Despite telling everyone in earshot (frequently) that he’s Ashar Tyranna (and therefore a meat eating dinosaur), negotiations have been made to revert to being a brontosaurus at mealtimes, for the sake of ensuring salad consumption. It works sometimes. Everyone else around here snaps up their luscious kitchen garden salad greens without so much as a…
The pigs are back! 6 wessex saddleback piglets, about 8 weeks old, are the new pig tractor team of Milkwood Farm. Welcome little ones. Back is not of course the correct term as the previous 2 pigs have now been turned into everything from terrine to bacon to roast pork to feed the oscillating numbers…
It’s a whole year since we made our first Zuni Bowl at Milkwood Farm to combat an erosive gully headcut, and time has proved the benefits of this simple yet powerful handmade technique nicely. One year on, the zuni bowl has 10cm of silt covering its paved floor, the vegetation around it is stable and…
Cima di Rapa is is a common brassica green in Italy, but not well known in Australia. Which is a shame, because it is truly delicious. And hardy. And nutritious. So we’re growing bucketloads of the stuff in the market garden. You can eat the leaves and the flowerheads in salad, or it makes a…
So what does moving a mob of pastured pigs look like, and how does it work? Our friend Derek has just finished up interning at Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm, and he sent us some photos of a recent ‘pig move’. As you can see, this method of pastured/forested pig production is many worlds away from…
Checking the Warré hives this week, Tim pulled off a box of empty Warré comb. The bees stored honey in this comb over winter, but now it’s spring they’ve eaten through these stores, leaving bare comb, sculpted according to the colony’s needs… (psst – our spring Natural Beekeeping course is on at Milkwood Farm this…
The red cabbage sauerkraut that Rose made recently is a beautiful thing, and we’re consuming it daily. It’s sour and it’s crunchy, and it’s complimenting many a meal here at the farm this spring, from potato curries through to our first home-grown roast pork dinner last weekend… here’s the last of the good stuff, moved…
Hooray for salad! We’ve hit 100% self-sufficiency in salad greens for crew and courses at Milkwood Farm. And we’re not just talking leaves-of-things-that-are-edible-and-could-be-used-for-salad-at-a-pinch, we’re talking retail quality, beautiful, sweet, diverse beyond organic greens. We’re pretty stoked. Michael has achieved this by being careful with his propagation techniques and with his choices in salad species. At…
As part of the mushroom propagation systems we’re setting up at Milkwood Farm, we’re growing reishi mushrooms, for their widely established healing properties. In China and Japan, reishi are used widely as a general health tonic and also as a specific treatment for some types of cancers. Making tea is a simple way of accessing…
We’ve been fielding a lot of questions lately on what exactly a Milkwood Permaculture Design Certificate course (PDC) consists of. In short, it’s an exceptional and intensive foundation course in permaculture theory, from which students emerge with solid design skills. The application of these design skills are broad – some people use their new knowledge…
A microforest garden is usually something you would design for small-space forest gardens – for urban situations, or areas where space is at a premium. However they translate into larger forest garden designs as a nucleus forest garden, and can be a great way of starting a larger forest garden too. To quote Dave Jacke:…
This last week at Milkwood Farm we’re kicking into the swing of Spring, and welcoming new crew to the Farm. There was a Mushroom Cultivation course held, and much home-cured, home grown, nitrate-free bacon consumed (I cannot tell you the ballpark of yum this equates to. Let’s just say alot). The Cima di Rapa is…
Honeybees build comb. It’s part of what they do. It’s part of who they are. And being, as it is, actually exuded from glands on the undersides of their bodies, the honeycomb that bees build is literally part of them. Comb is literally part of the super organism that is a honeybee colony. It’s a…
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