We’re getting very excited about growing delicious culinary mushrooms at Milkwood. Ever since we ran our first mushroom cultivation course in January, they’re springing up all over the place. One of the easiest and cheapest ways to grow them is on sawdust spawn that you can make yourself…
DetailsSo a little while ago (ok quite some time ago – like 4 years) I took a bunch of fig cuttings from an old abandoned orchard across the creek, and potted them up. And they grew. So we planted them. And guess what? This week, we ate our first figs, and they were delish. Hooray!…
DetailsI am a little bit in love with our new honey press. It is made from stainless steel and it can crush close to a whole box of natural honeycomb in one fell squish. What better way to get all that goodness of the pollen, propolis and of course the honey into the jar?
Now that Autumn’s here, our woolshed is bedecked in produce and garlands… brown onions, red onions, preserves, pickles and all the rest. And it turns out (fortunately) that stringing onions into a garland is actually quite easy.
We’re very excited to announce that Hannah Moloney will be joining Nick + guests to deliver our Urban Permaculture Design Certificate in Sydney in July! Hannah is a bombshell, in more ways than one. She’s an urban change-maker, composter, community facilitator, teacher, aid worker, writer and permaculture designer. I mean, the girl set up a…
DetailsLast weekend we held our annual Autumn Natural Beekeeping course at Milkwood Farm. We got to harvest Warré honeycomb for eating, press a bunch of stored honeycomb, and check one of the Warré hives as part of the course. It was an amazing two days with a great crew of folks…
Well, we all know food preservation IS an art, but this is a slightly different type – Korean artist Jihyun Ryou has done a beautiful project translating traditional food preservation knowledge into quirky design… This project is about traditional oral knowledge which has been accumulated from experience and transmitted by mouth to mouth. Particularly focusing…
DetailsSo it’s only 2 weeks until Australia’s first EVER Applied Watershed Restoration course, which is happening at Milkwood Farm (and is FarmReady approved. And will be incredible. Ok, end pitch… but you really would be crazy not to join us). Like many farms with fragile soils, Milkwood Farm has many examples of small-scale erosion –…
DetailsIt’s something we and others have joked about: what if we had a truck full of goats and just went around offering their weed-eating services? How cool would that be? At one of our recent Permaculture Design Certificates some of the students designed a rent-a-goat system as a permaculture enterprise that could be added to…
DetailsIf you’ve done a Permaculture Design Certificate then I hope you got to have the customary PDC party at the end of it… these nights are unique and crazy and daggy and awesome, in equal measure. And they exist nowhere else in my life except in this context. I love them. So here are just…
DetailsDouble-stacked, modified milk-crates as the basis for a large-scale vegetable growing system on a city rooftop. Yet another example of why rooftop farming is possible, even if you don’t have tonnes of infrastructure…
To the garden! A break in the rain calls for action. So we went down the hill (splashing in all the puddles), past the baby chicks (whose water we topped up), around the geese camped on the road (who honked, as always), and on to the market garden…
It was entirely incredible to welcome 400 folks into an auditorium to hear Michael Reynolds talk Earthships in Sydney recently. Thanks to everyone that came – what a night! Regardless of whether you have inclinations to take on an earthship building project or not, I think this evening was really valuable to lots of people.…
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