milkwood Farm,…
While we started off experimenting with annual and ground cover species seed balls, to date I’ve been most impressed by how useful they’ve proved to help us establish trees in unlikely areas. As I’ve mentioned before, we’ve been trying to figure out how to establish trees and increase biomass on the rocky, soil-deprived parts of…
When I’ve thought about small scale grain cropping in the past, I thought of long skirts, plaited hair, and a whole lot of winnowing, threshing, and hard work. Somehow, I always thought this stuff was either the province of the seriously self sufficient, or the seriously delusional. Nowadays I wonder why the heck in Australia…
Here’s a punchy little video piece about re-localisation of food, with soundtrack by Willie Nelson covering Coldplay. As one of the comments on the post says “When I buy naturally raised meats I don’t think, “This costs so much!”, rather I know, “This is money that won’t be going toward chemo.” You will either pay…
Hooray! After a month of pig tractoring, fencing and gathering resources, the Milkwood Farm organic market garden has officially begun! Behold the image above, in which is recorded the planting of our very first lettuce. It was a very eventful day, all in all. First thing in the morning, we had to convince our hire-a-pigs…
Tucked away within the Sydney College of Arts campus at Rozelle in Sydney is a gorgeous public garden of eatin’. Native bees, sugar snap peas, banana circles and raspberries all co-mingle in a glorious emerging jumble of edibility. It’s all flowered from a project called ‘Tending’, an artwork by Lucas Ihlein and Diego Bonetto, and…
Ok I know I said we’d be in our tinyhouse by Spring. And we’re so achingly, so un-utterably, so plainly not in. Yet. But just when does spring start? Is it a date thing? An equinox thing? Can i find an adequate caveat? You know those wattle-and-daub walls of ours? Great idea. No really. Only…
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