Join us for a fabulous day of digging, planting, learning and growing, with our annual Alexandria Park Permablitz! 10 – 4pm: Monday 13th June: Alexandria Park Community Garden, Alexandria, Sydney. Everyone is welcome, with light lunch and organic fruit provided. Bring your gloves, your boots, your kids, your dad & your water bottle, and expect…
DetailsI never thought we would get excited about, let along plan to do, the whole market garden thing. But while I’m all for no-dig polycultures like our domestic-scale kitchen garden, I’m also a pragmatist. These days, we need more vegetables than we currently produce, especially from Spring through till Autumn. Way, way more. So I…
DetailsThe permaculture school garden at Cringila public school is an oasis, in both the literal and metaphorical sense. Cringila is a suburb perched above the Port Kembla Steelworks, south of Sydney, and has some of the worst pollution in Australia thanks to the industrial fallout. Which is ironic, because the permaculture school garden here is…
DetailsReviewing your own online video archive is a bit like reading back through your diary. Except it’s all public. Eeek! Nevertheless, here is our new video page. This page is a collation of our sporadic video diary (you might notice the hiatus that coincided with parenthood). If you’d like to see the accompanying articles that…
DetailsSchool gardens are enjoying a growing revival currently, which is great because they have the power to be pretty transformative places. Since meeting Aaron Sorenson, I’ve begun to understand just how a good school garden can truly intersect with more aspects of learning than perhaps anything else that happens in a school day. At this…
DetailsThis is the first post in a series explaining how we built our very first earthbag dome at Milkwood Farm. So if you searched for earthbag building australia, you’ll come to see that this is a natural building technique that uses bags of earth to build structures that have incredible tensile strength and a very low…
DetailsWe were rather impressed with Joel Salatin when he came to Australia last year. So were one or two other people. Aside from being the most entertaining farmer that we’ve ever met, he’s really onto something. Multiple somethings, even. To call the Salatin’s farming practices at Polyface Farms in Virginia USA ‘innovative’ is a bit…
DetailsI am not a survivalist. Really I’m not. Despite growing up in a family that was so deeply concerned by nuclear threat in the 1980’s that we had pictures of mushroom clouds (framed) in my childhood lounge room, I refuse to concede that my family’s future may involve turning our farm into a stockade or…
DetailsGravity and chickens are two of our favorite natural forces at Milkwood. Chickens scratch, poo, give eggs and good company, plus a trillion other benefits. Gravity draws things down. Great it you want stuff to end up down the bottom. Which, in the case of our gravity fed chicken house, we do! For the past…
DetailsSo it turns out that aquaponics doesn’t have to be just a bunch of tanks and grow beds. Not that I mind ‘classic’ aquaponics setups. I just like to know there’s more than one way to grow a fish. And some salad. Recently we ran our first Aquaponics Workshop in Sydney, and it was a…
DetailsWe’re bringing David Holmgren to Sydney shortly as a guest teacher on our Winter Part-time PDC. So we thought we’d offer up a dinner while he’s here. Would you like to come? Dinner with David Holmgren Saturday 21st May Peasant’s Feast Organic Restaurant, Sydney We’d like to invite our current and future friends, readers, students…
DetailsThis tinyhouse building thing is taking ages. But we’re getting there now! For the walls, we’re planning on experimenting with double-skin wattle-and-daub with insulation in between. We started off planning for strawbale walls, but we’ve now decided to try wattle and daub to maximise the inside space. We don’t know of any precedents of doing…
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A wicking box is a contained, portable way to grow vegies (or anything else) with very little water. Essentially, it’s a wicking bed in miniature. Very cool. Wicking boxes can be used either as part of an intensive water-wise growing system, or just a good way to keep those herbs alive that you usually forget…
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