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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All hail the turkeytail! No matter where you live in the world, this medicinal mushroom lives nearby. Indigenous to all continents except Antarctica, turkeytails have been gathered and used medicinally for hundreds of years. Once you know what to look for, turkeytails are not hard to identify. Gathered in late winter (ie now) before they…
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The dams are full and the soft green winter grass in the orchard has returned. There’s been feijoa harvests by day and bioluminescent mushrooms by night. The landscape is slowing down. The frost confirms that this place is finally in Winter, after a long, long Autumn. At the end of this month, we will have been at…
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Starting a community food co-op or collective can begin with something as simple as a shared cup of tea, and a question. How can we access great quality, dry bulk food together? And local fresh veg also? With the power of co-operation, that’s how. Many a food co-op, collective or food share has begun with…
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This year we finally got a chance to try out a three sisters garden planting – maize, beans and squash, growing symbiotically. It was an awesome success. Stacking in space and time is one of my favourite ways to grow things – you can minimise ground prep and maximise harvests while letting the different plants…
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From collective fruit harvesting to skill sharing to school lunch programs… if you’re looking for inspiration for creating community, the Growing Abundance project in Castlemaine is a treasure trove. The programs run by Growing Abundance are many, but they all centre around food, and what a really truly local food system could look like. A local food system that was…
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Building a well designed, passive solar house can mean comfort in both summer and winter, with minimal energy inputs. On the hottest day of summer, it’s comfortable and cool inside. On the coldest night of the year, passively collected solar heat warms your bones. Enjoying a simple passive house does require participation from its residents, however. Even well designed passive…
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