Next round of Milkwood Market Garden internship apps…
Next round of Milkwood Market Garden internship apps close August 30th! Please help us spread the word! Or jump straight to it and >> apply here <<
Building a Jenkins-style Lovable Loo for the Tinyhouse
The lovable loo humanure toilet was designed by Joseph Jenkins. This design is, for my money, simply the best domestic-scale compost toilet ever. It’s so, so simple. It’s easy to build and easy to maintain, results in awesome compost, and means that we don’t have to poo in drinking water. What’s not to love? It’s…
DetailsWild Weed Paper by Wild Stories
A weed may be defined as ‘a plant out of place’. And one persons’ unwanted plant may be another’s medicine, food, soil builder or erosion controller. Recently Sydney artist Diego Bonetto has been working on wild weed paper: hand-made paper embedded with hand-harvested weed seeds of many and varied species found in the Sydney basin…
DetailsHow not to get eaten by Rats, if you’re a Seedling
If you are a pak-choi seedling and you live at our farm, you face certain challenges in life. Even before you get planted in the garden and battle the delights of our climate, things are risky. Especially in early spring, when Mumma rats are hungry, and there is little lush greenery about. As a luscious…
Details
Growing mushrooms in a laundry basket
Thought you might like to see a great way to grow mushrooms outdoors if you have a shady place that gets watered regularly… This technique also works indoors, but the laundry basket is usually bagged or boxed until the straw is completely colonised with mycelium. This technique has both upsides and downsides, but most importantly,…
DetailsCreating an Inside-Outside Woodbox for a Tiny House
The inside-outside woodbox for the tinyhouse is competed and now awaits filling! Now we can simply add firewood via the little, purpose-built external door, and open it from the inside, right next to the woodstove. Yay for easy heat and cooking energy delivery. I suppose if our spanky new (ok so it’s salvaged, but it’s…
DetailsPig boards: the pastured pig fancier’s best friend
Time to move the pigs. They’ve done a great job tractoring and manuring up in the suntrap, in readiness for groundcover plantings. Now we need their help down below the swale, to help prep ground for the new forest garden. Time for the biggest adventure the pigs’ lives on their own trotters – all the…
DetailsAnnouncing our Forest Garden & Silviculture internships
Next release in our area-specific internships is the forest garden & silviculture projects of Milkwood Farm. The first forest garden & silviculture internship slot is 3 October – 28 November, and applications close on 20th August. This internship is an opportunity for someone to work side by side with Dan Harris Pascal; designing, implementing and…
Details
Azolla (water fern) – a protein-rich animal feed
(A note that the above clip is in the garden at Quoll Hollow, where we live now on melukerdee country, and the references to Milkwood Farm below are from our years up north on Wiradjuri country) Azolla is a native water plant with some seriously exciting attributes for anyone looking to develop closed-loop cycles for…
DetailsSunday…
Sunday picnic, down by the creek. No hammers, no greywater schematics, no mushroom propagation and no internet. Just oranges and sandwiches and skimstones and dappled sunlight…
Soil building toolkit: Comfrey
Right about now is a good time to dig up bits of comfrey root and redistribute it wherever you need, but do not yet have, good soil. Garden path edges, forest garden path edges, places where you want to plant fruit trees next year, and so on. Comfrey is the ultimate multitasking plant. It shades…
Details
Solar Power at Milkwood Farm, Version Two
Milkwood Farm is now officially 100% solar powered. Yay! 12 CIS solar panels are now affixed to the roof of the top shed and turning sunlight into goodness for power tools and light, as we approach the move-in date for our tinyhouse. Being off-grid as we are (even though our family farm next door is…
DetailsNew beginnings in the Milkwood market garden
As spring slowly creeps towards us, things are stirring in the market garden… time to introduce our new Market Gardener, and plant field peas! Enter Michael Hewins, who, after joining us as a very experienced wwoofer for some months last season at Milkwood Farm, has returned to take on the organic market garden as an…
Details