Being a beginner beekeeper involves asking an awful lot of questions. In a good way. You are, after all, taking on the stewardship of a super-organism composed of between 20 and 60,000 individual bees. In light of the constant stream of questions that Tim Malfroy fields from students, Tim and I decided it was high…
DetailsLast Autumn we hosted a Forest Garden Design Intensive with Dave Jacke at Milkwood Farm. It was a truly awesome experience, and it changed the way many of us at Milkwood (and beyond) approach permaculture design education, and permaculture design process. To summarise, it was 9 days of immersive permaculture design, using forest ecosystems as analogies…
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Spring will be here any second now… I can smell it through the sleet. Ok maybe it’s a little while off still. But the wattles are flowering! And so are the fruit trees, down in the valley. The green manures in the market garden are about to be turned into the soil to make our…
DetailsWe think it is high time we started introducing you to the network of awesomeness that is the growers and doers we work with, and whom we take inspiration from. These are the folks we know and love who spend their days wrangling, organising and producing clean food in small, localised food systems. So that…
DetailsSoil blocks are a nifty technique for starting seedlings in a ‘pot-less’ way. They’re DIY home-pressed blocks of soil with a seed inside, and their construction is just sturdy enough to stay together until you plant them out into your garden once the seedling is growing strongly. The idea behind soil blocks is primarily to…
DetailsWe are getting pretty excited about welcoming Allan Savory to Australia in a couple of weeks to enliven a discussion about how Holistic management can play a key role in our future land regeneration strategies. In anticipation of his upcoming Aussie tour, Allan just recorded a podcast over at The Wellness Couch. It’s great to…
DetailsSo just what is Milkwood? Who are we? What do we do? And why do we do it? All the answers, in a nutshell, are in this video… This summary of Milkwood was made last season during our forest garden design intensive with Dave Jacke. We feel it really captures the spirit of what we’re…
DetailsLast winter, Nick decided that the best way to grow oyster mushrooms for us would be in a bucket. Plastic bags of mushrooms are great and fine, but they’re one-use only, and result in wastage with every harvest. Food-grade buckets, on the other hand… Nick figured we could use these to grow our shrooms in,…
DetailsGuess what? We’ve got a last-minute opening in our Applied Growing Skills program at the Milkwood Farm market garden. Are you up for a unique chance to learn the craft of chemical-free vegetable growing this Spring? This 10 week program is an intensive and practical introduction to all aspects of organic market gardening: from designing…
DetailsSole Food Farm is an urban farming project in Vancouver. With a firm focus on intensive, chemical-free food production, it knocks most other urban farming setups we’ve seen for six. And the best part? It’s entirely portable. Why is portable important? Because it effectively gets around the problem of land tenure: that biggest of stumbling…
DetailsI’m not sure how she got called Fatso. Probably because there were three of them, and she was the plumpest, by a fair margin. She was the pig which tended to disregard the electric fence occasionally and go for a wander, delighting in rearranging select parts of the forest garden, causing us to call her…
Detailshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDXZc0tZe04 This is a great little video from Gaia Bees, an American natural beekeeper doing some very interesting work in bee colony resilience and apicentric beekeeping. The super interesting thing about this video is that it clearly shows how, in a ‘wild hive’, the colony starts at the highest point of the cavity, and draws…
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