Happy World Soil Day! This week it’s all about birch bark flour, the climate change summit, soil, and farming on the small. And what refined sugar is possibly for. Firstly, Costa – our favourite and completely unstoppable champion of all things gardening, dirt and strange hats… Costa has teamed up with DirtGirl to produce a…
This Spring we went from bare ground to surplus organic veggies at our rental home – thanks to biointensive gardening techniques, strong seedlings and a few free workouts. I’m not here to tell you a story about obtaining magically abundant harvests with just a few minutes work, although that can happen, sometimes, depending on the context of the growing…
The act of gleaning – taking the leftovers of a crop from the field, once the harvesters had been through – is an age old tradition. In times gone by in some agricultural societies, it has been an enshrined right – that after the harvest, what is left may be taken by anyone who needs it. Its a…
This week, with Summer coming on hard where we are, I’ve been thinking + reading about water and savvy ways to use it – a lot. As renters, our options and abilities to harvest rainwater and design our home landscape to catch it are a bit limited, but there’s still plenty we can do, and…
We’re loving having a stingless beehive homed within the 107 Rooftop garden – aside from the pollination support for our garden’s veggies, its a bit special just to sit and watch these ladies going about their business, as they have for millions of years. Recently we held our first Stingless beekeeping workshop up on the rooftop…
Making grain spawn is a stage of mushroom cultivation the whole family can get into – there’s a job for everyone. This stage of the mushroom cultivation process comes before you use your grain spawn to inoculate your final bulk substrate, but after you’ve made (or purchased) your pure culture. The process of making grain spawn is…
Whew! It’s hot where we are. But we have peaches, so it’s not all bad. Also mushrooms, and a bunch of other amazing new things to read and do and think about. This week the vegetable garden in our current home took it’s first real beating from a short pre-summer heatwave – we came through it mostly…
Starter strips are a great way to encourage your bees to build their natural comb straight off your top bars. Because straight comb means easier harvest and inspection, which means less disturbance to your bees. Preparing starter strips for your Warré beehive top bars is a yearly task. It needs to be done before the bees…
Good morning everyone! Welcome to our weekly round up of good things to read, think about and do this weekend. If we like the same things, this will work well. Are you up for it? Let’s give it a go. The Weekly Round Up We can’t wait to get our hands on some of our…
Next week there’s a nation-wide Wild Pollinator Count – do you have 10 minutes to watch a flower and report what you see? Sure you do. The Wild Pollinator Count can be done without any fancy gear, and you don’t need to be an insect expert. You just need to dedicate 10 minutes to helping…
Why is making a Base Map essential to your permaculture design process? Because its the base template on which you’ll create your design. A base map is a scale drawing showing the basic, permanent features of your design site. There’s a couple of ways to do it. A base map is the starting point for a…
Microgreens are a great way to get fast growing, nutritious, home-grown green things into your diet. They can be grown in trays or in a garden bed, depending on what space you have. They are tasty, always. We’ve written before about growing microgreens in trays – they don’t take up much space, and make sense…
Next to my primary school, down by the railway track, there is a mulberry tree. It’s been there since before I started kindergarten. I think it was self-seeded, but it’s difficult to say – the street verge just there has since been planted with all manner of trees by the nearby residents – grevillas, loquats, lilies,…
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