So it turns out that mushroom cultivation is really easy – once you wrap your head around all the intricacies, that is. And setting aside all the ‘wow’ moments you’ll have as you begin to delve into the wonderful world of fungi. But apart from that, it’s simple!

We just hosted a mushroom propagation course at Milkwood Farm, and it was a full-on two days. So much awesomeness! So many possibilities! Why don’t we all learn mushroom propagation in kindergarten? It’s a total fit.

Will Borowski, mushroom whisperer, explaing how the heck mycelium does its thing

Pending how-tos and why-tos as we lope along the path of mushroom growing at Milkwood Farm (we intend to do quite a bit of it), here’s a peek into the first weekend of fungi induced fun + learning.

Sharn's fab 'from mushroom to mushroom' diagram. Click to enlarge

Adam Kennedy drilling 'just a couple' of logs for shiitake plugs...

Bring on the shiitake!

Shiitake mycelium on grain spawn, colonising plugs to be inserted into logs...

Plugging plugs into logs to grow shiitake mushrooms

Sourdough cinnamon swirls (with Milkwood honey) - Rose outdoing herself again...

Will Borowski with a big lump of shiitake mycelium, ready to fruit

Nick's flow chart of how mushroom cultivation works (we were all trying to wrap our heads around it)

Just picked blackberries, plus pastry and almond meal, equals yum.

Using a very DIY 'glove box' as a still air, semi-sterile environment to clone mushrooms from shop-bought cuttings

Learning to propogate mycelium from mushroom samples

Making sawdust and straw substrate to grow mycelium on

Sterilising the substrate before adding mycelium

Will with his trusty pressure cooker, showing the class how to prep ingredients

Our woolshed is now stacked with bags of spawn, and there are shiitake logs piled high outside, awaiting their final resting place in the forest garden… so much still to learn, but we’re getting there!

Super big thanks to Will Borowski for setting us on the path and sharing his quietly awesome knowledge. Big thanks also to Adso for his help with prepping everything, Trev for keeping the weekend smooth, Rose for the culinary delights and to all the great students who came to learn alongside us.

Next Mushroom course with Will Borowski is on 10-11 March, in Sydney. We’ll be doing another at Milkwood Farm in the spring. By which time we should have shiitakes aplenty, to share as part of the fun…

A modest harvest of field mushrooms that popped up out of the grass near the woolshed during the course, as if to join in the fun...

Wettest year on record. That’s what they’re saying…

Which means (amongst many other rain-related things, most of them good) that our erosion control Zuni bowls are consistently full of water. And they make fabulous tiny oceans for setting sail…

Arr, marooned on a energy-dispersing rock apron, curses!

So here we have it – two weeks of our recent urban Permaculture Design Certificate, in 160 seconds! And what an amazing two weeks of learning and thinking and designing and digging and tasting and doing it was…

Over the two weeks the PDC students worked their way through an intense curriculum of permaculture theory as well as plenty of hands-on, active learning. By the end of the course, each student had completed a functional permaculture design for a place they personally knew well, as well as a real-world community scale design…

It was a really diverse bunch of people that came together for two weeks and we’d like to thank everyone for making the most of the experience and working together so darn well!

A PDC is an activating, game-changing experience for many people, and you all did a marvelous job of holding it together in the face of so much new knowledge and so many new personalities that you all had to work with effectively over the course. Yay for all of you.

The teachers for this course were also a fine crew…

With Nick Ritar as lead trainer, we welcomed a range of knowledge and experience from Adam Grubb (urban permaculture, soils, weeds, permablitz and community strategies), Dan Harris Pascal (trees and their energy transactions), Alexia Martinez (climatology) and Gordon Williams (animal systems), with on-site sessions at the urban permaculture system of Michele Margolis and Michael Mobbs’ Sustainable House.

We were also very lucky to have Cathy Xiao Chen as a student, who took bucketloads of amazing photos throughout the course, and made urban permaculture design look as luscious as it should.

Designing...

PDC grads of Milkwood Permaculture Design Course Sydney Jan 2012 (missing Raj Batra)

Good luck out there in the world, Permaculture Design Certificate graduates… we know you will make change for the better – far and away, back in your communities, or wherever your journeys take you…

Upcoming Milkwood Permaculture Design Courses include a part-time one in Sydney starting mid-March, an intensive two week one in Sydney in July, and an intensive on-farm version at Milkwood Farm in November….

Many thanks to Adam Kennedy, ultimate coordinator and go-to guy, and to Jo Fletcher of Alexandria Park Community Center, for being such an enthused and supportive soul of us turning the center upside down (but in a good way) on a regular basis…

>> More posts about Permaculture

>> More Videos on Milkwood.net

Permaculture and Regenerative Agriculture are fortunately two fields that have lots of great resources. Books, DVDs, you name it. But where do you start? Which to read first? I thought I’d share our most-thumbed favorites.

