This place, Melliodora. A world renowned permaculture homestead, full of nut, fruit and forage trees, geese, goats, berries, vegetables, mudbrick homes and lives worth living. If you have studied, read or participated in any Permaculture-type doings and learnings in Australia, then you’ll be aware of the stellar home-scale permaculture demonstration site that is Melliodora, in…
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Eat that which grows where you live, and mostly plants. That’s pretty much our dietary approach, in this house. We try to keep it simple, and as local as possible, in the interests of provenance, thrift, energy footprint, and grounding ourselves where we are. And we are, currently, by the sea. Fish and it’s sustainable…
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There’s a big range of ways you can start your seedlings off to get them to grow well, both at their seedling stage and later on, when you plant them out. Previously, we’ve worked with seeding into seedling trays, with soil blocks, and more recently, with biointensive seedling flats. Each of these techniques have their…
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Harvesting a box of warré honeycomb is an exciting event in any beekeeping year – its a sign that your bees have so much honey stored that taking a full box of honeycomb off the top of the hive won’t even be missed. It’s been about 4 years since we’ve harvested – firstly due to two poor summers…
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What do you get when you mix two determined farmer girls with an acre of good land? Rad Growers, that’s what. Erin O’Callaghan + Belinda Joy Sheekey are two fine people that we first met as students during two of our Permaculture Design Certificate courses. Since then, they’ve teamed up to farm seasonal vegetables on an acre of…
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As 2015 winds up, we’re winding down a little. Such a big year it was! Here’s some of the highlights for us… We started out this year innocently enough – finding glow in the dark mushrooms, making DIY clip-together bathtub aquaponics systems and foraging seaweed for our garden, as well as holding our first ever…
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What better way to celebrate your home grown (or locally sourced) Summer herbs and produce than within a tasty home made baked thing? Super tasty and super easy – Summer Holiday Bread. Combine a couple of summer time garden favourites with the general crowd pleaser of some home baked bread, and you have yourself an easy…
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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,…
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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…
DetailsReclaiming 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…
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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.…
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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,…
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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…
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