**Note: Please wear safety gear when making & using this mix as it is caustic to the skin. Ouch! Good for its intended purposes, though. Okay so this one is not strictly a fertilizer (like our Biofertilizer recipe #1), it’s more an anti-fungal preparation. Still, anti-fungicides are something our agriculture pours millions, if not billions…
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Bees just want to be bees. I’ve learned recently that, like most things in nature, a honeybee colony is most happy, calm and resilient when it’s left to do what it does best. For bees, this means forage for nectar and pollen, raise a brood, and make honey. And bees want to do this in…
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Around the corner from the community center where we run our Sydney courses is a funky and friendly little cafe called LoveGrub. Down the side of LoveGrub lies a little strip of dirt which the cafe have claimed as their garden. One day LoveGrub asked us “erm, don’t suppose you could turn our little garden into a happening thing, could you?”
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A worm tower is a simple and effective way to take any garden bed from average yield to gloriously abundant. Simple to build, with materials you probably already have, a worm tower is the perfect addition to any garden bed, in any climate. It will bring increased fertility to your plants, improve your soil, make…
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Natural building is a conundrum. In every sense of the word. Pick an aspect of modern western building, and then try and find an economically priced, ethically viable and completely non-toxic solution with a minimum of embodied energy. I am telling you now, dear reader, that for many materials you will be looking for quite some time.
Off-gassing plastics, sealants, wood products impregnated with (organic) poison to prevent critters eating it, pipes that leach, insulation with massive embodied energy or just a prohibitive price tag. It seems frequently that while building our tinyhouse we keep running into these problems. Why is the simple act of building a small and simple home which is ethically sourced, economically priced and which won’t poison its residents such a hard thing to do?
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The too-hard basket seems often applied to fledgling aspirations of creating bountiful gardens in rental or strata title properties. Which is really quite understandable, in some ways. To succeed in such ventures one needs to effectively communicate with (sometimes dubious) landlords and fellow residents, which is no small thing.
Recently, though, we came across Lucinda’s garden, which is a beautiful example of such communications gone right. A small space, strata-title, yeehar permaculture garden in the heart of northern Sydney.
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We’ve brewed up our very first batch of BioFertilizer at Milkwood! Our carefully collected, simple ingredients are all in a big vat next to the woolshed, fermenting merrily. In two months time, we should have 200 liters of concentrated fertility, ready to dilute and spread across Milkwood’s creekflat and ridge. Fingers crossed.
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So Winter is ending and Spring is on its way. We spent this winter just gone traveling to Sydney every weekend to teach Permaculture, which made us feel like short-range nomads very quickly. And the end result is now out there; 40 accomplished urban permaculture designers, who will go on to do amazing things. Not bad for one winter’s work.
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Nick and some new friends from the creek
Recently we’ve un-ravelled one of the mysteries of nature that’s been plagueing us for years here at Milkwood. How is it that if you build a dam or a pond, in the middle of nowhere, that over time it naturally becomes inhabited with water-loving creatures like yabbies? How do they know the new water source is there? Can they smell it? Is there some sort of inter-species bush telegraph? This one really had us stumped.
But now, we’ve seen it for ourselves, so we can tell you too. In certain conditions, the yabbies just walk there.
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We’ve always been all about aquaponics in theory: a closed-loop system that provides abundant vegetables and fresh fish – what’s not to like? But it wasn’t until Nick took some PDC students on a tour of this amazing bathtub aquaponics system in Alice Springs last April that the true wonder of aquaponics really began to…
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For the last 2 and a half years we have waited for the big rain which would test the capacity of our water-harvesting earthworks. And waited. We’ve had a bit of rain here and there, but the summers have been hot and dry these last two years, and we had gotten used to life with half-full dams and swales which were good roads, but rarely wet.
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Recently I found myself sitting in a Melbourne basement talking to interesting people for a whole day. It was an unusual Sunday for me. Once upon a time, this sort of thing was quite normal in my life, but these days my Sundays seem to be spent either hosting Permaculture courses, or digging holes, or considering lichen, or re-thinking the planting design for the second food forest below the main swale. So a day spent chatting in a basement was quite a treat, in its way.
This long chat was a forum as part of the Seven Thousand Oaks festival. I think i was there in the capacity of an artist/farmer who also delves in sustainability education, but I’m not certain… what i do know is that I met a bunch of amazing and inspiring folks and came back home full of new ideas and different directions relating to Permaculture, mapping, social sustainability and covenants. Including the following:
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Hundreds of native tree seedlings, check. Copious quantities of newspaper, check. Bathtub in frame ready to turn into community worm-farm, check. Multiple uteloads of horse-bedding pea-straw, check. Tools, lunch for 50 hungry helpers, fruit trees, vines, potting mix, manures and a ride-on ripper, check. This can only mean one thing: we must be having a Permablitz .
The recent long weekend saw the considerable energy and enthusiasim of over 50 folks explode apon Alexandria Park Community Garden in Sydney. We run our Sydney courses in the same precinct and we've watched this community garden's crew move forward with a bunch of big jobs and features in their garden over the last year. It seemed to us what they needed was a big influx of temporary energy to get over some of the hurdles they faced in establishing and defining their garden so that it could be of maximum benefit to the community, and bring in new members. …
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