We have this crate of books that travels to each Permaculture Design Course as the ‘student library’, and those books mostly line up with the ones we use on the farm, either for reference, for inspiration, or for discussing with students and wwoofers…

So here’s some, but not all, of the titles we love:

• Getting Started in Permaculture – Ross & Jenny Mars
• Rocket Mass Heaters: Super efficient Woodstoves – Ianto Evans (review)
• The Complete Book of Fruit Growing in Australia – Louis Glowinski
• Mycelium Running – Paul Stamets (review)
• Earth Users Guide to Permaculture: Teachers Notes – Rosemary Morrow (out of print)
• Edible Forest Gardens Vol 1 & 2 – Dave Jake + Eric Toensomeier
• Create an Oasis with Greywater – Art Ludwig
• Gaia’s Garden – Toby Hemenway

• Jackie French’s Guide to Companion Planting – Jackie French
• A-Z of Useful Plants - Jackie French
• Jackie French’s Top 10 Vegetables – Jackie French
• No Dig Gardens and Leaves of Life – Esther Deans
• Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture – Smith (review)
• Natural Farming – Pat Colbey
• The Bee Friendly Beekeeper: A Sustainable Approach – David Heaf
• Permaculture – Sepp Holzer
• The World According to Monsanto – Marie-Monique Robin (review)
• Water for Every Farm – P.A. Yeomans
• Beekeeping for All – Abbé Warré
• Sustainable Freshwater Aquaculture – Nick Romanowski
• The Wilderness Garden – Jackie French

• Seed to Seed: Food Gardens in Schools – Jude & Michel Fanton
• Permaculture One – Bill Mollison & David Holmgren
• The New Organic Grower – Eliot Coleman
• Introduction to Permaculture – Bill Mollison & Reny Mia Slay
• Holistic Management Handbook – Jody Butterfield & Allan Savory
• Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond (vol I & II) – Brad Landcaster (review)
• Permaculture Two – Bill Mollison
• Let the Water do the Work - Bill Zeedyk
• The Earth User’s Guide to Permaculture – Rosemary Morrow
• Melliodora – David Holmgren

Whew! And that’s just the start of our library… so much goodness to learn from in there…

Should you like to browse our library, you could come to a Milkwood Permaculture Design Certificate course (or any of our on-farm courses actually, where the library resides), or come learn + work at our farm as part of our Wwoof program. Check your local library also!

Thanks to Cathy X for the photos…

Related posts:

• All our posts about good books

And I think all in all, it went pretty well. Ever since the gazillions of tomato plants (in numerous heritage varieties) were planted in the Milkwood Market Garden, we’ve been waiting for this great day. The inaugural squishing of the harvest.

And check out our new, fancy-pants passata machine! In the spirit of multi-function, it also transforms into a meat mincer and a juicer, so we can harvest every which way. And harvest we will…

Rose, nearly beside herself with the glory of passata

This was admittedly a test run of the passata machine… we’re about a week off from coming into full-blown tomato harvest, which should continue for a month or so.

We expect this machine to get quite a workout over the coming months, between making passata by the truckload, juicing tonnes of apples from the little orchard down the road we’ve made friends with, and, of course, mincing meat in the interests of sausage. Mmmm sausage.

The passata machine was a labor of love in terms of research to choose which model to buy – we asked around, we rung up tomato growers, we canvassed all the passata-making Nonnas we knew.

We weighed up hand-cranked versus mechanised. Cheap versus expensive. 1/3 horsepower motors vs 1 horse power motors. Single use vs multifunctional. And all this went on for months.

In the end, we settled on a machine that could do three of the many things we need done during harvest: make large quantities of passata, juice a great deal of fruit (mostly apples) and mince meat. All these tasks need to be done on a large-ish scale here at Milkwood Farm, so we needed something with a lot of grunt.

The machine we ended up with is a 1 horsepower Fabio Leonardi MR9, with both tomato crusher and mincer attachments. It is one serious machine. It’s also much bigger than I expected (not sure why i though it would be small, but i did). And it works a treat.

My plan with this machine was basically ‘get it right the first time’ and get something that can be used by us and whoever else we know in our area that needs to mince or squish something, for decades into the future.

I have been told of people that have been using these machines for 30 years, and they’re still going strong. And I know it will pay for itself within a year or two in terms of allowing us to process a huge quantity of organic produce to then be preserved and eaten year round.

Anyway. We’ll let you know how it goes. But we’re pretty happy with it so far!

We got the passata machine online from Bake and Brew (based in Adelaide), who stock lots of the Leonardi stuff. They also sell 1/2 hp and 1/4 hp models, and they were great to deal with and knew all the answers to my questions. Yay for them.

