Last week Milkwood Permaculture was the proud winner of the 2012 Green Lifestyles Awards in the Garden Company category.
We won it for being “a company whose products are consistently amazing, who are the pinnacle of sustainability behind the scenes, & who are working to green our food culture”. Wow. And I even got to meet Bob Brown at the awards ceremony, who’s been a household champion in my family since i was six. It was a pretty great night. Read More
Wes Jackson of The Land Institute. © Douglas Gayeton & Laura Howard-Gayeton
The Lexicon of Sustainability is a project that almost wriggles with excitement. It’s taking all those very important and even edgy things that we should care about and makes them so delicious that you want to eat them all. Which ironically, for the most part, you can!
Regenerative agriculture, foraging, local food systems, community supported agriculture, the soil food web, and many more really important ideas and movements are presented in such a way that you can’t help caring about. We need more of this sort of approach. Read More
Fissured foodstuffs – image by Tom Fox
One of the few things that makes me sometimes long for the city is to be part of the kerbside revolution that’s happening here, there and everywhere. Every time i walk past an inner-city grass verge that’s sprouting tomatoes or a roundabout which has seen a bit of guerrilla gardening action I breathe a little sigh of relief, because I feel like I can smell the beginnings of that sweetest of ferments in the air: it’s the beginnings of food security in the hands of people, not supermarkets.
In the last several years, community gardening has taken on new significance throughout the western world. It seems nearly every city now has some sort of kerbside vegetable gardening initiative, victory garden schemes, community gardens, you name it. And hooray to that – we need any and all of these initiatives. We need them because we all need to get more deeply involved in our own food security. We also all need them to get more deeply involved in our community if we’re going to build true resilience in our world over the next number of decades, and gardening is a great way to start. Bring on the edible landscapes… Read More
Milkwood in 2006… yet to become carbon sequestration central, due to overgrazing for… oh… only the last 100 years or so…
Last weekend Nick and I trooped off to the inaugural Carbon Farmers Conference (the first of its kind in Aus) which was conveniently held in Mudgee, just up the road (it’s quite a long road, though – this being the country and all).
And holy cow it was a jam-packed two days… The conference was set up to thresh out the concepts behind Carbon Farming – a term used to describe the process of sequestering carbon into good, healthy soil. This concept isn’t that hard to grasp – we’re all surrounded by a gazillion ‘carbon credit’ systems at the moment – systems and companies who are offering to ‘zero your footprint’ or ‘make your wedding carbon neutral’ or whatever… and the ethics of that industry is a long conversation in its self, which I will set aside for now (there’s plenty about it online though, if you want to get all riled up). Read More
You would have to be living under a large, large rock to not have heard about the concept of Peak Oil. It’s scary stuff – much debated by many, scoffed by some, acknowledged as a player on the field by all. Something’s going on with the oil. Who can access it depends on who is friends with who this week, and it is something that all the major car companies are trying to prepare for (a sure sign that someone high up in their respective corporate structures is mighty tetchy about it). Down here at the ‘little ol’ me’ level, the implications of this sort of change is… unsettling, to say the least. Read More
