Nick was asked by International Permaculture Day 2012 to video his take on permaculture, so here it is. Recorded stealthily during naptime, to avoid the otherwise ever-present soundtrack of a joyful 3 year old.
This International Permaculture Day we’re heading to the city to run an Earthbag bench workshop, but there’s a lot of other things to see and do this weekend, in over 17 countries! Check it all out at International Permaculture Day 2012…
‘On The Anatomy Of Thrift: Harvest Day‘ is a video by Farmrun and Farmstead Meatsmith about honoring the the pig, the whole pig, and everything inside the pig. This is the next generation of charcuterie, done with respect for the animal and unashamed enthusiasm for the results.
This is also previous generations of charcuterie – the coming together of people to process preserved meat for winter and to eat what cannot be kept very long, employing generosity as a strategy for survival… Read More
So here we have it – two weeks of our recent urban Permaculture Design Certificate, in 160 seconds! And what an amazing two weeks of learning and thinking and designing and digging and tasting and doing it was…
Over the two weeks the PDC students worked their way through an intense curriculum of permaculture theory as well as plenty of hands-on, active learning. By the end of the course, each student had completed a functional permaculture design for a place they personally knew well, as well as a real-world community scale design… Read More
And I think all in all, it went pretty well. Ever since the gazillions of tomato plants (in numerous heritage varieties) were planted in the Milkwood Market Garden, we’ve been waiting for this great day. The inaugural squishing of the harvest.
And check out our new, fancy-pants passata machine! In the spirit of multi-function, it also transforms into a meat mincer and a juicer, so we can harvest every which way. And harvest we will…
If you want you breath taken away by wild nature, incidentally filmed on an all-girl canoeing adventure, here you are: a spectacular starling swarm. Simply beautiful.
Part of a Permaculture Design Certificate is dedicated to patterns in nature and how we can use them in design. This pattern recognition flows through all things. But sometimes it just stops you in your tracks, like in the video above…
More murmurations… Read More
Recently Nick gave a talk at TEDx Canberra. He talked about stewarding nutrients, how we can solve the problem of peak phosphorous, and about how to grow the best cumquats ever.
Yes, Nick was talking about why taking responsibility for our poo and our wee, our most basic waste streams, is so crucial to our future. For a long time, a mark of superiority in some cultures has been how far you can get your shit away from you. But now, we need it back. Read More
Punchy little video piece about re-localisation of food, with soundtrack by Willie Nelson covering Coldplay.
As one of the comments on the post says “When I buy naturally raised meats I don’t think, “This costs so much!”, rather I know, “This is money that won’t be going toward chemo.” You will either pay the farmer or the doctor. It’s your choice.”
Although It’s possible to make this call as a consumer who can afford to do so, that call is an extremely hard one to make for many non-middle class folks trapped inside an industrialized food web. And that is the real grit of this issue, in my opinion…
Where should I buy land? Where’s a good area? What should I be looking for in a landscape?
This question is something that Nick gets asked a lot when he’s teaching and consulting, so we thought we’d ask Joel Salatin’s opinion while he was at our farm last Summer. Apparently we’re all in agreement with the answer: go where you will be happy with the company, regardless of the landscape. Because growing topsoil is the easy bit. Read More
Last summer, when Joel Salatin was at our farm, we asked him a question or two. The first one was: what’s your advice for young-uns who want to farm but don’t want to get into debt?
You see, at Milkwood Farm we’re very committed to positive balances. Positive natural balances, and positive (if only slightly) bank balances. In short, we want to figure out how to do mortgage-free regenerative farming, bit by bit, as our means allow. Can it be done? We hope so. Read More
Reviewing your own online video archive is a bit like reading back through your diary. Except it’s all public. Eeek! Nevertheless, here is our new video page.
This page is a collation of our sporadic video diary (you might notice the hiatus that coincided with parenthood). If you’d like to see the accompanying articles that contain olive pickling recipes, earthworks parameters and so on, you could do worse that going to www.Milkwood.net/tag/video.
And you know, watching back through those videos, I don’t squirm that much. Some I even like! I think our first dam is my favorite…
