Plant it, grow it, use it, eat it! Here's our favourite resources on growing all types of good things – from microgreens to oak trees.
See below for planting guides, how-to's, books and resources, as well as interviews with amazing growers to get you inspired…
Here’s how we made a DIY off-grid mushroom fruiting house – for creating a humid forest simulation chamber, to grow LOTS of mushrooms right on our back porch. You can grow mushrooms in lots of different ways. We grow them in reusable containers – buckets and jars, and also in gardens, on logs and stumps…
Want to design a better, earthier and more rewarding life with permaculture? Solutions-based thinking is not just for big design projects. Permaculture can also be used to improve the everyday, the little things, to create a happier you. Over the last 10 years, we’ve been gradually using permaculture principles to create better daily lives for…
All hail the turkeytail! No matter where you live in the world, this medicinal mushroom lives nearby. Indigenous to all continents except Antarctica, turkeytails have been gathered and used medicinally for hundreds of years. Once you know what to look for, turkeytails are not hard to identify. Gathered in late winter (ie now) before they…
The dams are full and the soft green winter grass in the orchard has returned. There’s been feijoa harvests by day and bioluminescent mushrooms by night. The landscape is slowing down. The frost confirms that this place is finally in Winter, after a long, long Autumn. At the end of this month, we will have been at…
This year we finally got a chance to try out a three sisters garden planting – maize, beans and squash, growing symbiotically. It was an awesome success. Stacking in space and time is one of my favourite ways to grow things – you can minimise ground prep and maximise harvests while letting the different plants…
From collective fruit harvesting to skill sharing to school lunch programs… if you’re looking for inspiration for creating community, the Growing Abundance project in Castlemaine is a treasure trove. The programs run by Growing Abundance are many, but they all centre around food, and what a really truly local food system could look like. A local food system that was…
It’s mid summer here at Melliodora. The days are hot and the cicadas sing in the trees all around. It’s a time for berries, plums, treehouse builds + giant zucchinis. We rise early before the heat starts – to water precious plants, to twine climbing tomatoes so they can reach high, to just sit outside with a…
At Melliodora, the goat forage system is designed to support this permaculture smallholding in numerous ways, while closing the loop, keeping happy goats and making tasty cheese. Every morning, Pip and Willow make their way up to the milking shed in readiness for their morning milking. When it’s my turn to milk in the morning,…
It’s 2 years since we started transforming a bare patch of city rooftop into an award-winning, thriving community garden space. Now seems like a good time to look back at what worked, what didn’t and what’s growing now. The 107 rooftop garden, incase you haven’t seen it, is a 140m2 patch of rooftop in inner Sydney. It’s lined…
Rarely have two books landed on our kitchen table at once that have been so different, yet so similar! The Art of Frugal Hedonism + Grown and Gathered encompass deep urban frugalism (for hedonists) to dreamy-yet-muddy farm life+kitchen. With pictures. In a current climate where lots of folks are wanting to downsize, downshift, simplify radically, barter + trade, go no waste,…
Learning how to establish a profitable urban farm takes a LOT of planning and thinking – it’s certainly not just about land access and good seedlings. So we’re very happy that Curtis Stone, author of The Urban Farmer, has launched this excellent online course. Some of you may have seen + learned from Curtis when we…
Morel mushrooms are not something I was expecting to find often in the Australian bush. Infact, we’d only heard rumours about them existing at all. Until we came across Morchella australiana. When I think of Morels (Morchella species), I think of the Pacific North-West of North America, with it’s lush deciduous early-spring forests and salmon berries…
Scoring a patch of dirt to start an urban farm in Sydney is no mean feat. But Pocket City Farms have done it, thanks to their passion, green fingers and ability to adapt. Just the skills you need for farming. Perfect. Pocket City Farms is a small group of normal folks with a big dream – to grow good clean…