Olivier (incidentally whose Nonna recommended a Leonardi passata maker) with about to be planted tomato, November 2011

Tomatoes in, ready to be mulched

Mid December 2011

Passata!

(Just a note on the passata machine + Bake and Brew shop: we didn’t receive a kickback  for this purchase in any way, we just like it, and wanted to share what we’ve learned.)

Related posts:

• Tick, tock, Tomato A’clock
• Market Garden update: Midsummer
• How to make a planting calendar, Allsun Style

Earthship in Brighton, England

Guess what? We’re hosting a great evening talk with Michael Reynolds, that world-leading sustainability pioneer of Earthship Biotecture, in Sydney on the 26th Feb. Do you want to come?

This community event is going to be a uniquely inspiring & informative evening of radical architecture, ideas and discussion about Earthship building and living. >> Book tickets here.

Ok Earthships: a building technique you may have heard about, using recycled tires and bottle walls, passive solar gain, no energy needed to heat or cool, etc. Yep, that one. The totally self-sufficient building thing. It’s been going 25 years as a active concept, and every step of the way has been fascinating.

Apart from the fact that Earthships are quite basically awesome, this is a chance to listen to and Q&A with a bloke who, perhaps more than any other architect of the last 25 years, has had an unprecedented influence on eco-architecture world-wide, and how we think about sustainability.

Michael Reynolds

Completed Earthship in Taos, New Mexico

Inside a completed Earthship in the desert

We’re inviting community and biotecture related crews to set up stalls as part of the event, so all in all it should be a corker of a night of knowledge, networking and downright interesting company that will leave you considering just what the boundaries of achievable sustainability are.

We’re really looking forward to it. We hope to see you there! >> Book tickets here.

Stacks more info on Earthships can be found at the Earthship Biotecture website.

So just over a year ago, our house dam filled for the first time. And then went into scary nearly-melt-down. So we pumped the water out, fixed it, and then waited for it to fill again. And waited. For a year.

Do excuse multiple soggy shots of muddy pools, but this is big news at Milkwood Farm. Last weekend, for the first time, our swale and dam system filled, thanks to a big downpour on the tail of a very wet spring. And nothing went wrong. Yay!

If you’d like to read about our imperfect (but ultimately triumphant) history with earthworks at the farm, please read the Saga of the Top Dam and the Saga of the Middle Dam.

You could also read these if you’re just feeling sad, and need to be cheered up by the fact that at least you don’t have multiple heart-stopping earthworks structural oddities that nearly took your best-laid plans apart.

But that’s all behind us now. The house dam is full! Not that it will stay full in this climate, we know that. But we are fairly sure that all the dams on our little farm work now. And that makes me extremely relived, for all sorts of reasons.

As you can also see, the tinyhouse is nearing completion. Hoping we’ll be in for Easter, but hoping in a ‘I hope The Decemberists play Sydney and I can escape child-free  for a whole weekend to see them’ type way… it would be great (really great), but we’ll live if it doesn’t happen.

We’ll be swimming + fishing off the deck in no time….

The pond below the house dam, created to acquire material to repair the dam wall the time it nearly failed due to dodgy construction in December 2010. Now a frog and goose haven.

Thanks to Stephen Couling for the photos…

We have been searching for seeds of the Siberian Pea Tree (Caragana arborescens) for years. Permies in North America and Europe rave about this plant for it’s hardiness, growth, nitrogen fixing and forage capabilities. But find it in Australia, we could not. Until we found Phoenix Seeds!

Phoenix Seeds is a little seed company in Tasmania. Their catalog is awesome. They have no website. They seem ardently and unashamedly old-school. And I love them to bits. Because they, unlike every other Australian seed company I’ve talked to, stock Siberian Pea Shrub seeds…

Siberian Pea shrub is similar to Honey Locust (no spikes tho, which is great) in many ways, but the reason we’ve been searching for it is because it is a great addition to Milkwood Farm, for the following attributes:

• Drought hardy
• Frost hardy
• Puts up with crappy soil
• Nitrogen fixing
• Fast growing
• Chicken forage
• Edible peas (they make great dahl, apparently)
• Deciduous (yay biomass + soil creation)

So there you have it. It won’t replace our fabulous acacias range, nor the tagasaste, nor the honey locusts. But it will hopefully be another addition of a very multifaceted, useful tree that will help build Milkwood into an amazing, fertile place.

You can read more about the delights of the Siberian Pea Tree at Plants for a Future.

Related articles on Milkwood.net:

• Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture – book review
• Seed Balls: how to grow trees without really trying
• Forest Garden posts

More beautiful shots by Cathy X from our current Urban Permaculture Design Certificate that Nick is teaching in Sydney.

