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 »
January 9, 2013 – 7:00 am
Last Spring Nick gave a Tedx talk about stewarding our most available nutrients to grow food for our communities in a closed-loop system. Yes, he was talking about humanure. And during said talk, Nick had a healthy, humanure-grown cumquat tree on stage with him.
During the talk, some of the cumquats from this tree were passed around the audience and munched on, to illustrate the point that when processed safely in a biological system, humanure can contribute hugely to the fertility of the soil that grows great fruit trees. Read More »
October 10, 2012 – 6:00 am
While worm farms are pretty normal to find nowadays in many yards, their capacity to cycle essential nutrients and make nutrient dense soil additives available to you, for free, can’t be understated. Worm farms rock, seriously.
Our bathtub wormfarm next to the kitchen garden, with it’s built in vertigation (direct worm juice injection into the irrigation system for the veggie beds), has been going strong for a couple of years now. However Michael needs lots of worm castings (worm poo) as an ingredient for his soil block mix for seedlings, so we’re souping up production. Read More »
September 15, 2012 – 6:00 am
An ecoPOP is a small and self-contained city oasis, boasting a simple, self-contained system of self-watering fruit trees, herbs, water collection and a worm farm.
Intended to be installed in places like a median strip in a suburban street, they’re designed to incrementally offset the ‘heat island’ effect of urban streets, slow traffic, and create community. Read More »
August 17, 2012 – 6:00 am
The lovable loo humanure toilet was designed by Joseph Jenkins. This design is, for my money, simply the best domestic-scale compost toilet ever. It’s so, so simple. It’s easy to build and easy to maintain, results in awesome compost, and means that we don’t have to poo in drinking water. What’s not to love?
It’s also incredibly cheap and quick. Nick built ours in a morning, from scrap material and a bought toilet seat, the day before we moved into the Tinyhouse. We’ve been using variations of this toilet design since we moved to Milkwood, but this is the first one we’ve built in a really truly bathroom. And it works a treat. Read More »
Anyone with compost worms knows how valuable the worm juice from their wormfarm can be as part of veggie growing. The trick is remembering to add it, and having a good method of applying it.
Last year Nick devised a way to passively add worm juice into our kitchen garden irrigation supply, via a rather clever little DIY setup. Read More »
On-farm composting is a big part of our farm’s nutrient cycling, and an essential technique for ensuring nutrient density for our veggies and tree crops. Over the past couple of years we’ve tried and trialled various methods of hot-composting, with varied success.
As our composting needs have grown alongside our vegetable outputs, we’ve had to figure out how to scale-up our composting operations so that we can one day soon be self-sufficient in compost needs for Milkwood Farm. One hand-turned pile just doesn’t cut it any more! Read More »
So it turns out that when we go to the toilet, each of us ‘produces’ nearly 80% of the nutrients we need to grow our food. That’s quite something. If you take hold of that concept, it really does make you ask questions about why the heck we manufacture chemicals (with all the detrimental side-effects of that production) to grow food…
Recently Nick did an interview with Ollie Lavender of Sustainable Solutions Radio about this very subject, following on from his TedX Canberra talk with a similar drift. Have a listen:
Or to summarize the above podcast, fortunately there’s a lot of straight-forward, completely safe and highly doable ways that you can re-cycle your family’s nutrients back though food producing systems. With very little ick factor, even. Starting with the simple act of collecting your wee. Read More »
By milkwoodkirsten
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Also posted in Appropriate Technology, Humanure
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Tagged Biogeochemical cycle, compost toilet, farm, food, humanure, Milkwood Farm, Nutrient, Pasture, soil, urine
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Just a quick note that we’ve scheduled some spring Aquaponics Workshops in Sydney, which are 2 days of intensive aquaponics how-to and why-to with Charlie Bacon (Ecolicious) + Nick Ritar (Milkwood).
While the basics of Aquaponics can be quite simple, there’s a lot of ways to do it in a way that enhances growing conditions for both fish and plants while still adhering to permaculture principles, which ensures you don’t end up with an input-heavy system disguised as a closed-loop one. Which is the kind of knowledge that this workshop is all about… Read More »
Sowing Winter green manure crops are a crucial part of Milkwood Farm’s organic vegetable growing regime – the green manures convert sunlight to nutrients, then get dug into the soil in early Spring, and become food for us all.
Green manures in the veggie garden can also be used as a living understorey for growing vegetables – they help protect the soil, help retain water and provide a host of nutrients while they grow. We use them extensively all over Milkwood Farm. Read More »
