One of our students' amazing designs: a re-design for a suburban small holding

So Winter is ending and Spring is on its way.  We spent this winter just gone traveling to Sydney every weekend to teach Permaculture, which made us feel like short-range nomads very quickly. And the end result is now out there; 40 accomplished urban permaculture designers, who will go on to do amazing things. Not bad for one winter’s work.

A comprehensive design for a school garden

What was so amazing about this part-time Permaculture Design Certificate course was the incredible diversity of students we had. Being a one-day per week course, these were all folks from Sydney. Mums and dads, uni students, international risk-management specialists, futures traders and school teachers. They came each Saturday or Sunday, depending on what class they were in, sat down and absorbed knowledge.

They dug holes and planted fruit trees and they questioned the fundamentals of what we treat as ‘normal every-day living’. They learnt how to design stable, sustainable systems for their families and communities, and they learnt to see their urban surrounds as a feast of possibility.

Infrastructure plan for City Farm project

And in turn, we learned so much from all these lovely folks. They played with Ashar while i had a cup of tea, brought in amazing cakes to supplement my (only occasionally burnt) offerings and brought a HUGE new knowledge base to the class. They became our friends and before long we couldn’t wait to get to class each weekend to see everybody and have a chat.

compost making at the beginning of the course

Apart from classes on utilizing permaculture in the urban sphere, soil, water harvesting, trees and their energy transactions and so many other things (see our Permaculture site if you’re interested in the details) we went to an amazing urban permaculture backyard in Marrickville and held a 50-strong permablitz at the community garden attached to our class venue.

Alexandria Park permablitz in full flight

What i liked best about this course, however, was the the urban permaculture designs the students produced. Everyone worked on real-world projects that they brought to the course – backyards, community gardens, school gardens, public parks, disused lots and even a city farm. And they were amazing! I would love to live in a city that contained such abundant, functional and useful gardens and systems. And maybe, someday, people in Sydney will do just that.

Heck, Sydney now has 40 motivated and competent permaculture designers that it didn’t have last autumn – surely something’s gotta give. The whole place should be a food forest in no time.

Graduation lunch for Saturday class

And lastly, and most importantly of all, there were the relationships formed over winter, as a result of us all seeing and chatting and learning with each other each weekend. I watched friendships be made that i know will endure – and they might just change the world while they’re at it. We made a big bunch of new friends, and our baby got to play games with multiple new uncles and aunts, which of course he loved. It was truly amazing. Worth all the tiring bits, the burnt cakes and the mr-cranky-pants moments, certainly.

Would we do it again? I think so. It’s a good feeling to enter spring knowing you’ve helped facilitate a bunch of new trajectories over the slow of winter. So watch out Sydney, this spring might just surprise you. There’s a host of new permaculture designers about and amongst you, just waiting for the right moment to pounce.

Nick and some new friends from the creek

Recently we’ve un-ravelled one of the mysteries of nature that’s been plagueing us for years here at Milkwood. How is it that if you build a dam or a pond, in the middle of nowhere, that over time it naturally becomes inhabited with water-loving creatures like yabbies? How do they know the new water source is there? Can they smell it? Is there some sort of inter-species bush telegraph? This one really had us stumped.

But now, we’ve seen it for ourselves, so we can tell you too. In certain conditions, the yabbies just walk there.

Yabbies. Lots of em!

Last summer, when everything here was dried to a crisp in the drought, we were trying to imagine how the heck critters like yabbies, turtles and so on move from place to place. In high summer, I can’t imagine a water-dweller would strike out across a paddock or up a hillside in the hope of finding a new pond to inhabit. They’d be dried to a crisp in a second or two. And then, in winter, it would be so cold they might freeze before they got there…

But in retrospect it all seems so obvious and, as usual, so elegantly designed. Here’s how we’ve seen it work with yabbies: in big rain events, catchments like ponds and dams overflow. This overflow trickles downhill to the next water catchment, which might be another pond, or perhaps a creek. If there are yabbies in the lower catchment, and those yabbies are feeling adventurous (for whatever biological reason), those yabbies may judge that overflow to be worthy of following up to its source, which, i suppose they are betting, is another pocket of water suitable for them to inhabit.

The yabbies at their chosen point of exit from the creek - they'll follow the waterflow up the bank and across the paddock to the source

In the case of the overflow from our bottom dam to our creek, the yabbies had chosen well. If they could make it out of the creek, up the bank, across the creekflat and up to the source of the overflow they would have the run of the largest dam on our property. Lots of room for everyone. However (and here I am trying not to channel David Attenborough -esque narration), their journey was not to be an easy one…

Firstly the yabbies had to get past the currawongs, who were picking them off as they made it up the steep bank of the creek and onto the creekflat. It was a bit of a free smorgasboard for the currawongs – they were all hopping about, looking very pleased. The yabbies also had to get past the grey herons, similarly engaged. And then, of course, the yabbies had to get past Nick.

