Azolla is a native water plant with some seriously exciting attributes for anyone looking to develop closed-loop cycles for organic animal feed. It’s high in protein and minerals, fixes nitrogen, is palatable to chickens, pigs, goats, ducks and cows, and can be grown on any closed body of water.
At Milkwood Farm we have many emerging animal production systems, and we’re looking for cost and energy effective ways to produce organic feed for them, using passive and regenerative techniques. Azolla looks like a great tool for us. Read More »
November 6, 2011 – 6:00 am
Soil Chromatography is both incredibly beautiful and incredibly useful, all at once. It’s a way of assessing your soil for humus, minerals, microbiology and more.
Best of all, you can do this soil assessment effectively at home – no need to send off tests to a faraway lab. Maybe that’s why soil chromatography hasn’t caught on in the western world yet – it’s a bit too DIY and open source for our patent-rich way of agriculture…
This technique was taught to us by Eugenio Gras as part of the biofertilizer workshop we just ran at Milkwood Farm. We asked all the students to bring with them a sample of soil from their home, so that they could take home their first soil chromatogram, a pictograph of what’s happening in their soil. The first of many, we hope! Read More »
November 2, 2010 – 12:02 am
Eugenio Gras, BioFertiliser maestro!
**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 of dollars into every year. Some of the food you eat today will definitely have had anti-fungicides applied during the growing cycle.
So can you make a natural, low-cost version, which has no crazy side-effects? Yes, you can! And we did. While lots of people watched, who can now go home and make their own. Read More »
September 7, 2010 – 6:00 am
BioFertilizer all sealed up and ready to go...
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.
BioFertilizer is really a catch-all term for any liquid fertilizer that is good for your soil and which isn’t manufactured by a chemical company. We’re already working with compost tea at Milkwood to heal and build our fragile soils, and now we’re on to BioFertilizer recipes – another tool in our amoury to regenerate this landscape of ours. Read More »
