Dovecotes are a great addition to any small farm (and possibly your backyard too). Keeping doves is like keeping chickens, in a way, except there’s minimal feeding involved if you take the traditional approach. The doves fly off every morning, forage within their natural radius, and come home each night to roost.
And when they come home, they deliver to the floor of the dovecote free nutrients, in the form of guano. So firstly there’s free fertilizer, with no feeding costs. Secondly. if you’re that way inclined, there’s a seasonal supply of dove eggs, and squabs. Wild protein, delivered to your door. Read More »
After a fabulous summer of yielding buckets apon buckets of organic veggies, our market garden needs a rest. This system is a cycle of give and take, and it is definitely time to go into a giving phase for our not-that-brilliant soils.
Also, Michael’s been having ideas. It’s re-design time. We’re two seasons in from the start of this veggie growing project, and we’ve all agreed it’s time to get funky. Designing for resilience, you might call it… Read More »
Following on from raising the walls of this roundhouse in four days, Floyd and Shane have been focussed on getting this little place finished before Winter. And yep, we’ve all noticed the speed at which things progress when you go from a crew of twenty four to a crew of two!
Mind you, once the walls were up and the bones of the roof were on, this natural building project was firmly into the ‘fiddly bits’ part of the build. So perhaps it’s just as well there were 2 and not 20 people working on it. But we’re getting there now! Progress shots below… Read More »
It has become clear that without pikelets, we would be lost. They may be small, and innocuous, but they are the shield against the storm, around here.
So you’ve worked all day and it’s now time to magically and quickly fabricate a wholesome dinner for 6 out of carrots, potatoes and carrots. So soup it is. But with soup there must be bread. Ah, yes. I didn’t quite make any, again. Oops. Aha. Pikelets. Read More »
Two good years. Two full Spring to Autumn seasons stacked with sourdough, rabbit ravioli and crazy beautiful desserts. And a quietly grounding presence for our entire farm crew, and for every student lucky enough to share a taste.
Tragic (no, really) though it is, I must share with you that Rose, the permachef whom we do love so, is off to seek the next chapter of her fortune. To design and run a new inner-city eatery in Brisbane, to be exact. I hope those Brisbanites figure out how good they’ve got it coming to them… Read More »
A guild, in permaculture terms, is usually used to define a harmonious assembly of species clustered around a central element (plant or animal) that acts in relation to this element to assist its health, aid our work in management, or buffer adverse environmental effects (Mollison, via Jacke).
Dave Jacke has taken this concept further and identifies a range of different types of guilds that generally (but not exclusively) can be applied to aid forest garden design process. Like many permaculture design elements, these guild types at once simple, and deeply complex… Read More »
‘Packed with minerals and protein, and easy to grow at home’… too right. Home mushroom cultivation is a good idea, for everyone. You don’t even need a window in your house (though we do hope that you have one), let alone a window sill or outdoor area to grow nutrient dense, protein rich, organic mushroomy goodness…
Check out these gorgeous mushroom cultivation posters by Victor Paiam… Read More »
Our Urban Permaculture Design Course is coming up fast in July, and is shaping to be pretty special. Leading the learning will be the awesome Hannah Moloney, supported by Nick Ritar and none other that the co-originator of Permaculture, David Holmgren.
The great thing about this teaching team is the breadth of experience and enthusiasm they bring to share with students of urban permaculture design – Hannah is a long-time urban community cultivator, Nick’s focus is the small farm / urban permaculture resurgence, and David Holmgren, well, he’s David Holmgren. Need we say more. But we will. Read More »
