Following on from designing a microforest garden recently, it was time to realise the design! Harris led the charge, helped by forest garden interns Minoru and Kelly, as well as all the students of the forest garden design course. This micro forest garden was to be established on a very compacted piece of ground that…
In the spirit of using small and slow solutions (with large effects on gross colony happiness), Tim Malfroy has recently modified his design for quilt boxes on his Warré hives, and I’m liking his latest update. The quilt box on a Warré hive is a simple aspect that makes a big difference to the hive’s…
This week has been all about vegetables, forest garden establishment and permaculture design. And ferment, as always. In between I snuck in a trip to Allsun Farm and discovered the delights of Old Mill Road Farm at Moruya…
Here’s another of Floyd’s aquaponics systems that have been designed to merge economy with beauty and food production, using mostly recycled materials. This system was made for a Darwin Cafe, to help create a customer-friendly courtyard that was serviceable yet green with the trickling sound of water, all the while producing fresh herbs for the…
Figuring out the puzzle of successful pastured pigs has been interesting, but luckily we’ve got excellent mentors like Joel Salatin to help us along the way. One technique Joel explained to us during his visit last year is how he trains his piglets to ‘respect the fence’ at an early age so you’re not chasing…
Rose has moved into the Earthbag Dome at Milkwood Farm and we can now report that it works. There’s the woodstove to stoke up on cold nights, and the rest of the time it’s a very quiet, very temperature-stable bedroom, with only slight hobbit connotations. One of the things about this earthdome is that it’s…
This week at Milkwood Farm we’re in full swing with our spring Permaculture Design Certificate, but of course there’s plenty else going on. Our season’s worth of tomatoes are all in the ground, the lower dam wall is being prepped for pumpkin growing (with sheep) and there’s biochar on the boil…
I just wanted to flag something at this point in Milkwood Farm’s development, regarding food. You know, those beautiful shots we share of honeycomb on sourdough scones, home-cured bacon and fresh rainbow radishes. They look nice, don’t they? and they are. They really are. Feeding crew and students amazing food, grown and cooked with love,…
Urban forest gardens and food forests are definitely a part of our future cities – they have to be. We think every backyard should have a patch dedicated to perennial crops which interrelate as a stable and resilient system, while providing food, fruit and herbs for the household, hence our upcoming Urban Forest Garden workshop:…
Field pea harvest time… this calls for a pea party. While no longer common in supermarkets, podded peas are on the menu at Milkwood Farm this week. Michael sowed them as a spring crop that would both improve the soil and give a yield, before we plant our summer veggies of capsicum, tomato, eggplant and…
Spring is here, the tomatoes are being planted, and it’s all about the mulch. Also, we’ve had 13mm of rain! And in a season like this, 13mm warrants a celebration… We’re also embarking on our first Permaculture Design Certificate of the season here this weekend, so the farm is a-buzz with new people & Rose…
Behold, for we have home-grown pearl oyster mushrooms, and you can too. The process of growing them from scratch is not that tricky once you know how, and results in a luscious harvest of fresh oyster mushrooms. First of all, you need good spawn. For this session we used a block of grain spawn that he’d grown…
Back when Costa was setting up his verge garden (the one that now beams into Aussie homes every Saturday night on Gardening Australia), he proved that chicken tractors will work just about anywhere, even on the verge. As part of the preparation of taking his verge from grass to community veggie patch, Costa made a…