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…
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If you’re a Natural Beekeeper, then beeswax is part of your harvest – when you crush your natural comb to extract the honey, there’s beeswax to spare. That’s how beekeeping with natural comb works. It’s a good thing for your bees, because encouraging comb renewal is an important part of colony health. Honeybees prefer to lay their…
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Master Tonic, or Fire Cider, is a potent home-made remedy for winter colds and lurgies. It promises to boost your immune system, it’s anti bacterial, it’s anti viral and should ward any colds off like a medieval swordsperson. It also happens to be incredibly easy to make. The question is, will I be able to get…
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The whole freshly ground flour thing has been something i’ve been meaning to sort out for about 8 years now. And we finally did it! A delicious decision. In our kitchen we tend to keep things whole + basic + home produced wherever possible. Life gets in the way of this a bit, but mostly, we…
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So what does a permaculture design process look like on the ground, outside the world of a Permaculture Design Course? Here we have Dan Palmer, who’ll be teaching an Advanced Permaculture Design Course with us in October, sharing an example of his design process designing the surrounds of a suburban homestead in Victoria. Take it…
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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,…
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Our great-grandparents didn’t have slow cookers to make their life easier. But they may have had something similar – a box of hay. Haybox cooking involved placing a hot pot of food in a nest of hay and leaving it there to complete cooking. Thermal cooking is an efficient and convenient way to cook –…
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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…
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Storing the season can be done in many delicious ways, but I have to say, dried fruit is one of my favourite ways to do it. In Summer, it’s pears, nashis, peaches + strawberries. In Autumn, it’s all about the apples. In Winter, it’s citrus, and kiwi, and banana. And in Spring… well, you’ve got…
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Here’s a few photos from our Autumn Natural Beekeeping course in Sydney, and some resources for you to be reading over Winter. These shots are from opening a hive that Adam Kennedy, who hosts our Natural Beekeeping courses, caught as a swarm and housed in a Warré hive box – go Adam! The bees are…
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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…
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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…
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These delicious little things have become a house staple at our place – the go-to biscuit of lunchbox and ‘we have nothing to munch’ issues alike. They’re crunchy and chewy and full of yum, and extremely easy to make. You can make them with white flour as per the recipe below, or you can make…
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