November 4, 2011 – 1:23 pm
A zuni bowl is a riparian restoration technique involving rocks, water, biology and time. It’s a great way of dealing with a small headcut (or erosion which is about to become a headcut) in order to prevent that headcut continuing up your catchment.
Headcuts are not an uncommon sight in our valley’s many gullies. Many decades of clearing the land and grazing pressure have made the soils very fragile. For a long time, we’ve been scouting around for the best way to deal with them using simple, accessible materials and knowledge. And now we’re starting to find answers. Read More »
Deep in the heart of Marrickville, in a little street of workers cottages, right under the flight path to Sydney International Airport, there is a food forest.
A splendid wrangle of Australian rainforest food trees, sugar cane, herbs from all parts of asia, plums and even citrus, grow on a small suburban block with a little brick cottage nestled in the center. Read More »
December 7, 2010 – 11:13 am
pasture cropped oats growing in symbiosis with native perennial pastures at Col Seis’s farm
Grain cropping is something that, for the vast majority of us, is someone else’s problem. We just eat the results; certainly every day, and nearly with every meal. Bread, rice, corn, soy, beans and so on. Produced somewhere out there, by someone else.
So a portion of our every single meal is coming from a grain crop, somewhere way out west. We wish it were grown organically, and in a way that doesn’t destroy too much of our topsoil. But we’ll eat it regardless of the farming practices, really. It’s in our diet. It’s what we do. Read More »
October 12, 2010 – 12:02 am
Alexe drills holes in a pipe to make a worm tower
A worm tower is a simple and effective way to take any garden bed from average yield to gloriously abundant. Simple to build, with materials you probably already have, a worm tower is the perfect addition to any garden bed, in any climate.
It will bring increased fertility to your plants, improve your soil, make every living thing very happy and process organic waste to boot.
We’ve been adding worm towers to garden projects for a couple of years. We love them because they are so simple to make, are energy efficient and they are so beneficial. Who came up with the idea originally we do not know, but it’s a darn good one. Read More »
September 7, 2010 – 6:00 am
BioFertilizer all sealed up and ready to go...
We’ve brewed up our very first batch of BioFertilizer at Milkwood! Our carefully collected, simple ingredients are all in a big vat next to the woolshed, fermenting merrily. In two months time, we should have 200 liters of concentrated fertility, ready to dilute and spread across Milkwood’s creekflat and ridge. Fingers crossed.
BioFertilizer is really a catch-all term for any liquid fertilizer that is good for your soil and which isn’t manufactured by a chemical company. We’re already working with compost tea at Milkwood to heal and build our fragile soils, and now we’re on to BioFertilizer recipes – another tool in our amoury to regenerate this landscape of ours. Read More »
August 17, 2010 – 6:34 am
We’ve always been all about aquaponics in theory: a closed-loop system that provides abundant vegetables and fresh fish – what’s not to like? But it wasn’t until Nick took some PDC students on a tour of this amazing bathtub aquaponics system in Alice Springs last April that the true wonder of aquaponics really began to sink in.
Alice Springs is one of the driest places in Australia. But here, in Steve’s backyard, was an oasis of mythical proportions. Fresh spinach, greens, vegetables, berries and beautiful shady pools containing healthy, fat fish. Not what you normally think of when you think of an Alice Springs backyard. Read More »
When I lived in the city, I always loved the idea of a microfarm. In my head, a microfarm was a plot of land with a footprint the size of a city terrace which was simultaneously blooming with flowers and vegetables, honking with geese, clucking with chickens and covered in trailing greenery and mulch. Someone drove a wheelbarrow through the plot, delivering hay to some minature cows while a small but sturdy windmill creaked overhead.
While this version of a microfarm might be only realisable in my head (or in duplo) and might seem a little idiotic, the real-life version of farming seems just as crazy these days, though its up the other end of the scale. The median size of an Australian farm which functions as a ‘primary producer’ is something like 700 acres. As opposed to my imagined 0.03 acres. Which means (leaving aside the delightful conversation we could have here about big agribusiness and the demise of the productive small farm) that any farm less than 700 acres is therefore a small(er) farm, and anything less than, say, 100 acres, would by today’s definition be getting into the micro. Read More »
February 14, 2010 – 10:00 am
Drylands greywater kitchen garden at Ampersand Sustainable Learning Center, Arizona
In the course of researching for our upcoming Permaculture Design Course in Alice Springs this April, I’ve come across quite a few great new resources for food security and regeneration for desert environments.
And it would seem to me, as is usually the case, the main blockage between most modern drylands habitats becoming abundant places to inhabit is the time-worn problem of access to appropriate knowledge.
Fortunately, and somewhat mysteriously, our species has a very long history of living in seemingly inhospitable environments the world over. Traditional techniques that served previous generations with food and housing are not always possible in todays world, and so much knowledge has been lost in the last century with the arrival of industrialized (and colonial) everything. Read More »
December 22, 2009 – 10:00 am
The poetry of the Seedball concept is simple, yet immense. Encase a seed (or seeds) in a protective jacket of clay, creating a Seed ball. Distribute Seedballs across ground, not worrying if this day, or this month even, is the best time to ‘sow’.
Protected from insects, birds, heat and sunlight until the time is right, the seedball activates with a rain event which is sufficient to soak through the clay coating to germinate the seed. Which incidentally is the sort of rain event that you want to have directly following the perfect seed sowing day. And that’s it. But that’s not all. Read More »
