Insect Hotel visitors, great (if somewhat odd) family Christmas bonding ideas, and why blue cheese will heal the world…. This week we’re splitting the difference, as some of us are chilling out and some of us are still hard at it. So we’ve got a selection of shake your tail feather, and big thinking reads. First up,…
The colour is all around us – it’s in the stems of our salad sorrel and in our spice cabinets too. We just need to learn to look for it, and try it out, and then, keep experimenting. Recently at the 107 rooftop garden we held our first Natural Dyeing course with textile artist Samorn Sanixay…
Reclaiming cheese sovereignty just might be the new frontier of reclaiming our home-made, from scratch and localised food economies. So how do we do it? By starting from scratch with our cheese, and understanding milk for the incredible ecosystem that it is, rather than treating milk as an inert holding medium for commercial cheesemaking cultures. If…
This week we’ve been planning vegetable extravaganzas for Christmas lunch (will they make it through the extended family filter? Time will tell) as well as considering some very good points about voluntary simplicity. So earlier this week we read a piece called The Troubling Trendiness with Poverty Appropriation and it created quite a few good conversations.…
Growing climbing beans and peas on a trellis is a great way to maximise your garden’s growing space, while providing habitat and shade that further helps your garden grow. There’s all sorts of things you can use – what will suit you best depends on your garden’s context, and what you’re growing. First of all,…
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…
Send this to a friend