Recently I was at a friend’s beautiful little off-grid house, and it was wash-up time. Time to boil the kettle, get the big bowl and stand out at the table in the evening air, watching the sun set over the valley. That’s wash up time, at Autumn Farm.
The kitchen garden is an essential part of any life lived in a house with a yard, in my opinion. I love the small cycles it brings us closer to with the ebb and flow of growth, flower and fruit. The dry and the wet. And the crunch of harvest.
So this is exciting – we’re teaming up with Organic Gardener Magazine to offer a Permaculture Garden Makeover for one lucky duck – who wants in? The competition is Australia wide and entries close 30th September, so get writing on your entries, people! So much goodness in this one…
Kangaroo Valley is this rather special place where a thick mist rests, each morning, until about 10am. And then magically lifts, to reveal lush farmlands, rivers, creeks, and escarpment rainforest, all around. Recently I went there to visit Kangaroo Valley Permaculture – an established permaculture homestead that is a bit of a jewel within a jewel – a special place nestled in…
Recently we went north for a quick visit to see family in Iluka, a tiny fishing village which sits at the mouth of the Clarence River, about an hour south of Byron Bay. Somehow the skyscrapers and beachside resorts of the north coast missed this little place. And I’m so glad they did. Surrounded by world heritage…
Is it possible to recycle 100% of a small family’s organic kitchen waste with just a simple, single worm farm? I’ve always wondered. I’ve done 50% of our scraps easily – but the whole lot? That’s… a lot of scraps, in our house. Well, it seems you can, if the design is right. We’ve been…
Do you live in Sydney? What are you doing on Saturday the 23rd? Come play with us at the Green Day Out! It’s going to be a great day of kid-friendly stalls, workshops – and I’ll be making seedballs with whoever wants to learn…
Mmm cannelloni – winter comfort food at it’s best: pasta stuffed with ricotta and greens, smothered in home made passata and cheesy goodness. But first, one must forage one’s weeds. So off we went.
Recently we were lucky enough to score some of the amazing, earthy sunshine that are organic turmeric rhizomes. So much goodness in this plant! But like many harvests, when it rains it pours. Here’s what we did with ours.
Hooray for the 2015 Permaculture Calendar! Once again the crew at permacultureprinciples.com have created a beautiful and intimate calendar that is packed with useful info and also just plain lovely to have on your wall. And yes, it also has the best cover boy of all time (not that we’re biased or anything) – namely our little…
Next in our lineup of Permaculture Design Course grads are Michael Zagoridis and Emma Bowen from Green Up Top – a social enterprise dedicated to farming pockets of Sydney’s inner-urban suburbs. Zag went on to do a market gardening internship with us at our farm, and these days, there’s no stopping these two pocket rockets of…
Now that we’re gardening in a frost-free area we have to get acquainted with a new bunch of sub tropical-ish weeds. This week, it’s been all about the Madeira Vine. In our new garden, the stuff is everywhere. Look up Madeira vine and you will find gazillions of references to its invasive and terrible habits. But…
One of the gorgeous features of a Warré Hive is their cute gabled roofs. In Australia, those gables help primarily with insulating the hive from extreme heat (and therefore lowering colony stress) by providing circulation. The Warré Hive was, however, developed in France – and those beautiful gabled roofs were originally designed for winter snows!…
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