Planting Milkwood

Back steps, front steps

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 05:15:26 +0000

Milkwood basecamp with *new* no-dig herb garden, mulched path and puppydog

Vegetable gardens are the ultimate in complex, layered systems which have implications that flow through every corner of your daily life. And, no, I'm not being dramatic - I really believe this to be so... even more now that we've had to take a couple of major backward steps in order to move forwards with one of the basics of life... growing food to eat.

In Nick + my usual style, we appoached the Milkwood kitchen garden (Mark I) with much gusto. We chose a large area close to the studio site, sculpted beds, re-sculpted beds, planned the ultimate vegetable manifesto and then set about bringing it to life... and, also in our usual style, bit off more than we could chew.

This winter past saw the defining of what you could say as my 'comfort threshold'. And living in a teeny pop-top caravan with no insulation on a windswept hillside when it's -10ºC turned out, curiously, to be below that threshold. So we decamped to the current 'Basecamp' - a slightly insulated caravan behind the family shearing shed, over the hill from Milkwood proper. It's quite comfy - far from luxurious, true, but by the end of this summer we'll be in strawbale studio heaven (fingers crossed), over on Milkwood proper.

Which means that, amoung other things, that the Kitchen Garden is nowhere near our kitchen, until further notice. Which means in its turn that we needed to re-think our food supply for this coming summer. A Kitchen Garden that is nowhere near one's kitchen ceases to be an immediate growing area, and becomes a far-flung field... which is great news for the wood-ducks and the rabbits, who can munch happily without immediate fear of repraisal, but not so good for our tummies. So we're starting again on a vege garden over at Basecamp, and this time we're actualy going to follow that very profound, basic tenant of Permaculture - Start at your front step and work your way out from there - a simple idea, but hard to hear and even harder to stick to... which is crazy, cause it's the most energy efficient way of building a sustainable system.

So! No-dig garden bed time... and might as well get the herb garden in gear. Herb gardens are something that are essential to life. Herbs = flavour. Herbs = medicine. Herbs = diversity and lots of insects. Hooray for herbs!

At the moment, our gardens being what you could call itinerant, we definitely need FOOD but it is probably not the best idea to be building the most spectacularly intricate and permanent gardens that the human race has ever seen. After all, this time next year, we won't be living here at Basecamp. And henceforth, we only need gardens here that will see us through this summer.

So - this info could also be useful to you if you're: renting, squatting, long-term camping or otherwise in some situation where you will not be there forever, but still need to grow food.

No-dig garden beds are the answer! The no-dig method is, in short, a method of creating a garden where you make a lasagne of good stuff which will coalesce to form soil quick-sticks. In our case, we created the herb garden via the following method - and it took me about 4 hours:

loosen soil with a garden fork (or I tried to, anyways)
water ground
put down layer of cardboard (plonk it down on the grass that's there) + water well
slop on 20cm of wetted sheep poo or other well-rotted manure (wet down)
cover with 20cm layer of lucerne straw (this stuff has an awsome Carbon to Nitrogen ratio, and will break down into yummy compost all by itself, with a bit of watering) + water well (until stuff runs out the bottom of the bed)

Ta da! It's an itinerant No-Dig garden bed... then to planting:

make holes in mulch and slop in some compost / potting mix / growing medium of choice...

sprinkle on a mix of herb seeds (I used a bunch of different ones that are frost tolerant, plus some flowery type things)...

cover with square of WET hessian - this will keep seeds moist, prevent them getting blasted away when you water them, and generally protect them till they're germinated and off and running... then remove hessian and yr off to a flying start

And lo, for it was a herb bed, and that was that.

This planting method was assuredly more lo-fi than our usual methodical approach to all things green and growing, but I am wanting to make sure that lots of things get planted a.s.a.p. around here, so that we can start eating homegrown tucker... think of it as 'quickie gardening in transient housing'... and I'm sure that's a familiar concept to many.

