This Sunday Nick is leading a free earthbag bench building workshop as part of National Permaculture Day in Sydney. Do you want to come along?
Earthbag is a really excellent, low-impact building technique used for building strong, solid structures; be they benches, garden beds, or homes. We’ve cut our teeth on an Earthbag dome at Milkwood Farm, and now we’re ready to pass on the knowledge. So we’re starting this weekend. Read More
The further we get into mushroom cultivation, the more I realise just how useful and amazing fungi is. I’ve also found that it’s sometimes a little hard to find info that relates to growing edible mushrooms in Australian conditions. Finding local knowledge is crucial!
Luckily, Will Borowski, that friendly expert who teaches the Mushroom Cultivation courses we run, has lots of resources that relate specifically to growing culinary mushrooms in Australia successfully. Which he’s kindly shared with us, so we can learn too…
Recently at Milkwood Farm, Craig Sponholtz led a course in Applied Watershed Restoration, and taught us all a bit about how to tackle on-farm erosion control with human-scale solutions.
One of the things we constructed as part of the workshop was a media luna, a simple but effective rockwork structure that can be used to subtly manipulate sheet flow in a number of ways to prevent erosion… Read More
Last weekend I went on a rare road trip to see Michael Ableman speak down at Mulloon Creek. While I was there I squeezed in a quick peek at Mulloon’s free-range egg operation…
I was also lucky enough to stay on farm with our good friends (and comrades in permaculture farming aspirations) Cam and Jessie Wilson, who are bringing up their young family in this beautiful valley, as well as milking, planting, designing and doing… Read More
The first frost has arrived and the last tomatoes and capsicums harvested. The last course has been hosted and the cups all put away. Tis officially the end of the year for our seasonal courses and crew at Milkwood Farm.
At this time of year our focus shifts from welcoming many students, woofers and friends to the farm on a weekly basis over to clearing things up and bedding the farm down for winter. The market garden is being planted in green manures, and the shelves of preserves are groaning. What an incredible year! Read More
An Egg Mobile is a movable chicken house designed to house laying hens at night, who by day cluck around on open pasture. Joel Salatin made them famous at Polyface Farms, but who invented the concept I do not know.
Egg mobiles are different from chicken tractors in that they are designed as part of a free-range chicken system where the hens can venture well beyond their house to the limits of whatever fences them in (commonly electric netting in a farm setting). They are a darn fine idea. Read More
Once you start natural beekeeping you’ll soon be introduced to eating brood honeycomb – comb that has had baby bees (brood) go through it, and now contains honey.
In many traditional cultures, this dark honeycomb is the most sought after – it is riddled with extra enzymes and traces of pollen from the brood rearing process, and tastes altogether different from virgin honeycomb – nutty, strong and complex… Read More
Over the Easter weekend we had a little shindig at Milkwood Farm, with camping and artists and lots of food. Dave and Phoebe brought their yurt, which they made themselves, from scratch, for under $2,000. It was an amazing and a beautiful thing.
‘Oh yes’, i thought, when Dave said they were bringing it… ‘I know all about yurts – hole in the roof, concertina walls, all that’. But actually I had no idea just how gorgeous in it’s simplicity and elegance of design a hand-crafted, DIY yurt could be… Read More
So about 5 months ago we got interviewed about the process of building a very small house… and last weekend the resulting article finally made it to the paper. Apparently we’re part of a ‘backlash’… I just thought we were trying (trying as opposed to necessarily succeeding) to build something simple and within our means…
This does throw up some interesting questions about what it means to live in a small space, happily, in this day and age. Will it work for us? We don’t know yet – we’re still building that tiny, cheap (cough) house. But we’ll get there one day soon! You can browse our tinyhouse journey thus far here…
