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…
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Good morning everyone! Welcome to our weekly round up of good things to read, think about and do this weekend. If we like the same things, this will work well. Are you up for it? Let’s give it a go. The Weekly Round Up We can’t wait to get our hands on some of our…
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Next week there’s a nation-wide Wild Pollinator Count – do you have 10 minutes to watch a flower and report what you see? Sure you do. The Wild Pollinator Count can be done without any fancy gear, and you don’t need to be an insect expert. You just need to dedicate 10 minutes to helping…
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Why is making a Base Map essential to your permaculture design process? Because its the base template on which you’ll create your design. A base map is a scale drawing showing the basic, permanent features of your design site. There’s a couple of ways to do it. A base map is the starting point for a…
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If you seek out ethical and sustainable meat, you may have found yourself with a huge bag of animal fat at some stage. Buying a half or whole animal direct from a local farmer is a great way to know exactly where your meat comes from and is an easy way to save money, reduce…
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Microgreens are a great way to get fast growing, nutritious, home-grown green things into your diet. They can be grown in trays or in a garden bed, depending on what space you have. They are tasty, always. We’ve written before about growing microgreens in trays – they don’t take up much space, and make sense…
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Next to my primary school, down by the railway track, there is a mulberry tree. It’s been there since before I started kindergarten. I think it was self-seeded, but it’s difficult to say – the street verge just there has since been planted with all manner of trees by the nearby residents – grevillas, loquats, lilies,…
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Our bees are back! We’ve set up a small Warré apiary at Buena Vista Farm on the coast at Gerringong. This will be a little different from beekeeping in the dry inland hills of Mudgee… 18 months ago we said goodbye to our Milkwood Farm bees, which, after we left the farm, went to live at Rahamim Ecolearning…
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So you want to create a permaculture design for your home, farm, verge or community. How exactly do you begin the design process? By forming a goal statement, that’s how. Goals Articulation When we clearly articulate our goals we are creating a powerful statement which we can then design by, and for. Dave Jacke refers to this…
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It was hot, and humid, and threatening to storm. Perfect weather for catching our first honeybee swarm. We got the alert via our friends Adam + Fiona of Buenavista Farm – the usual bush telegraph story – someone called them about a swarm on a driveway, but Fi + Adam were packing for market day…
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There’s a lot packed into our 3 day Natural Building course – students learn hands-on techniques in mud + lime renders, earth floors, strawbale, roundwood building, reciprocal roofs and more. Most folks that come to this course are there to get a solid overview of all these techniques from a master builder, so they can…
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A Crop and Swap is an informal get-together of folks who have backyard harvest to spare, or are looking for new ideas for what to grow next. Recently we went to the very first crop and swap held at Kiama Community Garden, with our home-grown offerings of greens, herbs and a few oyster mushrooms. It…
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Have you seen the latest edition of Organic Gardener Magazine? It contains an article we wrote, about the principles of natural beekeeping. We really wanted to write this article from a principles based approach for a couple of reasons – primarily because there’s an awful lot of mis-information out there about what constitutes natural beekeeping. We’ve learned…
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