Winter Workshops: Designing for Spring
We’ve decided to make a small expansion on the stuff we co-ordinate and teach down in Sydney: enter the Milkwood Seasonal Workshop Series!
What we’re reading: Monsanto + Mushrooms
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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Combining Two Warré Honeybee Colonies
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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Sydney Winter PDC with special guest David Holmgren
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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DIY urban bathtub aquaponics system
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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The saga of the middle dam
First off, i would like to make an important point: we are yet to meet a challenge at Milkwood Farm that we could not fix with careful thought, good advice, relentless research, a strong dose of creativity and a stronger dose of humor. That said, the saga of the middle dam nearly had us stumped.…
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My land is your land: the Landshare concept
Update Februray 2021 – Landshare is no longer operating as an entity in Australia or the UK (links to those site have been removed), however Landshare NZ is still operating and there are many alternatives that have sprung up in communities all over the world. One great example in Australia is Farm it Forward who are connecting young…
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Visiting the Marrickville Food Forest
Deep in the heart of Marrickville, in a little street of workers cottages, right under the flight path to Sydney International Airport, there is a food forest. A splendid wrangle of Australian rainforest food trees, sugar cane, herbs from all parts of asia, plums and even citrus, grow on a small suburban block with a…
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Gravity fed water for Milkwood Farm
One of the most powerful concepts in permaculture for me is ‘keep the water high’. All water stored high in the landscape is potential energy, thanks in part to gravity. If your water is high, you can make that water available to everything below it in the landscape, via gravity feed and piping, with no…
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Putting our honey where our mouth is: a lean year
Bees are amazingly resilient and adaptable creatures. In a good year, when there are many ‘honey flows’ happening, they can build comb and collect and store honey at an astonishing rate, to make the most of the bounty dripping from nearby plants. Tim tells stories of his bees filling 5 boxes full with comb and…
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Water Tank Comparisons for Clean Drinking Water
All drinking water at Milkwood Farm comes from the sky. This means catchment and storage of drinking-quality water is a very big deal for us. And since we’ve got the opportunity to define the quality of our drinking water here (a luxury so many millions of people do not have), we’re determined to get it…
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Crash-grazing the creekflat: an experiment
Flat ground. Seemingly simple, but oh so full of implications. We didn’t really think about how cool flat ground was until we calculated that it made up exactly 10% of the total landmass of Milkwood. That means 90% hilly bits. Hmm. Flat ground is very precious – you can do all sorts of things with…
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EarthBag Building Workshop at Milkwood Farm
The idea that you can build a structurally strong house with nothing more complicated than a bunch of bags, earth, clay and lime, plus some basic on-farm materials and plenty of hands on deck is pretty exciting for a lot of people, including me. Earthbag building might just be the answer to our dreams. Want…
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