In a way, I'm enjoying this interim time - I've always thought of gardening and growing food as a long slow plodding towards the promised land of abundance and fecundity, to be reached in many years time... but, as usual, I've been seeing it in an over romanticized fashion. Nature, on the other hand, doesn't give a hoot. Give her something to grow in, and she'll grow - so I might as well make sure she's growing what I can eat, rather than something i can't (or, in the case of grass, I could eat, but I'd prefer not to if there's an option)... I want to be overwhelmed in a surplus of organic greens by this time next month... fingers crossed...

Links for 2008-08-30 [del.icio.us]

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Hillbilly Housewife Recipes
good stuff on potatoes / beans / cornmeal

Links for 2008-08-19 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Future Primitive - Dialogue on emergent communities in a planet-friendly future - interview w/ Isabela Coelho
Isabela Coelho is an educator and performing artist; graduate in International Affairs from the University of Colorado. She has worked in many arts and social projects with youth and adults in Brazil, Nicaragua and the USA. She is co-founder and co-director of OPA, a non-profit organization which emerged from the desire to combine permaculture and arts in order to build bridges between cultural, social and environmental sustainability in the urban setting.
Plant Professor
great little interactive list of useful plants, where/how/why to grow - very extensive

Links for 2008-08-13 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Atlantis Corp
Capture at Source - Stormwater Filtration - Roofscaping - The Atlantis concept is to integrate urban development with nature, creating ecologically sustainable cities & communities. Atlantis is a point source infiltration and detention stormwater management system comprised of 95% void structure products, wrapped in specified geotextile for use in a wide range of water management applications.
Article: Local plot thickens and leaves planners for dust - SMH
Outside Mobbs's house in Chippendale a little garden grows. Beside it a sign reads: "Mandarins, oranges, limes, chillies, mint, native mint, coriander, rocket, strawberries, raspberries, kaffir lime leaves, cumquats, parsley, passionfruit, bay leaves, lemon myrtle and more … Pick any fruit, berry or leaf that you want to eat. These plants provided by local residents for anyone - we need to grow food where we live and work."

Links for 2008-07-28 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Leda's Urban Homestead - Brooklyn NYC

Links for 2008-07-20 [del.icio.us]

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500

David Gosling - Environmental Art
Notably some good living willow sculptures

Links for 2008-07-16 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Newton House - Strawbale workshops
sorta the QLD Strawbale association - losta examples
BuildRight Toolbox - footings 101
boring, yes. essential, also... good basics
Footing The (Strawbale) Bill
John Glassford and Susan Wingate-Pearse run Huff ‘n Puff Constructions, specialising in strawbale buildings, from their base at Ganmain in south-west New South Wales.* In this article John describes three types of cheap footings for strawbale buildings

Links for 2008-07-14 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Leeaky Hose
Leeaky Hose takes advantage of the fact that water acts as its own conductor. It is designed so that water ‘sweats’ through its walls at a controlled rate over long distances at low water flow. At pressures of 4psi or below the hose will deliver moist

Autumn adventures

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 11:38:38 +0000

Our Permaculture Design Certificate students planting trees on the main swale

'Twas an autumn of harvesting apples, and to a degree, reaping what we had sowed... we may not have brought a crop in at Milkwood, so to speak, but we sure did our Autumn toil.

To summarise the last period of time, Milkwood was awash in farmers, tractors, students, caravans and Keyline Plows. There was much planting of trees and eating of stews, and many, many pots of tea were drunk... a wood-fired shower materialized, a bigger (quite deluxe, really) Milkwood HQ caravan arrived. Landscapes were charted, courses were convened, hillsides were surveyed and many cakes baked...

The cause of all this kerfuffle was, in part, a bunch of courses we ran out of the family woolshed. I'll spare you the details (though they were all really fabulous, exciting and excellent) but suffice to say that they all went very well.

First up was a 3-day Keyline Design Course which was attended by 35 farmers and earthmoving operators from as far north as Maroochydore and as far south as Adelaide... Darren Doherty had them all enthralled regarding the potential of Keyline Design (I think - they looked pretty engrossed), which is a set of design parameters and techniques to hold water in the soil without large-scale, expensive earthworks, by working with the contours of the land. Photos.

