School gardens have incredible potential to provide experiential learning. But what’s the best way to go about setting one up? I’ve been wondering this for a while. Recently I’ve been asking around amongst my esteemed permaculture colleges as to what they thought were the best school garden models they’d seen or heard of. Aaron Sorensen’s…
DetailsWendell Berry once said if you eat, you’re involved. He was talking about agriculture, but if you ask me, he really meant humanure. Getting your outputs sorted is a big and necessary task. For us, that meant designing and implementing a composting toilet system based on wheelie bins. I thought I’d better give out the…
DetailsThe third winter workshop we’re running in Sydney is about how to get your garden’s nutrient cycles pumping, and it’s called Feed Your Garden.
I desperately want to be Annemarie and Graham Brookman. Not right away – maybe about 30 years from now. By that time I want to be sitting back and recounting our successful adventure of transforming our land from an exposed and rocky ridge into a kick-ass permaculture farm. Just like the Brookmans. Annemarie and Graham…
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Rocket stoves have become a part of our lives at Milkwood Farm. They’re hyper energy efficient, can be built out of rubbish and result in more usable heat that any other wood-burning system we’ve come across. Big love. It doesn’t take long to be besotted – everyone who needs a wash at our farm heats…
DetailsNext up in our Seasonal Workshop series is a short workshop in something we all should know how to do (but probably don’t): Grafting.
Last year on May 1st we hopped down to Sydney to see what delights National Permaculture Day had to offer – and there were many! We devised a plan that covered a range of projects and we spent the day whizzing through a selection of open gardens and talks, and even helped dig up some…
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At the end of a weirdly unseasonal summer, we have more green tomatoes than we can count. Especially the little ones. This is definitely the easiest way i’ve discovered to make the most of them for winter and beyond – pickling them whole! All you need is some big jars, many little green tomatoes, water,…
DetailsWe’ve decided to make a small expansion on the stuff we co-ordinate and teach down in Sydney: enter the Milkwood Seasonal Workshop Series!
In our reading room this week, it’s all about interconnection. The vast, unseen webs of mycelium running through the soil, and the tangled and huge implications of Genetically Modified Organisms. The World According to Monsanto is a book that really scratches the itch. Which itch? That itch that tells you that you really should get…
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As explained in Putting our honey where our mouth is, this year has been a tough one for our new Warré beehives, and for bees in general throughout the central west. Torrential, unseasonal rain for much of late spring and into summer meant that many flowering plants had their regular cycles thrown off course, and…
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Following on from last year’s overwhelmingly positive experience, Milkwood Permaculture is holding another of our unique Part-Time Permaculture Design Certificate courses in Sydney this Winter, starting on the weekend of May 15 and running until the 31 July. We’ve found this one-day-a-week format is an effective way to enable many folks to learn permaculture design…
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Aquaponics just might be the ultimate closed-loop food production system. A healthy aquaponics system can provide its lucky owner with fresh fish and fresh organic vegetables year round, for very little ongoing cost. Getting an aquaponics system set up, however, can be costly. There’s lots of off-the-shelf systems to choose from nowadays, but they cost…
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