Carrots! Purple ones, orange ones, cream ones, yellow ones… they all make for rainbow salads, just at the point when the summer of colors coming out of the market garden is starting to wind down for winter… So while we have a kind of anti-spring festival here in the southern hemisphere every Easter, we do [...]
While I have heard from multiple sources that cow poo is a fine and admirable structural component for cob render mix, I never thought we’d try it. But thanks to Harris, we have finally given the Earthbag dome we started building in February 2011 it’s first complete outer render, featuring mud, sand, silt and cow [...]
Soil blocks are a great technique for getting a heap of seedlings started without pots. The basic concept is that you make blocks of soil with a mold and then plant seeds into the block, and raise the seed to seedling size. When you’re ready to transplant the seedling to your garden, you simply plant [...]
We’re getting very excited about growing delicious culinary mushrooms at Milkwood. Ever since we ran our first mushroom cultivation course in January, they’re springing up all over the place. One of the easiest and cheapest ways to grow them is on sawdust spawn that you can make yourself…
So a little while ago (ok quite some time ago – like 4 years) I took a bunch of fig cuttings from an old abandoned orchard across the creek, and potted them up. And they grew. So we planted them. And guess what? This week, we ate our first figs, and they were delish. Hooray! [...]
I am a little bit in love with our new honey press. It is made from stainless steel and it can crush close to a whole box of natural honeycomb in one fell squish. What better way to get all that goodness of the pollen, propolis and of course the honey into the jar?
Now that Autumn’s here, our woolshed is bedecked in produce and garlands… brown onions, red onions, preserves, pickles and all the rest. And it turns out (fortunately) that stringing onions into a garland is actually quite easy.
Last weekend we held our annual Autumn Natural Beekeeping course at Milkwood Farm. We got to harvest Warré honeycomb for eating, press a bunch of stored honeycomb, and check one of the Warré hives as part of the course. It was an amazing two days with a great crew of folks…
So it’s only 2 weeks until Australia’s first EVER Applied Watershed Restoration course, which is happening at Milkwood Farm (and is FarmReady approved. And will be incredible. Ok, end pitch… but you really would be crazy not to join us). Like many farms with fragile soils, Milkwood Farm has many examples of small-scale erosion – [...]
It’s something we and others have joked about: what if we had a truck full of goats and just went around offering their weed-eating services? How cool would that be? At one of our recent Permaculture Design Certificates some of the students designed a rent-a-goat system as a permaculture enterprise that could be added to [...]