Secondly, there was the Permaculture Design Certificate Course - a two-week, live-in, boots-and-all course attended by 15 brave souls from across the land of Oz and also from far flung places such as Vietnam, Japan and the US of A. Darren Doherty taught this one too (with Nick Ritar and Tom Bell contributing sessions) and goodness gracious but he was fine... two weeks of Permaculture Design Theory (supplemented with tree planting, surveying, compost making and propagation), followed by a substantial design exercise. This group took it all in their stride and came out the end of those two weeks far wiser than they went in... and slightly more sunburnt, too. Photos.

Lastly was a 3-Day course called Designing Water into Landscape. This was one we held off-site - Goulburn, in fact... 3 days with both Darren and Geoff Lawton, the affectionately dubbed 'earth surgeons'... and that was something else again.. whew-ee. Great stuff. Photos.

But all seasons have their end (just as well - we were quite tired out by the end of all that). We're settling down for winter here - nearly finished the first half of the Kitchen Garden (stay tuned), propagating, propagating, propagating (just like last year), and wondering if one can plant too many turnips... I hope to be gathering 60% of our food from Milkwood by the end of Winter... hmmm... if only I could graft a green thumb onto my novice digits...

Vegie Garden: Autumn Report

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 00:00:01 +0000

Over the last few weeks we have FINALLY managed to begin on the vegie garden so I thought now would be a good time to start another Milkwood ritual - The Change of Season Vegie Garden Report!

Being on the bottom half of this great big beautiful blue ball summer has slipped away and autumn is upon us. The evenings are getting chilly already.

While we were digging our first dam, we got the local earthmoving company to bring in a gianormous yellow excavator to dig two big terraces just uphill from the dam. This is the spot we (hope to) will build our little strawbale studio, the first part of our future home. Trying to follow the "oftenest = nearest" permaculture principle we extended the terraces to the south east to create a very large space for our kitchen garden, only about 10 meters from our back door.

Each terrace is 20 metres long and 5 metres wide (65ft x 16ft) which gives us a collossus vegie garden of about 200 square metres (over 2000 sqare feet). Of course after the excavator had finished digging we were left with a lovely surface of clay and rock.. not exactly garden of eden material. Lucky for us there was quite a bit of topsoil left over after covering the dam wall, so we got Justin the driver to dump that over in the vege garden area and last week I started the serious labour of shaping this topsoil into the basic form of garden beds. Gotta love the burning feeling of geek body meeting spade and barrow. So far I've only found time to make 4 beds about 4 metres long by 1.2 metres wide (double reach beds)

Around here when we talk about topsoil what we really mean is powdery ash like clay of the sickly grey type. Really we are only expecting to use the 'topsoil' as a base for no-dig garden beds. So we piled on the compost that Kirsten has been making along with some well aged poo from aunty Linda's chickens and a very thick layer of spoilt oaten straw we got cheap from a local farmer.

Now the first frosts usually hit us in April so we only have two months at best to get any real growing going on. This somewhat limits what's worth planting. I want to put in a heap of broad beans and a bunch of other assorted legumes, even if we don't get a harvest from them they will improve the soil and produce a lot of organic matter. In fact I have planted a whole bed of mixed lab lab bean and cow pea. So far we have planted leeks, red onions, celery, chives, parsley, nasturtium and garlic chives. I'm even trying a few potatoes that started growing in the pantry. I also have to admit that I cheated a little and bought a punnet of rainbow chard (silverbeet) seedlings from the garden centre in town.

Autumn will be a serious season of planting, the summer has been quite wet so we really need to take advantage of all the moisture that is in the soil. Apart from the vegetables we want to get as many trees planted as possible so they can establish themselves over the cooler months.

With all the earthmoving going on it's taken us a while to finally plant some things in the ground, but it feels so good to have started... we really have begun Planting Milkwood. Oh I nearly forgot... WE HAVE CHICKENS.... and a chook dome for them to live in, in our next video I'll show you my attempt at making a movable chicken dome so we can kick start our food forest using CHICKEN POWER.

Whats been going on in your garden over the change of seasons?

Our first dam

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 06:47:13 +0000

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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 the very fabulous 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.

