The red cabbage sauerkraut that Rose made recently is a beautiful thing, and we’re consuming it daily. It’s sour and it’s crunchy, and it’s complimenting many a meal here at the farm this spring, from potato curries through to our first home-grown roast pork dinner last weekend… here’s the last of the good stuff, moved…
DetailsHooray for salad! We’ve hit 100% self-sufficiency in salad greens for crew and courses at Milkwood Farm. And we’re not just talking leaves-of-things-that-are-edible-and-could-be-used-for-salad-at-a-pinch, we’re talking retail quality, beautiful, sweet, diverse beyond organic greens. We’re pretty stoked. Michael has achieved this by being careful with his propagation techniques and with his choices in salad species. At…
DetailsAs part of the mushroom propagation systems we’re setting up at Milkwood Farm, we’re growing reishi mushrooms, for their widely established healing properties. In China and Japan, reishi are used widely as a general health tonic and also as a specific treatment for some types of cancers. Making tea is a simple way of accessing…
DetailsWe’ve been fielding a lot of questions lately on what exactly a Milkwood Permaculture Design Certificate course (PDC) consists of. In short, it’s an exceptional and intensive foundation course in permaculture theory, from which students emerge with solid design skills. The application of these design skills are broad – some people use their new knowledge…
DetailsA microforest garden is usually something you would design for small-space forest gardens – for urban situations, or areas where space is at a premium. However they translate into larger forest garden designs as a nucleus forest garden, and can be a great way of starting a larger forest garden too. To quote Dave Jacke:…
DetailsThis last week at Milkwood Farm we’re kicking into the swing of Spring, and welcoming new crew to the Farm. There was a Mushroom Cultivation course held, and much home-cured, home grown, nitrate-free bacon consumed (I cannot tell you the ballpark of yum this equates to. Let’s just say alot). The Cima di Rapa is…
DetailsHoneybees build comb. It’s part of what they do. It’s part of who they are. And being, as it is, actually exuded from glands on the undersides of their bodies, the honeycomb that bees build is literally part of them. Comb is literally part of the super organism that is a honeybee colony. It’s a…
DetailsThis year in the market garden Michael has sown lots of silverbeet and rainbow chard, because it’s such a versatile and hardy green. However silverbeet are poly-embryonic, which means that multiple plants will sprout from the one seed. So to prevent crowding and to be able to regulate the final size of the plant, silverbeet…
DetailsOur criteria for building the greywater system for the tinyhouse was pretty simple: cheap, made from readily available materials, and effective. We also wanted to use the outputs to irrigate a grove of important fruit trees, as water is very precious here, especially in a dry year. After many, many hours of research on systems…
DetailsHow to make the most of the late brassica harvest? Sauerkraut! Fermented cabbage is a hard thing not to love. It’s spicy and it’s sour and it looks beautiful too, especially made with your own red cabbages. The cabbage harvest was not what we’d hoped for, with lots of half-headed cabbages that were obviously perfect…
DetailsCharlie has been busy in Sydney making beautiful and functional aquaponics systems far and wide of late, of which he’ll be sharing the designs and process during our Backyard Aquaponics Workshop happening in Sydney next weekend on the 20-21 October 2012. While he’s still making lots of bathtub aquaponics systems, Charlie’s also find that a…
DetailsWhile worm farms are pretty normal to find nowadays in many yards, their capacity to cycle essential nutrients and make nutrient dense soil additives available to you, for free, can’t be understated. Worm farms rock, seriously. Our bathtub wormfarm next to the kitchen garden, with it’s built in vertigation (direct worm juice injection into the…
DetailsNick just finished up co-teaching a Permaculture Teacher Training course with Rowe Morrow on Sunday, which was by all accounts an enlightening 7 days of how the heck to communicate core design concepts to a wide range of different types of learners. Amongst the varied and wonderful students present was Jasmine Whyte from communicatecreative, who…
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…