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…
No-one knows how old this door is – it came off a shed that pre-dates Nick’s family taking over this farm… bet you its maker never imagined that it would wind up keeping the wind out of a earthbag dome, high on the ridge at Milkwood Farm… Shane sanded this door back, oiled it and…
If you’re looking for a good resource on the actual practicalities of taking on market gardening, get a copy of this book. It’s full of deeply practical insights and uses multiple small-scale, successful vegetable growers direct experiences as templates for it’s planting and financial guides. In the ways of synergies, Crop Planning for Organic Vegetable…
See? New season radishes have got to be one of the cutest things in the garden cabinet. Especially when they’re organically grown, multicolored, freshly washed and about to become lunch… Radish tops are also great in salads, especially when the crop is young like these. Radishes are also very easy to grow and can be…
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…
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