Chapter three in Milkwood is all about Natural Beekeeping, and how you can use a principles-based approach to keep bees at home, safe and well, in a range of hive designs. But why natural beekeeping? Why not just keep bees in the ‘normal’ way? Well, from our perspective, and the perspective of a growing number of…
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Wildwood tea is, in its essence, as individual and as unique as each household that makes it. It’s an expression of place, in a teapot. A warm hug, from the woods where you live – and from all four of your seasons, too. We make our wildwood tea from a combination of medicinals and flavours…
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The Milkwood book tour is off and running – and we’re all over the place, from Brisbane to Melbourne. Join us at a free mushroom demo, an intimate author talk, or a seaweed show-and-tell somewhere? But firstly, we officially launched Milkwood on the first day of spring, at Pocket City Farms. And it was a…
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Here’s a little extract from chapter 1 (The Tomato) from our first book, Milkwood… We can’t quite imagine life without tomatoes. They’re such a large part of our lives in spring, summer and autumn, and in winter, too. First, the careful seed-raising stage in early spring, in the warmth of our kitchen and then our…
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It is with much excitement that we can finally share with you – the Milkwood book is coming. Hooray! Many years in the making, our little labour of love will be out in all good bookstores on September 1st. We are SO looking forward to sharing a load of feasts, extracts, explorations and events that…
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Winter is the season of soup, long nights, and at our house – great gardening books! It’s this time of year when we plan, and consider, and compare last year’s yields and harvests against what we’re dreaming of for next season. The seed catalogues are strewn across the dining table, there’s talk of re-designing that…
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Lyttleton Stores is a little piece of Blue Mountains magic, with community at its heart. A super inspiring example of what a small-town cooperative can be – local organic grocery, community gallery, kitchen, workshop space… you get excited the minute you walk in the door. This collective-turned-co-operative sits just off the highway at Lawson in…
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Hooray, it’s feijoa season! Perfumed green fruits like no other, and the final harvest of our autumn. Here’s a few tips for growing, harvesting and eating them, including our favourite recipes. The feijoa is a smallish, evergreen tree that hails from Brazil. It produces stacks of beautiful (and tasty) pink flowers in spring, which are…
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Garlic makes everything in life better. And since you can grow your own, quite easily, we thought it was time to write a beginners guide on how to grow great garlic. Whether you’ve only got a windowsill or a whole garden bed spare right now, get some garlic in! Garlic is a very space-efficient crop,…
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Making great decisions. Who doesn’t want to learn how to do that? In our permaculture designs, in our families, our projects, and for ourselves on a deeply personal level. Enter Holistic Decision Making. (a note before we begin, Dan Palmer passed in 2023. I’ve left the below article in the form that it was, as…
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This book is dangerous. In its essence, RetroSuburbia invites and inspires us all to stay right where we are. Turning our suburbs upside down, to make the world we want. No need to be moving to the country, to the coast or to the hills for a happier, greener life. That idyllic community? It’s probably…
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Here’s how we made a DIY off-grid mushroom fruiting house – for creating a humid forest simulation chamber, to grow LOTS of mushrooms right on our back porch. You can grow mushrooms in lots of different ways. We grow them in reusable containers – buckets and jars, and also in gardens, on logs and stumps…
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Want to design a better, earthier and more rewarding life with permaculture? Solutions-based thinking is not just for big design projects. Permaculture can also be used to improve the everyday, the little things, to create a happier you. Over the last 10 years, we’ve been gradually using permaculture principles to create better daily lives for…
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