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…
Recently we held a Biointensive Growing course with Jodi Roebuck at Buena Vista Farm in Gerringong. It was a big learning experience for everyone involved! The Biointensive Method is one that focusses on growing vegetables with maximum productivity from minimal space, in as immediate a timeframe as possible. This means there’s lots of energy that needs…
Time to de-turf and complete our garden beds! Once we’d made our garden beds from scrap timber, the next step was to get the soil dug and planted. Grass Off This part was not as hard as we were expecting – probably because we’re on sandy soil, so the solid cover of buffalo and kikuyu…
Planting some bush tucker plants is a great way to increase diversity and resilience. Here’s some tasty, compact suggestions for bush tucker gardening on the small. The Australian continent is full of unique indigenous food plants that look and taste entirely unlike anything else you’ll typically see growing in an everyday edible urban garden, with its carrots…
Alrighty. In this next 107 Rooftop Garden day we’re tackling nutrient cycling on the small – namely with in-garden worm towers, and worm farms. I know you know about compost worms by now. We all know about compost worms by now. But have you actually figured out how to use them productively + effectively in…
Recently we stayed at a small farm in the Bega valley that raises truly pastured chickens. Like, chase you across the paddock pastured chickens. Each morning, the chickens get let out of their night-time houses, and the houses are moved to fresh grass. Each day, the chickens roam the paddocks under the watchful eye of their…
Welcome to our new series on permaculture renting, in which we attempt to grow food and live a simple life while moving from rental to rental at the whim of landlords + Australian housing prices. Yay! So we’ve been off the farm just over a year now. We’ve just moved into our second rental house,…
One of the great things about home mushroom propagation is that it can be entirely portable. Lease ended? No worries – pack up your bags, buckets and logs, and off you go. Your food supply comes with you. Which is good news for renters, like us. Unlike our veggie garden, when we had to move house…
Seed balls. In a nutshell, they are a ball of clay and compost with seeds inside. Sounds pretty simple right? Well they are, they really are. They’re incredibly easy to make, and are a rather excellent way to get things growing in areas that don’t usually have much plant growth. This month’s 107 Rooftop Garden…
Last weekend we gathered with a crew of local folks to harvest + replant the 107 Rooftop Garden – seedlings, celery, turmeric, leeks + more… First up we led everyone through the skill of seed ball making (we’ll post a how-to on this technique shortly) and then it was on to garden chores. Our monthly garden…
Learning how to make a great seed raising mix means you are giving your seedlings an excellent head start. It also keeps costs down and is a great fundamental skill of edible gardening. Recently up at the107 Rooftop Garden, that’s exactly what we were all there to learn how to do. A dark threatening sky looked over…
Here’s how we built a bunch of mobile micro forest gardens for the 107 Rooftop Garden – complete with wicking beds. Our challenge with this design was to build tree planters that could move around to make space when needed, while providing shade, beauty, pollination and food. Mobile Forest Garden Wicking Planters: Pallet undercarriage so they can…
It’s the kind of thing you might dream as a kid to find in a back lane – a tree loaded with bean-like pods full of sweet, fluffy ice-cream-ish tasting fruit. And guess what? They exist! Behold the awesomeness of the ice cream bean, or Guama – Inga edulis. Originating from Central and South America and with many,…
Inspiration takes many forms, but a thriving backyard ecosystem like Happy Earth has got to be pretty high up on our list. Ali + Rich have created this edible suburban oasis over the last 8 years, on a sloping block in Unanderra, just south of Wollongong in NSW. We first visited them 3 years ago, but…