A weed may be defined as ‘a plant out of place’. And one persons’ unwanted plant may be another’s medicine, food, soil builder or erosion controller.
Recently Sydney artist Diego Bonetto has been working on wild weed paper: hand-made paper embedded with hand-harvested weed seeds of many and varied species found in the Sydney basin… Read More
It’s something we and others have joked about: what if we had a truck full of goats and just went around offering their weed-eating services? How cool would that be?
At one of our recent Permaculture Design Certificates some of the students designed a rent-a-goat system as a permaculture enterprise that could be added to a farm. But as I’ve just discovered, this concept is already up and running. And chewing. And bleating. Read More
We’re bringing David Holmgren to Sydney shortly as a guest teacher on our Winter Part-time PDC. So we thought we’d offer up a dinner while he’s here. Would you like to come?
Dinner with David Holmgren
We’d like to invite our current and future friends, readers, students and comrades to a chance to sit down and eat delicious organic food together. Please join us for an evening of good food & great conversation, with a talk by David between courses. Read More
I am often coming across plants and trees that I don’t know the names of. Which isn’t very unusual, i know, but once you start wanting to figure out how your surrounding environment works, being able to identify what plant is growing where leads to why that plant is growing there, which quickly leads to the beginnings of an integrated understanding of one’s surroundings. Hopefully. Read More
Out in the rural areas of NSW (and probably in other states of Australia as well) this book has been causing a minor furore. Country town bookstores were selling out of all their copies in a day, everyone was talking about it, everyone wanted to read it, everyone was ordering in a copy for their father/wife/husband/themselves because the word on the street was that it contained mighty important information about how to drought-proof your land. Read More
Useful Weeds at our Doorstep - in touch with the earth Pat Collins with illustrations by Kath Mitchell
In Australia, the term ‘weed’ is highly subjective, depending on what industry puts food on your family’s table… so this book caught my eye. In short, it’s great. A no-nonsense run through of every weed you are likely to find in the Hunter Region of NSW, what to use them for, and why to use them.Useful Weeds at our Doorstep is a handy reference book for several reasons. Firstly, it’s thorough. It includes photographs of many, and illustrations of all of its entries, and lists common names, origins and current distribution as well as uses (for farm, garden and medicinal), recipes, and when to harvest…. Read More