So then we had 35 farmers and earthmovers on-site at Milkwood for three days. The course was great, and many of the participants came up to me during or after to express thanks that such a course had been run... you have to understand that there are bugger-all courses or workshops in sustainable hydrology earthworks for farmers and earthmovers around... unless they want to do a PDC, which for most of them might be a bridge too far, for various reasons.

But back to our fabulous dam. The minute it was finished, the rain came down... which was not at all what we wanted (sorry, rain) because we wanted to mulch and plant out the dam wall first. At the final stage of the dam's construction, our earthmover re-covered the earthworks with the topsoil that he's scraped off at the start, before he began his digging proper. This meant that our completed dam was covered in topsoil, which meant that we could plant stuff into it, and reasonably expect it to grow. Not trees, mind you... taproots (ie most trees) and dam wall = bad. Hairnet roots (perennial grasses, clumping bamboos) and dam wall = good.

A couple of weeks after this video was made, Nick turned a neighbor's disaster into our Christmas present, and pumped the contents of a failing dam ('she's about to blow, boys!') across the valley into our dam with a fire-fighters pump and a very long hose. Despite growing up by the ocean and always eschewing muddy water when it came to swimming, I am in love with my dam! And I am proud to say we already have four froggy friends that have moved in, and sing us to sleep all this summer long...

Technical bits:

We sowed the dam wall with a 50-50 mix of Lablab and Cowpea seeds, both of which had been inoculated with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, which will help them grow (you just ask for the to be inoculated before you buy the bags of seed). Geoff recommended sowing at between 4-8 times the commercially recommended rate - the idea is to get that dam wall jumping with growth asap, and growing with the species you want.
Both these species are nitrogen-fixing legumes, which means they will improve the topsoil quick smart so we can plant some other things in there .
Over the top of the broadcast seeds, we did a 'feather mulch' of oaten straw, which we got cheap because it was all a bit wet and rotten. A 'feather mulch' is where you lightly mulch the ground so that you can only *just* not see the soil. This mulch holds dew, protects the seed from birds and increases the germination rate of the seeds, all without blocking out all the light.
We hit good clay in in this dam, which should mean that it doesn't leak much at all. We also hit a lot of huge rocks.
A dam this size when full, will hold just under 1 Megalitre. It took about 3 days (24 hours) to build with one bulldozer and Nick manning the laser level to check heights of various bits. The bulldozer (with a driver in it) cost us $150 p/h. So that's about $3,600 for this dam. Which is not much at all, really, for the multi-purpose resource that it will be for Milkwood.
In terms of dam size on Australian rural properties, this is a very small dam. We wanted it small and deep, in order to minimize surface area (evaporation) and so that it would be on a complimentary scale to the other elements in the system nearby.
By putting in multiple small, deep dams, rather than one big-kahuna dam, we are spreading the many benefits a body of water brings to its immediate environment around the property, hedging our bets in case one dam leaks badly or gives way all together, minimizing evaporation and generally creating diversity in the landscape. Diversity in a productive landscape = good.

Once we had all made it through the first four days of earthworks, things started hotting up with Nick and the Bulldozer... top dam, top swale, middle swale, bottom dam, studio site... it was on for young and old... at an hourly rate of $150 - yikes... and we've got approximately 3 weeks of work for the bulldozer.. so... better have a cake stall sometime soon, I think...

Surveying the site from scratch

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 23:01:59 +0000

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Having grand plans is all very fine, but there comes a time when one must make the first, single, decisive gesture towards action.

For us, this meant placing a small wooden peg, painted white, at the southern boundary of Milkwood. And then surveying a contour which continued aaaallllll the way around the hillside at the same height as that first peg, right around to the other boundary of Milkwood on the western side of the ridge. This first contour was important to mark out for a couple of reasons:

it will mark the 'level' for the middle swale of our Permaculture design, and therefore the level of the middle dam (and in turn, therefore, the position of the studio)
being roughly in the middle of the system, this contour will be used to define the placement of features above and below it (like greenhouse/chookhouse combos, the kitchen garden, the orchard, the bath house)
as swales are tree growing systems, this contour will define where a belt of trees (all productive, food bearing ones) runs through the centre of the Permaculture system
because you have to start somewhere

And so we whacked the first peg into the soil of Milkwood. Which wasn't too easy at the time, given the 6-year drought - the soil was quite un-enthused about opening up for our peg. But even the soil of Milkwood (in it's sorry, overgrazed state) was no match for our collective enthusiasm. And in a year or so, that soil will be hydrated, friable and hopping with life.

