Worms. The very essence of every flourishing garden. They are great for improving soil quality, turn your kitchen scraps into a valuable, incredibly rich fertiliser, and also make for an undemanding household pet. With a block of coir, some newspaper and handful of worms ready to go, setting up a simple worm farm couldn’t be…
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Microbats are worth encouraging into your garden. Not only are they delightful to watch on dusk – they gobble thousands of mosquitoes, moths and other garden pests each and every night. A single microbat can eat up to 1,200 mosquitoes and small insects in an hour – which has earned them the well deserved reputation…
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Cascara is a drink made from the outer berry of a coffee bean – a byproduct of the coffee harvest, and a tasty drink unto itself, as we’ve recently learned. Coffee trees are an unlikely but awesome backyard plant that can be found in many community gardens in Sydney these days, including the 107 Rooftop Garden in…
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Are you ready to take the plunge and get seriously skilled up in Permaculture Design? Join some of Australia’s best Permaculture educators this Summer for our Sydney PDC. We pride ourselves on the quality of our Permaculture Design Certificate, which we run 3 times a year. Drawing on best-practice, student outcome based learning and the…
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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…
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It was threatening to rain, and the wind was a-blowing. What a perfect day to ramble along the Coast Walk between Kiama and Gerringong! Hmm. Though actually, it all worked out quite well. Getting little people outside and adventuring on a non-conventionally-pleasant day comes down to clothing, mostly. At least in our house. So Ashar…
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We are very excited to announce that in February 2016, Jean-Martin Fortier of ‘The Market Gardener’ and Curtis Stone of ‘The Urban Farmer’ are coming to Australia to help grow more farmers with good knowledge. These two farmers are both folks who we’ve been inspired by for some years now – they’re both at the top…
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So how do you design a patch from scratch with Permaculture Design? Here’s a breakdown of the backyard permaculture design Nick did for Organic Gardener Magazine’s ‘Patch From Scratch’ project. There’s not many things more iconic that the Aussie suburban backyard – hills hoist, kids under the sprinkler… But do you know what’s even better?…
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Selecting a good site for your apiary can make a huge difference to honeybee health, and your hive’s honey harvest too. Here’s some important things to consider when choosing a site. Natural Beekeeping is about stewarding honeybee colonies in place, in a bee-centric way. Therefore, the idea is that you place your hive well, and…
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Are you thinking about getting a small market garden growing? Maybe a crop of garlic to add to your weekender block, or a small microgreens enterprise in your backyard? Maybe you’re dreaming of a fully-fledged livelihood in growing great organic food, but you’re not sure if you’re up for it. Or if it’s going to be…
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It’s Spring! Finally. Our 107 Rooftop Garden has now officially survived it’s first Winter, which was long, cold and wet up, on this rooftop we love. Cold and shady meant not much growth for the plants in this space over Winter – which we took into consideration in the planting + garden bed design. The carrots loved it.…
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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…
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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…
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