Featuring Michele Margolis’ amazing urban permaculture garden, Adam Grubb teaching soil, and permaculture design! And mini bulldozers, of course…

First, a visit to Michele Margolis’s rockin’ urban permaculture forest garden in inner-city Marrickville…

Then a spot of earthmoving talk, in relation to building dams, swales and other permaculture earthworks. How best to make everyone in the room feel comfortable with the knowledge? Keep it playful…

And then enters Adam Grubb from Very Edible Gardens – to talk soil, permablitz and urban design…

Who says you can’t get your hands dirty in the city…

Many thanks to Cathy X for her continuing ability to make a PDC experience look as lush and wonderful as it actually is, but in photographs.

Next Milkwood Urban PDC‘s in Sydney: 17 March – 10 June (Part Time), and 1-14 July (intensive)… please join us if you’re ready to get rolling on a regenerative future…

Once you’ve harvested your natural honeycomb from your Warré (or other kind of top bar) beehive, it’s time to make get some of that goodness into jars! Fortunately, like many other aspects of natural beekeeping, getting the honey out of natural comb is easy and simple, once you know how.

We’re just at the start of our beekeeping journey, but still, even though we don’t have whizz-bang equipment, we found this a wonderfully tactile and rewarding experience. It’s prettymuch just a case of crushing the comb, sieving it, and bottling the results. 100% organic yum, with all the goodness of the honey still utterly intact.

At first, this seemed just a bit to easy – don’t we need extractors, hot knives, spinning things and somewhere to store all the frames? Not when doing natural beekeeping, you don’t. You simply cut the comb off the top bar, crush it up, strain it through a sieve and, um, that’s it.

Tim cuts the honeycomb off the top-bars

Warré honeycomb, all ready to crush...

Nick tucks into a spare piece of semi-capped honeycomb

The comb is crushed and mashed...

Then into the sieve over the honey bucket...

Getting all the crushed comb in, including some older stuff from a previous harvest

And proceed to get squishy! It's quite a sensation...

The result - pure, cold-pressed organic honey

Mmmm honey...

The advantages of harvesting honey in this way include:

• You get everything that was in the comb, in your honey. Pollen, propolis, the lot. Which is ridiculously good for you, in all sorts of ways.
• Because the natural comb is not re-used year after year, there’s less chance that environmental toxins that might be present in the comb can build up, affecting both the colony, and the honey.
• You get a big glob of organic beeswax, which you can then use creatively (we’re using ours for sealing the ends of our shiitake mushroom logs).
• You get honey that is not heated in any way during the process, which means none of the delicate antibiotics and enzymes within the honey are destroyed. It all makes it into the jar.

The advantages to the bees by harvesting honey from hives managed in this way include:

• The bees get to build natural comb, with no plastic or pre-set foundation. This benefits the colony in heaps of ways including but not limited to: communication (vibrating the comb to send messages), general hive health, toxin accumulation, etc and so on.
• By getting to build new comb, the bees get to re-set their cell size according to what is needed in that comb at that point (did you know they make all different gauges of cell size, given the chance?).

Tim Malfroy’s tips for a happy honey harvest from Warré comb:

• Have all your gear washed and ready, and process the comb soon after you return from collecting it in the hive. The honey will be more liquid at this point.
• If for some reason you have to wait to process the comb, put it in the sun before crushing it to gently warm it. It will make everything quicker and easier
• If you’re not going to process the comb straight away, cut if off the frames and store it in slabs of comb. While it’s in the comb, it is sealed and pure, and will last much longer than broken up.

For this harvest, we placed a big sieve on top of a honey bucket with a ‘gate’ on the front, then simply crushed the comb in a bucket and then tipped it into the sieve. To speed the process up, we all squished the comb by grabbing great handfuls – this meant we expelled the honey from the wax much quicker.

At the end of this process we had about 5kg of strained honey (from 3 combs – we’ll be harvesting more later) and about 0.5kg of beeswax in lumps.

The beeswax we’ll melt down in water and skim off, from which brew we’ll be left with honey water, which is what mead is made from! But we’ll probably just drink that straight – it’s an awesome cocktail-like honey hit of propolis, pollen and honey.

So there you have it. Honey harvest the simple way. I dare say we’ll get more experimental and advanced in our techniques as we go, but as a starting point, this was great fun!

If you’d like to read more about Warré beekeeping, head to Tim Malfroy’s Natural Beekeeping website, which is full of great info about this very permaculture-minded approach to bees.

And the journey of Warré beekeeping at Milkwood Farm is here.

Sunlight in a jar. So many millions of flowers went into making this... many thanks, Milkwood bees!

• Natural Beekeeping courses at Milkwood Farm + inner-city Sydney
• More Milkwood.net How-to’s on everything from planting spuds to shiitake logs