Following the experience of the Cowley level and the laser level, it was clear that the laser level was going to be an indespensable tool for the amount of surveying and earthworks we intended to carry out at Milkwood. And having one around would be quite handy for outside projects and teaching, too. So we went out and sourced a cheap laser level at auction, and now we are lasering our little hearts out. It's so good. You can re-check levels in the blink of an eye... and earthworks is like carpentry, only to the power of 10... measure twice, measure twice again, cut once.

One of the great things about surveying out a site is that you go through the entire landscape very slowly. You're looking in all directions as you move around the contour, and you begin to appreciate exactly what bits are level with what, and what features are markedly higher than others. And this makes a big difference, when you're trying to analyze how the rainwater runoff 'works' within a particular landscape.

As i write this, we have finished just about all of the surveying for Milkwood. Everything has been pegged, measured, and re-measured within an inch of its life. All of the swales, dams, access ways and structure sites exist in a language of little white pegs throughout the grassy hillside. It's all action stations from here on in... fingers crossed... bring on the bulldozers...

Milkwood - the Permaculture Design

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:13:57 +0000

Aerial photo of Kirwin, with Milkwood top left-ish. Taken in about 2002, we think.

Standing on a bare hilltop, with the creek below and a small creekflat to the left, it all seemed so easy when we first got here... all we had to do was figure out where to put some structures, avoid the big trees, and build a bridge over the creek to get in. Grow something on the creekflat, put in a vegie garden, and get water from the sky... and the rest of it all, all those complex ideas and fiddly bits, could just wait till we were nicely set up.

Close-up pf Milkwood - looking pretty dry...

However, the more we sat and looked, and the more we thought about it, we realised that establishing a well-functioning Permaculture system was going to take a bit of planning. Rushing in putting down a driveway, and putting up a studio, wasn't an option. So, we went back to the basics of Permaculture design: Water. Access. Structure. In that order. Hard to stick to, when it gets down to -17 here in winter... but we're still here, now on the sunny-side of that first winter, and we're now ready to implement our Permaculture design for Milkwood.

Milkwood - Permaculture Design

I know the above design may look fairly un-interesting at first glance - but I assure you it is TREMENDOUSLY EXCITING and, in addition, quite a damn fine Permaculture design, as far as designs go. The blue bits are dams, the dark-brown lines are swales, and the yellow thing is the studio, with the kitchen garden next to it (the little green bit). The lighter brown lines are the access roads, to enable us to get vehicles everywhere that we need to during system establishment, and the greeny-blue line is the existing creek.

The swales are the thing we are most excited about. Without going into a lengthy explanation, swales are water-harvesting elements (they look like long ditches), made exactly on-contour within the landscape. Basically, everything uphill from the swale (in terms of rain + nutrient run-off) flows downhill into the swale. At this point, the water is captured, and ends up sitting in the swale, rather than rushing off downhill to the creek. The swale then fills up along its entire length, until the overflow pours into the dam that is attached to it at some point.

If you have a series of these systems, you end up with long canals of water in the landscape, everytime you get a big rain. The water quickly soaks into the downhill side of the swale, making the downhill side of the swale a *great* place to grow trees. And your dams fill up. And your trees grow. And the whole landscape has heaps more water in it, not just on it - you want to store water IN not ON the landscape if you possibly can. Which makes the creeks flow for longer. Which nudges everything towards a more stable ecosystem. Which is not just good, but great. It benefits us, our food production, the wallabies and the water table. Hurrah.

Milkwood - Permaculture Design with Aerial photo underlay...

