So we have these great fuzzy caterpillars in the forest garden who occasionally get together and go journeying in a long, fuzzy line.
We happened to be in the forest garden during one such sojourn, and Nick decided to do a bit of caterpillar-wrangling… Read More
‘On The Anatomy Of Thrift: Harvest Day‘ is a video by Farmrun and Farmstead Meatsmith about honoring the the pig, the whole pig, and everything inside the pig. This is the next generation of charcuterie, done with respect for the animal and unashamed enthusiasm for the results.
This is also previous generations of charcuterie – the coming together of people to process preserved meat for winter and to eat what cannot be kept very long, employing generosity as a strategy for survival… Read More
At the Permaculture Design Course we just finished in Sydney, Adam Grubb got everyone truly inspired about the power of Permablitz. A good permablitz is an valuable opportunity to participate in design, community, digging, growing and learning, all in one day.
Following on from Adam’s excellent ‘How to run a Permablitz really well’ talk that he gave during his visit (video of the talk is below), there’s been a few videos come to light that really help understand just why a permablitz is so darn cool. So I thought I’d share them with you… Read More
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… Read More
“Some call it permaculture, we prefer p-culture… ya dig? p-culture, starring the wonderful Miss Tasia Zalar, is a series of 10 segments designed to get youthful peeps actively involved in reducing their impact on the environment.”
Great! Bring on the teen permacool. I mean p-culture… sorry dudes.
Then there’s the Permaculture challenge, which is 50 funded places for 15-17 y.o. peeps to embark on a wilderness adventure, permaculture certification and some permablitz action.
So it looks like we’re finally cool! I knew everyone would cotton on to holistic systems theory eventually. Even the cool kids.
Recently Nick gave a talk at TEDx Canberra. He talked about stewarding nutrients, how we can solve the problem of peak phosphorous, and about how to grow the best cumquats ever.
Yes, Nick was talking about why taking responsibility for our poo and our wee, our most basic waste streams, is so crucial to our future. For a long time, a mark of superiority in some cultures has been how far you can get your shit away from you. But now, we need it back. Read More
Permaculture Pioneers is a new book looking at the trajectory of permaculture in Australia from the 1970′s until right now. It’s an amazing and humbling read. And it’s launching in Sydney next week on August 25th, with David Holmgren presenting.
At the same event there will be the Sydney premiere of Anima Mundi, a new doco on the future of this planet of ours. Anima Mundi features Vandana Shiva, Noam Chomsky, the Melbourne Permablitz crew and many more thinkers and doers. Sounds like a good night to me! Read More
P.A.Yeomans was a visionary farmer who could read the Australian landscape in a way unheard of, before or since. He designed water into landscape and drought-proofed farms, designed a sub-soil Keyline Plow, and generally left a massive legacy of knowledge and implemented design.
In 1975, a conceptual artist decided the Art Gallery of NSW should do a massive exhibition on Yeomans and his Keyline Design concepts, as they were much more pertinent to the future of Australia than the ‘Land Art’ of the time, which specialized in digging large holes for no discernible reason. Read More
The night before our workshop with Joel Salatin at Jamberoo, there’s going to be an awesome evening. It’s the Australian premiere of The Greenhorns, a new and funky film on young farmers. And Joel Salatin will be there, slurping soup and talking farming.
The Greenhorns is a great new film we discovered recently and have brought to Australia. It’s made by young farmers, for young farmers, and for young wanna-be farmers. The Greenhorns tells it like it is: farming is hard work, a super worthy cause, and the ultimate in rebellion in the face of our current food system. Read More
Martin Crawford’s forest garden in Devon might not be in a biosphere anything like the climate at Milkwood Farm, but it’s a project that’s been an inspiration to me for a while, nonetheless.
Martin’s forest garden is a poem of time and space and the seasons – or a big jumbly mess of green stuff, depending on how you look at it. But one thing is not debatable. That forest garden of his produces a lot of very edible food, in a very stable, resilient and low-energy input system. Like. Read More
