Our current permaculture design course in Sydney is producing a heap of exciting, creative and actually doable urban design, but not as you might know it. 40 urban folks have taken up paper and software, and also cross-stitch and dioramas to help them re-imagine home.
I love watching people design. Especially people who are thinking holistically, thanks to good information. Every time we run a permaculture design course, no matter where it is, we see the results of a group of switched-on folks who have re-designed their known spaces with permaculture principles in mind…
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The main food forest at Milkwood Farm sits above our tinyhouse, in a sheltered, east-facing, sloping paddock, with lots of rocky bits and a sprinkling of useful trees. Not for much longer though. We’re determined to fast-track it into an incredible, luscious forest garden, dripping with fruit, herbs and shady green nooks.
Enter Dan Harris-Pascal (Harris), our friendly plant whisperer. Harris is currently re-designing this space into an intricate, resilient and abundant forest garden that is suited to our temperate and rather challenging climate. One forest of food for us, coming right up. Or as fast as our climate will allow, anyways. Read More »
Recognizing simple pattern in nature is easy, and it’s the basis of bio mimicry. But just as crucial as recognizing these natural patterns, is thinking about how you can use them to create. That’s where the design comes in.
Figuring how to integrate natural patterning into permaculture designs for homesteads, communities, farms and cities in a beneficial way is a core concept in Permaculture theory. Read More »
So it turns out that aquaponics doesn’t have to be just a bunch of tanks and grow beds. Not that I mind ‘classic’ aquaponics setups. I just like to know there’s more than one way to grow a fish. And some salad.
Recently we ran our first Aquaponics Workshop in Sydney, and it was a very enlightening weekend. We wanted to run a workshop in aquaponics that focused on how to design and build your own system from recycled materials. And the student designs that came out of the workshop were not only awesome but also achievable! Read More »
October 29, 2008 – 11:36 am
Basecamp gardens plan – click for enlargement. As for my illustration skills, that’s what happens when you spend your life on a laptop – you draw like a 12 year old…
Planning, making and planting the gardens around Bascamp has become one of my favourite parts of the week, and we are finally starting to feast on the results! I really cannot believe that i didn’t garden for the first 30 years of my mishappen (but oh-so very full) life… what was i thinking? This is great! And you can eat it! Yum.
I started planning the Basecamp Garden as a result of a kick up the bum, thanks to some Canadian friends who stayed here over winter, and who sort-of barged in and constructed a no-dig mainbed next to the caravan. As I’ve mentioned earlier, up until this point we were trying to keep the Milkwood Kitchen Garden going while living over the hill… and it just wasnt really working. Start at your front step, work from there. I should probably get that statement tattooed somewhere… Read More »
February 15, 2008 – 5:47 pm
The studio dam, the one halfway up the ridge and in the middle of our system, was the first one we all sunk our teeth into. And boy oh boy…earthworks are something else… it’s like having your skin torn off in large slabs, while someone tells you it’s not skin, it’s just butter. No problem…
Strange analogy, perhaps… but until I had witnessed these earthworks, the landscape of Milkwood to me was a solid and impermeable mass… something that you could get a shovel into if you were lucky, but essentially one big, solid object. And then the bulldozer showed up. And now everything looks like a completely different place.
We were actually really lucky with what is usually a traumatic time (don’t get me wrong… it was still pretty scary) when setting up a property… hydrology earthworks are something that you want to only do once, if at all possible. Nick and I had chewed over the Permaculture earthworks design for months, and to add excitement to the situation, we invited Geoff Lawton to Milkwood to teach a Permaculture Earthworks course during the first three days of the madness that has been the terra-forming of Milkwood. Read More »
