Recently Nick was lucky enough to hang out with David Holmgren for a couple of days at Melliodora, the superb small-acre permaculture site that David has established with his partner Su Dennett in Hepburn Springs, Victoria.
Being in the thick of a super-productive, comfortable and energy efficient permaculture system at harvest time was inspiring, to say the least. To add to that, the purpose of the visit was for Dave Jacke to spend time with David and Su while he was in Australia. You can imagine the intensely wonderful conversations that went down! Read More »
February 2, 2013 – 7:00 am
The delights of the country show are many. For me, though, it’s all about the vegetables. Specifically the vegetables dressed as animals, or people. All the rest of pales in comparison.
Last week I was lucky enough to catch the Kiama show, south of Sydney. Kiama is where we’ll be hosting Joel Salatin’s upcoming Masterclasses, in the Showground Pavilion. Last week however, the Pavilion was in full flight, doing what it does best.. hosting the pride of the regions produce, its finest animals, and a banana octopus.
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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 »
September 7, 2012 – 11:45 am
‘You have to come to the Allsun farm open day’ said my scythe-mad friend Nikki. ‘They’re a microfarm and they do market gardening and all this amazing stuff there with integrated animal systems and they’re just brilliant’.
Hmm, we thought. That sounds kinda interesting. So we side-tracked our road trip to Gundaroo for the Allsun Farm open day. It was a watershed moment for us and the future of Milkwood.
Since that day in November 2009, our relationship with Mike and Joyce of Allsun Farm has taken some interesting and amazing turns, through friendship and mentorship to the point where tomorrow I’m heading there to help host a Market Garden Masterclass with them. Here’s the trajectory in pictures… Read More »
In a small house in Byron Bay, surrounded by lush gardens sporting edible plants from ever continent on earth, live two of Australia’s living legends. No truly, I’m not being romantic – if i can achieve but a fraction of what these folks have done to create resilience for future generations, I’ll die happy.
Jude and Michel Fanton founded The SeedSavers in Australia in 1986 to preserve local varieties of useful plants, and have since played a crucial role in over 37 countries, within communities and networks motivated to preserve seed sovereignty. Recently I was luck enough to visit them… Read More »
Here’s a couple of photos of an Aquaponics system our friend Floyd recently built in Thailand. His brief was to provide fish, herbs and greens for the staff of an island-based business, on a site that was not exactly prime growing medium (read: sand)… Read More »
Following on from a whole street of verge gardens is another verge garden in Sydney that is using verge plantings as a great way of cultivating community.
Costa and his verge needs little introduction, since his garden gets featured weekly on national television as part of Gardening Australia. What I like best about this verge garden is how it is truly helping to create community in a rather underutilized street of spacious verges. Read More »
The thing I like best about Michael Pollan is that he articulates many important points that need to be made in such an approachable way that, well, everyone gets it. That’s rare in a writer, and in a speaker. And he’s been doing it for quite some time now. About time he came to Sydney, really. Read More »
When I say ‘vermiponics’ to most people i get either a blank stare or a vague nod, mostly. But artist Amy Youngs has created a vermiponics (that’s aquaponics with added worms) system that is both whimsical and functional… art and aquaponics! Read More »
