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 »
Nearly time for our next Intro to Permaculture course! It’s coming up fast on the 13 – 14 April in Sydney.
Nick teaches this course as a two day intensive that aims to give students a solid grounding in permaculture theory as applies to the everyday. It’s all about taking the big ideas, concepts and advantages of biomimicry, and applying them at home… Read More »
Recently we welcomed a crew of budding market gardeners to Milkwood Farm to start learning the craft of organic market gardening.
The crew was a mix of city folks dreaming of rooftop farms, enterprising suburban folks, small farm owners looking to diversify and keen-but-landless growers looking for opportunities. All of them left full of good knowledge. Read More »
February 16, 2013 – 6:00 am
Just a quick note that we’re extremely excited to announce a comprehensive Natural Building course that will be happening at Milkwood Farm 6 – 9 April 2013 with Sam Vivas of Viva Eco Homes.
As you may have worked out, we’re rather passionate about natural building, and the empowerment that comes from having the knowledge and skills to build non-toxic, living homes from natural materials.
If this course had been around when we were building the Tiny House, we would have been there in a flash. It will cover load bearing strawbale building, earthern floors, reciprocal roofs, roundwood building, cobb building and earth and line renders. All with a focus on skilling up the owner-builder to either build their own or be in an informed position to direct a natural building project.
All the details are here: Natural Building: Apr 2013: Milkwood Farm NSW
January 5, 2013 – 7:00 am
We can’t wait to host Joel Salatin for 3 one-day masterclasses in February. This will be the first time that Joel will present the in-depth specifics of the various integrated animal systems of Polyface Farm to a NSW audience.
Leading on from our previous 2 years of working with Joel, we very much wanted to get specific with him for these masterclasses. The Polyface Farm animal systems are fantastic to look at from the outside, but what about all the little important details? How do you design for producing 200 clean eggs a day in the eggmobile laying boxes, so you don’t have to wash them all? How to make your small farm systems cost-efficient enough to ensure you’re still farming in 2 years time, edging forwards with fertility and security?
So this time around, Joel is all about the detail. The three masterclasses are split into: You Can Farm (an overview of designing for successful small farm enterprise setup, including marketing and buying club systems), Pastured Poultry (egg laying systems, broiler systems, turkey systems, on-farm processing, direct marketing) and Pastured Beef + Pork (mob stocked beef systems, pigerator and pastured pork systems, direct marketing) Read More »
December 6, 2012 – 10:56 am
We’ve just finished up our Spring Permaculture Design Certificate here at Milkwood Farm, and I thought I’d share some of the (yet again) truly impressive design work that came out of it. Some great permaculture designs for both urban and rural systems.
One of the Spring PDC students described their new understanding of permaculture as: “like a basket of tools for humanity: an intersection of biology, geology, climatology, philosophy, social justice and humanitarian issues and history, packaged into a viable way of providing needs of everyday living.” Read More »
October 4, 2012 – 6:00 am
Recently we had 24 folks come to Milkwood Farm to learn the basics of market gardening under the stewardship of Michael Hewins, Milkwood’s resident market gardener. It was a great weekend of learning and digging and doing.
Michael’s been a market gardener for some years up north, and it’s been great to have him arrive at Milkwood Farm and get stuck into growing. We’re all learning fast (including Michael whose moved from sub-tropical growing to the wonky warm/cool temperate climate of Milkwood) and the greens are growing faster. Here’s a bunch of photos from the weekend… Read More »
October 1, 2012 – 11:56 am
A quick shout-out that we’ve extended the earlybird price deadline for this darn fine course until Sunday night: Permaculture Design Certificate: 11-24 Nov 2012, Milkwood Farm
Milkwood PDC’s frequently produce motivated folks ready to take on and transform their communities. We place huge emphasis on ensuring excellent student outcomes and we see permaculture design skills as something that you’ll never stop learning, so we don’t pretend that this 2-week stint is all there is to it. But it sure is a hell of a start.
Our on-farm PDCs also prioritize people care and incredible farm-grown food to nourish body and soul throughout the 2 week intensive course. We have everyone from home-makers to bankers to teachers to international aid workers attend, and the consistent student feedback is that a Milkwood PDC enhances, affirms and motivates people’s existing knowledge and skillsets to go out there and be the change they want to see in this world.
>> More posts and photos of our previous Permaculture Design Certificate courses
September 24, 2012 – 6:00 am
Just a few photos from the recent and awesome Market Garden Masterclass at Allsun Farm down in Gundaroo. It was so exciting to have 25 future market gardeners in the one space, all with so many skills and ambitions!
Joyce, Mike and the whole Allsun Farm crew packed us full of knowledge over three days of seeding, reading, listening, crop rotation planning, hoeing, soil blocking transplanting, broadforking and (of course) eating… Read More »
