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…
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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…
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Starting a community food co-op or collective can begin with something as simple as a shared cup of tea, and a question. How can we access great quality, dry bulk food together? And local fresh veg also? With the power of co-operation, that’s how. Many a food co-op, collective or food share has begun with…
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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…
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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…
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Building a well designed, passive solar house can mean comfort in both summer and winter, with minimal energy inputs. On the hottest day of summer, it’s comfortable and cool inside. On the coldest night of the year, passively collected solar heat warms your bones. Enjoying a simple passive house does require participation from its residents, however. Even well designed passive…
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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…
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Our household runs on a few key foods + drinks that we make from scratch each week with local ingredients and wild fermentation: tibicos, jun, no-knead sourdough, kefir cheese and kraut. Here’s how we make them! Alrighty so for our final article of the year I thought I’d leave you with a bunch of small but delicious kitchen…
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As the weather heats up, the bees get busy. We’re all hoping for a great season. But the hotter weather also brings with it possible bee pests including small hive beetle, especially if you’re beekeeping in wam-temperate Australia. Here’s some tips for dealing with small hive beetle, naturally. All about Small Hive Beetle Small hive beetle was…
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For anyone wanting to start natural cheesemaking at home, sourcing raw milk can be tricky, if not impossible. So to the rescue comes Milk Kefir – breaker of chains, un-pasteurizer of milk, restorer of worlds and all-round kitchen hero. No really, I mean it. Milk kefir grains are a Symbiotic Community of Bacteria and Yeasts (SCOBY) –…
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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,…
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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…
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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,…
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