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 »
No room to grow? Your options for vertical gardens are expanding by the day. Some are big, and some are small, some blend in, and some stand out. Like this one.
Here’s a funky little home growing project by the crew behind Calanthe Artisian Loft, a homestay in Melaka, Malaysia… Read More »
January 29, 2013 – 5:47 am
When we moved in to the tiny house last August, our design plans for our edible courtyard were vast, and immediate. It would be a riot of color and flavor in no time – citrus trees ripening in the microclimate of the east-facing gabion wall, feasts of greens, herbs everywhere, scenting the air as pollinators buzzed, and my child laughing and playing, surrounded by an oversupply of butterflies attracted by the many small flowers that would be springing from every crack we could see.
I expected all this to take shape by mid spring, or early Summer at the latest. Hey, we’d lived through the build and we had moved in. What more was there to do but garden?
Well, there was life and a farm and permaculture education to run, and egg-cup dinosaurs to make, as it turned out. We hope to realise the design next winter in our quieter months. But in the meantime, bring on the glory of potted interim gardening! Never have I lived in such a happy space. Read More »
January 23, 2013 – 7:00 am
The Urban Farming Guidebook is a free pdf resource for helping local governments to plan the growing of food in their cities. Given that we’re all about bottom-up action, we feel that it’s best placed in the hands of potential growers, so they can get on with creating local food systems!
And that means you. This guide was written for Canadian councils in BC, but that doesn’t make it any less interesting, or useful, for the rest of us. There’s 4 case studies of successful urban farms in BC, and plenty of inspiration and workable ideas for more… Read More »
November 14, 2012 – 7:00 am
Urban forest gardens and food forests are definitely a part of our future cities – they have to be. We think every backyard should have a patch dedicated to perennial crops which interrelate as a stable and resilient system, while providing food, fruit and herbs for the household, hence our upcoming Urban Forest Garden workshop: 15 – 16 Dec: Sydney.
Micro forest gardens are a perfect way of achieving this goal. Essentially a food forest in miniature, a micro forest garden can be as small as one central fruit or nut tree with a complimentary guild of herbs and shrubs beneath it. You can stack a lot of nutrition into this kind of space if you design it right, and even slip some edible mushrooms in there too. 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 »
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 »
Wilga Avenue in Sydney has moved their community out of their backyards and into their front yards. Squished between a busy road and a train line, it wouldn’t look very illustrious on a map, but once I got there I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face… a whole street of edible verge gardens! Yay!
And even better, it was a lived-in space. Outside one home, in the middle of a verdant verge garden, was a small wooden picnic table where a bunch of kids were busy having morning tea. Across the road, two guys were shoveling mulch from the back of a ute. This is city living done right… Read More »
Last weekend we ran an Urban Forest Garden workshop in Sydney… it was a great weekend of design, thinking and planting… Read More »
