Hey there, welcome to Milkwood! We are here to help you create the life you want to live – by learning the skills you’ve always wanted to have.

A garden full of organic veggies, a healthy home full of sunlight and low energy costs. A family full of busy hands deep in new projects; notebooks and seedpods on the kitchen table. Muddy boots at your back door, a nourishing soup simmering on the stove, and a community around you that you can rely on when it’s a bad day.

Now… how could you make that happen…

First up, what is permaculture?

What is permaculture? Nick and Kirsten explain...

In its essence, Permaculture is a design framework to help you live with more meaning and purpose, in a functional relationship with your ecosystem.

You can use permaculture thinking and design to make your life truly excellent and earthy, connected to place and community – no matter where you live.

Are you living in an inner city apartment? Or on a faraway farm? It doesn’t matter. Permaculture ethics, design and skills can be utilized anywhere, to make life better.

You can use permaculture to design a life with less stuff but more goodness, to create community, design your business, plan your resilient dream home and garden, and so much more.

By observing and learning from nature, and by applying basic permaculture design principles, you can create a life and community that thrives – all while making significant, meaningful change that will benefit you, many generations to come, and our planet, too.

Learn more: ‘what is permaculture’

Sound good? Let’s get you started…

Check out a few of our free starter guides…

Permaculture Starter Guide - steps to a climate positive life.
Veggie gardening - A beginners guide.
Mushroom Cultivation beginners guide

Explore hundreds of articles on all things permaculture…

Alrighty – so we have literally hundreds of useful articles for you to delve into, sorted by topic  (we’ve been doing this since 2006, after all).

BUT! We recommend you start with our top 5 articles on permaculture living, design and doing. These will give you a taste of the concepts, ideas and projects that you can get stuck into as you begin creating a climate-positive permaculture life.

Our top 5 permaculture articles:

Join our thriving community

Step 1 is: sign up to our awesome Milkwood newsletter – you’ll get new blogposts, free how-to guides, inspiration from across the planet of what other funky folks are doing … and giveaways of amazing new books happen regularly here, too.

Sign me up to the Newsletter!

Then, you might like to:

  • Follow @milkwood on Instagram for regular inspiration.
  • Follow our page on Facebook for daily inspiration and big thinking articles in your newsfeed (no cats or gloomy memes, promise).
  • There’s also the Milkwood Permaculture Community Facebook group for you to sign up to – full of interesting conversations, and peopled by all of our fabulous students, teachers, woofers, interns and friends over the years who have helped build and share permaculture knowledge.
  • We have a bunch of videos over on YouTube (including some great stuff from ye olde days on our former Milkwood farm).
  • Oh, and for permaculture concepts in pictures, take a look at our Pinterest.

Grab a Milkwood book

Milkwood: Real Skills for
Down-To-Earth Living

Designed to be read with a pot of tea by your elbow and a notebook beside you, Milkwood: Real Skills For Down-to-Earth Living draws on rich seams of knowledge and experience to bring the essence of five key subjects to you in a friendly, let’s-get-going format.

Get going with tomatoes, mushroom cultivation, seaweed, natural beekeeping and wild food.

Get your signed Milkwood book

The Milkwood Permaculture
Living Handbook

What if your habits could create a more meaningful life for you AND a better world? The Milkwood Permaculture Living Handbook is your guide to improving your home, health and happiness – and the planet – one simple step at a time. Packed with practical skills and projects, its regenerative living for busy people who want to make a positive impact in a world out of balance.

Get your Permaculture Handbook

Continue learning, from anywhere in the world

Kirsten and Nick from Milkwood can teach you Permaculture Living skills.

Join our online Permaculture Living course

Our 12-week Permaculture Living course will help you make a better life – for you, your ecosystem and for our planet, too. You’ll learn the 12 permaculture principles and how to apply them in big-picture thinking and everyday design, to create the climate-positive future we all need.

This entirely self-paced course is a choose-your-own-adventure of learning. You’ll master everything from making sauerkraut, starting a seed bank and designing your home greywater system… to connecting with community, relating to local waterways and learning to effectively stand up for change.

Learn more about Permaculture Living

Learn Home Mushroom Cultivation online with us

Get ready to learn everything you need to know – to successfully grow a wide range of organic AND low-waste edible and medicinal mushrooms, at your place.

By the end of this Home Mushroom Cultivation course, you’ll know how to grow your own mushrooms in four different ways:

  • Cardboard cultivation – great for beginners
  • Bucket cultivation – re-usable, guaranteed harvest
  • Log cultivation – with both edible and medicinal species
  • Garden cultivation – great for adding to backyard resilience
Learn more about Mushroom Cultivation

Learn Organic Vegetable Gardening online with us

Our latest guided online course & community, will help take you from complete beginner on bare ground, to a thriving veggie patch – for all four seasons, and beyond

Organic Vegetable Gardening is an 8-week learning experience crafted from many decades of gardening knowledge, to be the BEST ‘start-your-garden’ course we could ever create

  • Design your best-ever veggie patch, from scratch.
  • Build super-healthy soil, design crop rotation and succession planting
  • Identify how to water efficiently, make your own compost, save seeds, and so much more
Learn more about Vegetable Gardening