Last 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…
DetailsReciprocal roof frames are self-supporting structures that date back to the 12th Century. They are used in Chinese and Japanese architecture, as well as being something that Leonardo Da Vinci explored in detail. The interlocking nature of the separate members creates a complimentary tension that, ultimately, results in an extremely strong, self-supporting roof. The theory of it…
DetailsWinter at Milkwood Farm can be a little frosty. When you come from warmer country, it’s nearly as exciting as snow. Ok maybe just the first time. After that, it’s just chilly. Now that we’ve moved into an insulated abode after 5 years of caravans and sheds, the intricacy of the frost crystals on the…
DetailsA mushroom garden is a low cost, DIY way to increase the diversity of your home-grown produce, as well as your overall resilience. It’s also surprisingly simple to do, once you understand the basics of how and why. Recently Nick was over in the US doing some training with Paul Stamets at Fungi Perfecti, and…
DetailsPerhaps you have seen Allan Savory’s recent TED talk on Greening the Desert. Perhaps you have heard of Holistic Management, or worked on a farm that uses this technique. Or perhaps your main connection to farming is that you prefer to eat clean food from regenerative sources. Wherever you’re coming from, I encourage you to…
DetailsThe idea of forage farming has gotten a bad rap in recent years – it’s considered akin to subsistence farming, which no-one in their right mind would leave their well paid city job to go and do, right? I mean, we’re successful people. We have serious dreams. We didn’t work this hard and buy land just to…
DetailsOnce you start natural beekeeping with Warré hives, you can look forward to your first honey harvest. Harvesting from a Warré hive means crushing frames of luscious honeycomb to remove the honey. That is, if you don’t eat all your harvest straight up as chunks of raw honeycomb, which is tempting. But honey in a jar has its place,…
DetailsPicking carrots in the Winter garden with my two loves. Trialling Azolla as a chook feed. Driving many miles to visit my parents and to teach my little boy how to fish. Learning how to make Labneh. Hoping we’d move into the Tinyhouse someday soon.
DetailsWhat is most intriguing to me about this little book is that, once again, good writing has allowed me to re-discover a subject that I thought I had it together on. I mean, we farm naturally at Milkwood. We know and we love and we dig manures. Regularly, even. Yet, reading this really excellent book, I’m reminded…
DetailsThe Milkwood newsletter is an occasional publication that’s a treasure trove of writings, free DIY guides, gardening tips, permaculture hacks, special newsletter-only posts and giveaways, and lots, lots more…