Mud is the most amazing building material. It’s beautiful, it’s local, it’s completely non-toxic, and it’s free! And perhaps the best bit is that your house takes on the colors of the hills around you, as you wrap your home in the clay of that particular place. As outlined previously, our experimental wattle-and-daub walls haven’t…
DetailsHere’s a bunch of Forest Garden books and resources we’ve put together for the students of our Food Forest Garden workshops. There is so very much to learn, read, think about and absorb here! And it’s all incredibly useful and exciting information. Many thanks to Milkwood Farm’s resident plant-whisperer Dan Harris Pascal for putting these…
DetailsEagle Street Rooftop Farm is as good as city farming gets, in my book. If you want an example of lo-fi community food security that is blisteringly cool as well as being truly functional, here you are. What I would really like is that out of our urban-focussed Sydney Permaculture Design Certificate in January, multiple…
DetailsLast weekend Tim Malfroy checked Belinda’s bees at her small urban apiary in Sydney. This is the apiary we take our Sydney Natural Beekeeping students to as part of their course, so it was great to see how the hive had wintered. Spring has sprung in Sydney, and the bees were busily buzzing! Belinda’s warré…
DetailsI must say that while I’m finding this market garden experiment very exciting, it’s also rather daunting. What are we planting today? What are we planting next week? Where are we going? Who am i and where are my pants? The solution to all this is Allsun Farm’s planting calendar system. Joyce Wilkie devised this…
DetailsRoll up, roll up. It’s our very first film night in Mudgee! We thought we’d start with Vanishing of the Bees, an amazing doco about why organic beekeeping (and farming) is so darn important. And it’s free! Please join us for a local wine, a wood fired pizza and a great evening: Wednesday 5th October,…
DetailsWe’ve just finished hosting our first Starting an Organic Market Garden course with Joyce and Mike from Allsun Farm, and it feels like the start of a quiet revolution. 30 people for 3 days, in our woolshed and down on our creekflat, learning the basics of growing good food well. Whew! I knew this was…
DetailsThe Australian City Farms and Community Gardens network has just released a new poster for free download. And it is a beautiful thing. Chooks, roots, fruit, earthworms and of course community, all flourishing together.
DetailsThere is nothing so joyful as a large group of people coming together to plant currants. Especially when they’re doing it in a forest garden, early in Spring, when the peaches and wattles are flowering madly and the sap is rising all around. As part of our first forest garden workshop here at Milkwood Farm,…
DetailsWhile we started off experimenting with annual and ground cover species seed balls, to date I’ve been most impressed by how useful they’ve proved to help us establish trees in unlikely areas. As I’ve mentioned before, we’ve been trying to figure out how to establish trees and increase biomass on the rocky, soil-deprived parts of…
DetailsWhen I’ve thought about small scale grain cropping in the past, I thought of long skirts, plaited hair, and a whole lot of winnowing, threshing, and hard work. Somehow, I always thought this stuff was either the province of the seriously self sufficient, or the seriously delusional. Nowadays I wonder why the heck in Australia…
DetailsHere’s a punchy little video piece about re-localisation of food, with soundtrack by Willie Nelson covering Coldplay. As one of the comments on the post says “When I buy naturally raised meats I don’t think, “This costs so much!”, rather I know, “This is money that won’t be going toward chemo.” You will either pay…
DetailsHooray! After a month of pig tractoring, fencing and gathering resources, the Milkwood Farm organic market garden has officially begun! Behold the image above, in which is recorded the planting of our very first lettuce. It was a very eventful day, all in all. First thing in the morning, we had to convince our hire-a-pigs…
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…