So that's it. Three dams (plus the one at bottom left, which is on next-door's land, but will feed our system), three long swales. Some access, and a studio-site. Which just happens to be right next to the middle dam. Which will provide thermal mass and temperature stabilization (not to mention reflected light in winter). And which will also mean that we can jump off the front deck of the studio into the water. To swim with the fishes. And the ducks, and the yabbies, and the frogs, and the turtles....

Now all we have to do is... do it.

Compost - and 2007 - finito!

Sat, 29 Dec 2007 01:09:58 +0000

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Friends, romans, countrymen, may I present to you... my compost. Living, breathing soil in just three weeks. What began as thistles, rotten veggies and election advertising (hmm... striking similarities there) is now good brown stuff that smells great and is going to make things GROW... And I've finished off my slightly dysfunctional but ultimately successful How to: make Compost series over in our resources page.

Can i just add that this post is a bit late due to a bunch of Permaculture courses we've been running in Sydney and here at Milkwood - most noticeably the 'Designing Water into Landscape' earthworks course last week which was a hoot... So the compost has, infact, been finished for weeks... it lies in wait for the formation of the Kitchen garden, a thing of beauty which will be constructed from January onwards...

We are off to wash the dust from our overalls in the ocean for a week. Some swimming, reading, eating and fishing, and a little bit of headspace to gee-up for the next year at Milkwood.

Thanks so much to all for your help and comments this year! The whole process has been both very exciting and rather tricky so far... it really is so different from where we were a year ago. Challenging (actually, terrifying) at times and sublime at other times, I wouldn't be anywhere else for all the tea in China.

And a year from now.. who knows? Hopefully we'll be pulling yabbies and fresh-water crayfish from the dam and making plum pudding from feral fruit while resting under shady boughs, surrounded by friends, ducks, chikens and goats.

Happy holidays to all and we'll be back shortly...

Milkwood Timelapses: and so it begins...

Sat, 01 Dec 2007 01:08:45 +0000

Site of Strawbale studio and middle dam, looking southish - the courtyard will be on this side, along with a few prize deciduous trees.

One of the things that always gets me is seeing old photos of how a place used to be. I have a photo of what the headland at Kiama looked like when it was still a windswept farm - before my parents (and everyone else) put up their brick-veneer houses in the 60's and turned it into prime-real estate, densely packed suburb it is today....

So in light of this, and because we like to document things (incase you hadn't noticed) , Nick and I have committed to a very long-term project: Milkwood Timelapses. Every morning before sunrise, we will walk the boundary of Milkwood, taking photos from 7 different points. We will do this each morning, every morning that we are here, until such a time as we can walk no more... and by then we will have trained monkeys to do it for us. Or some future solar-powered zero-footprint adsl whizz-bang gadget which requires no maintainence and also makes cheese as a byproduct.

Every so often we will compile the daily shots and produce a timelapse movie for each position on Milkwood, and post it here.

Things will grow, things will be built, seasons will pass. The finger on the camera shutter will get gradually older. So will the camera, for that matter. But 40 years from now, I hope to still be getting up before the dawn and shuffling off on my daily timelapse circuit, treading a well-worn path around Milkwood... to both record, and appreciate, the passing of yet another day...

And we started yesterday. Here are some of the views-to-be:

Site of kitchen garden, on south side of Strawbale Studio. Garden beds will be on-contour with large trellis structure overhead and on south side.

Looking north up the main swale (little white pegs) to be dug in Dec '07. Orchard and food forest will be below swale to the north, nut trees and fodder crops below swale to the south.

Site of Strawbale studio and middle dam (just infront of the coloured bins center-right). Main swale runs left to right - food forest + orchard below.

Site of bridge looking west over Campbells Creek into Milkwood, with creekflat (maincrop + seasonal soccer field) to right .

Looking south on creekflat to food forest below main swale and middle dam. Bridge and entry to Milkwood are just off to the middle left.

Panorama of creekflat, looking south. Recently slashed to create mulch to help with moisture retention throughout summer. Eventual main crop with bottom dam centre left, at the base of the ridge.

Panorama of creekflat, looking North. Recently slashed to create mulch to help with moisture retention throughout summer. Eventual main crop with bottom dam on right, at the base of the ridge. Bridge and entry on far right.

