January 19, 2012 – 6:00 am
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 [...]
September 24, 2011 – 6:00 am
I must say that while I’m finding this market garden experiment very exciting, it’s also rather daunting. What are we planting today? What are we planting next week? Where are we going? Who am i and where are my pants? The solution to all this is Allsun Farm’s planting calendar system. Joyce Wilkie devised this [...]
Shiitake mushrooms are the yummiest variety, in my opinion. They’re also the most expensive in the shops, and virtually impossible to find in an organic variety (at least where we live). Solution: grow your own. You’ll be happy to hear that making your own shiitake mushroom log turns out to be very easy. It would [...]
They say that one of the many blessings of country life is that you appreciate the little things. Like clean air, water and food. And I do. I also VERY much appreciate our internet connection, now that we’ve finally got it (kind of) sorted. Our hidden valley is questionably blessed with being devoid of mobile [...]
This is the first post in a series explaining how we built our very first earthbag dome at Milkwood Farm. Earthbag is a natural building technique that uses bags of earth to build structures that have incredible tensile strength and a very low energy footprint… The first step of the build was choosing the site. [...]
A wicking box is a contained, portable way to grow vegies (or anything else) with very little water. Essentially, it’s a wicking bed in miniature. Very cool. Wicking boxes can be used either as part of an intensive water-wise growing system, or just a good way to keep those herbs alive that you usually forget [...]
Rocket stoves have become a part of our lives at Milkwood Farm. They’re hyper energy efficient, can be built out of rubbish and result in more usable heat that any other wood-burning system we’ve come across. Big love. It doesn’t take long to be besotted – everyone who needs a wash at our farm heats [...]
November 8, 2010 – 12:05 am
Ferrocement (sometimes called thin-shell cement) is a construction technique where cement is thinly applied to a sturdy steel or wire frame. It is very cheap and relatively quick to do, and produces extremely strong structures. While it does involve cement, which has quite a large energy footprint, the resulting strength-for-inputs equation means it is a [...]
November 2, 2010 – 12:02 am
**Note: Please wear safety gear when making & using this mix as it is caustic to the skin. Ouch! Good for its intended purposes, though. Okay so this one is not strictly a fertilizer (like our Biofertilizer recipe #1), it’s more an anti-fungal preparation. Still, anti-fungicides are something our agriculture pours millions, if not billions [...]
October 12, 2010 – 12:02 am
[caption id="attachment_1188" align="aligncenter" width="375" caption="Alexe drills holes in a pipe to make a worm tower"]
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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.
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