Here’s another of our gourmet mushroom cultivation students who’s off and growing! Marita Smith lives in the Morton National Park just behind Milton on the South Coast of NSW and over the last year she’s been setting up an awesome local food initiative. We caught up with her to take a peek inside her emerging organic mushroom…
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Silently eyeing the crostata off, I did briefly think of eating it all just there and then. No one else was home you see, they didn’t know I had made it. Still eyeing the tart off, I paused for just a moment longer… did they really need to know? I gently poked the pastry edging…
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Every now and then we get to visit a small organic farm that truly blows our socks off. Old Mill Road, and the family who farm it, are one of those farms. I think I should let the images speak for themselves here, so in summary: Old Mill Road is a diverse biological farm supplying vegetables, eggs,…
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If you’ve been hanging out in many of Australia’s cities this last week or two, you may have noticed a lot of rain about. Falling off roofs, gushing down gutters and along stormwater drains, those droplets that sound so glorious on a tin roof are often a lost resource in cities, washing down our hard…
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I’m getting cosy with the seaweeds that grow near our place. It seems only fair – I’ve always made a point of understanding what wild land plants and animals are particular to wherever we live – what they indicate, the conditions they prefer, and what niches they hold in the ecosystem. But up until now, I wasn’t…
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Think making your own aquaponics setup would be too hard and costly? Think again my friends. Here’s a straightforward and easy way to grow some waterwise greens in your home system. We made this super easy and downright cheap aquaponics system for the 107 Rooftop Garden in Redfern, Sydney, because we wanted to show folks how…
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The definition of a weed is subjective, I know. They’re simply plants out of place, after all. And one person’s weed might be another person’s harvest, or food, or medicine. It’s true. However, when it comes to our current backyard veggie patch, we’ve been laying down some ground rules about what plants get to stay,…
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Next in our lineup of Permaculture Design Course grads is Megan Norgate from Brave New Eco, a sustainable design + interior service based in Melbourne town. While the dream of building our own ultra-sustainable, self-sufficient, ethically-made homes from scratch exists for many, the reality of the current age and circumstance is that most of us…
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Summer downtime is the perfect chance to get fermenting, even if the heat means that everything bubbles like crazy! Check out these 4 recipes for some easy yet delicious ways to get some probiotic action into your kitchen this Summer. Fermented Tomato Salsa This recipe comes via our Fermentation teacher Gillian Kozicki. It’s absolutely killer,…
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Holidays are a good time to dream about the future, and what you’re going to build one day. Here’s some articles to get you inspired about building with a minimum of money and a maximum of passion for creating natural, living homes and shelter. Let there be Mud: the Basics of Natural Building Natural Building is…
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Has this year been a big one for you? It has for us. So much digging, doing, designing, moving, re-settling, replanting and re-thinking. Thank goodness for the inaugural backyard gherkin, which appeared on our back fence trellis the other day, to calm me down. In the spirit of building on what’s gone before, or incase you’ve…
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Rustic style cooking and I seem to go way back, long before it was cool to do rustic anyway. It wasn’t because I was ahead of the hipster masses – really when it comes down to it, it’s because I’m quite a lazy cook. I’ll happily slap a rustic label on well, pretty much most…
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The act of preserving fruit, like gardening, is a hopeful act. It’s a gesture of goodwill to future meals that you plan to have, incorporating a since-past season’s bounty. It’s also darn repetitive (though some would call it calming, I suppose), all that cutting and washing and slicing and bringing up to heat and waiting and cleaning…
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