Turning a compost pile

Wed, 21 Nov 2007 11:03:11 +0000

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It's been two weeks now and I've been a-turnin' my compost... and it's working! Sortof. I think I should have ripped up all that newsprint - it's proving a right pesk to turn with my pitchfork - it just becomes great gloopy clumps of glossy advertisements and happy-families pamphlets from the bank, all bonded together as if by magic to thwart my composting progress. But I am undaunted... I just mutter darkly at them and enjoy poking various political leaders through the eye with my pitchfork as I turn my pile...

So the compost is heating and life is fermenting (literally) in there... Nick and I are having fascinating anthropological discussions about its components. About why the corn flakes packet seems to take the longest to break down (we rekon it's coated in arsenic to repel rodents or similar - yech), followed closely by any and all full-page car ads... there might be a thesis in this, actually... anyone?

I'm planning to harangue my scientist sister into figuring out a wicked compost recipe which uses lots of the glossy newsprint, but still ends up not-too-toxic at the end of the composting process. I now see all magazines as simply inert carboniferous material, just waiting to be turned into rich soil humus... the trouble is, I don't really know how best to deal with the suspended animation caused by all their glossy coatings and such, and how to negate those chemicals within the composting process... there might be another thesis in this, actually... anyone?

Anyway. I wrote down the full process of turning compost over in resources under How to make compost: Pt2 - have a look. Slowly but surely, I will become a composting machine...

Earthworks, water and other fantastic fun

Wed, 21 Nov 2007 09:05:02 +0000

Water is precious. And hard to find, around here. The process of designing hydrology into a site so that whatever water is available is used intelligently and for multiple purposes before it is allowed to seep out of the soil and into the creek is a tricky task. We have spend nigh on a year now, just watching the rainfall and the landscape and thinking and planning how we would best design Milkwood to make the most of our limited rainwater catchment.

How we could harvest that water and divert it across the landscape so that it seeps in gently and slowly, creating places for things to grow, rather than have the water pelting down the cleared gullies on either side of Milkwood, to swell the eroded creek and rush off downstream before the land and the soil has had a chance to benefit from it.

So we designed water into the landscape. Then we re-designed, we watched some more and then designed again. And now it is time to do it! And we're making a course out of it, so other people can learn about this stuff too, as it gets implemented at Milkwood.The fantabulous Geoff Lawton has agreed to teach a three-day earthworks course on-site here at Milkwood, while the earthworks get done. How cool is that? Dams will be built, swales will be dug, and all manner of sustainable earthworks and design will be at play. If anyone's interested, it's on 18-20 December and it's called Designing Water into Landscape.

Also also..... there is more! Next March, following on from APC9 (a big Permaculture conference in Sydney), we will be hosting a Keyine Design Course with Darren Doherty. Darren knows his onions when it comes to Keyline Design. Darren knows his onions on quite a few things, actually... it is going to be a true gift to have two such experienced Permaculture educators coming to Milkwood before next winter... we are really looking forward to it.

Most of all, we're looking forward to sharing the process of system-establishment with whoever wants to come to Milkwood and learn while it all goes down... for me, I like the idea that we're opening up every stage of the process for viewing and learning, rather than just the finished article. I've seen quite a few established Permaculture systems now - beautiful, gorgeous places where everything within the system is tootling along happily together - plants, animals, native species, people... but sometimes it just seems so daunting to try and project forwards to that point. Especially when you're starting with, very literally, nothing.

I know that Milkwood is well designed, and with energy and intelligence it will one day be a smashing and downright gorgeous example of what you can do with a piece of over-grazed, farmed-out land... but right now it's still a mostly-bare, windy hillside with a little caravan, some compost piles and the two of us. But we will get there, yes sirree... and following on from the Permaculture maxim order of design: access, water, structure, we are designed to the hilt and ready to embark on the first two.

One month from now, we will have a funky array of access roads, swales, dams and gabeons, all ready and waiting to harvest that elusive rainfall and steep it into the landscape of Milkwood. And then, let the planting begin in earnest....