A yabbie in progress across our creekflat, on its way up to our bottom dam

Nick, splashing about in the rain, was admiring our newly filled dams with their perfectly re-set spillways. Going down to the creekflat to see what all those currawongs were doing hopping about, he discovered the march of the yabbies. Being the helpful soul he is, Nick of course went and got a bucket, collected all the yabbies he could find marching (slowly) across the grass, and generously delivered them to the dam above.

The geese were too busy rejoicing in the rain to notice their new neighbours arrive, but as they eat mostly grass I can’t imagine they’ll be too fussed. A good spring should see a nice big yabby harvest for summer solstice. Or perhaps make that next summer solstice, depending on how long they’ll take to grow.

Even if we don’t get a yabby harvest this year, at least we’ve added to the biodiversity of Milkwood. And we solved a mystery, all in one rainy day.

an abundance of fresh greens, in the middle of the desert

We’ve always been all about aquaponics in theory: a closed-loop system that provides abundant vegetables and fresh fish – what’s not to like? But it wasn’t until Nick took some PDC students on a tour of this amazing bathtub aquaponics system in Alice Springs last April that the true wonder of aquaponics really began to sink in.

Alice Springs is one of the driest places in Australia. But here, in Steve’s backyard, was an oasis of mythical proportions. Fresh spinach, greens, vegetables, berries and beautiful shady pools containing healthy, fat fish. Not what you normally think of when you think of an Alice Springs backyard.

inspecting the growbeds with fish food makers beneath

But best of all, this was an aquaponics system – which means it was a relatively ‘closed loop’ in terms of inputs and outputs: the fish swim (and poo) in their large, beautiful fishponds, creating nutrient-rich water. That nutrient-laden water is then cycled through gravel-filled growbeds containing vegetables.

The vegetable roots take up the nutrient to feed the plants above, effectively cleaning that water in the process. The now clean (and oxygenated to boot – thanks, plant roots) water is now drained from the growbeds and flows back into the fishpond. Happy fishes swim in their fresh, clean and oxygen rich water and the cycle begins again. And that, my friends, is the basis of aquaponics.

floating trays of fish food below the growbeds

Now add some other ponds which produce duckweed, which is great food for the fish, and there you have it. A (relatively) closed loop system. Every output is an input for something else. This system produces a steady stream of fresh vegetables and fresh fish, all fed organically and all with an incredibly small footprint. In terms of protein and nutrition per square meter, this is as good as it gets.

Here’s a great little animation by EcoFilms on how aquaponics works in a nutshell.

a small stand-alone bathtub aquaponics system

The bathtubs in a bathtub aquaponics system refers mainly to the growbeds, although sometimes, like the one above, bathtubs are used for the entirety of the system. The fishponds are preferably larger ponds than bathtubs, for the health of the fish and so that the system has a bit more stability. Steve had yabbies in his system too! Mmm yabby and fish curry with growbed greens…

Main fishpond

We’re currently planning to install a bathtub aquaponics system at our ‘home away from home’ at Alexandria Park Community Garden where we teach our Sydney courses, inspired by Steve’s system.

We’re aiming to start setting one up for the community garden in January 2011 as part of the Permaculture Design Certificate we’re hosting there… now all we need is a couple of bathtubs! And some helping hands. And some fish.

Aquaponics resources:

• Ecofilms have a great stash of aquaponics info, some of it featuring:
• Murray Hallam, who is a bit of an aquaponics guru
• Aquaponics forum – lots and lots of info here
• Aquaponics in Mudgee!
• The photoset of our Alice Springs PDC in April 2010, including the aquaponics site visit.

Our very full swale snaking past the house and into our very full dam

For the last 2 and a half years we have waited for the big rain which would test the capacity of our water-harvesting earthworks. And waited. We’ve had a bit of rain here and there, but the summers have been hot and dry these last two years, and we had gotten used to life with half-full dams and swales which were good roads, but rarely wet.

And then, when we least expected it, our system filled up. Finally.

Water-front views... finally.

One thing that is usually done the first time permaculture earthworks ‘fill up’ is that you observe the spillways and the swales to check the levels. Water is the ultimate leveler. Water lets you know if any of your swales are a little low, a little high, or generally off contour.

Though we had surveyed our swales as best we could, and adhered to the ‘measure thrice, cut once’ adage of permaculture earthworks, we knew that the real test of our swales were the first time the system filled. Only then would we see if the spillways were exactly right and that the water was being directed as it should through our system.

The water-harvesting earthworks design for Milkwood

Of course, if you live in most landscapes you have a lot easier time than we did at Milkwood when constructing the water harvesting earthworks we’d designed. Most landscapes consist mostly of topsoil and subsoil, at least for the first meter or so. But not Milkwood. Milkwood specializes in shale, road-base and rocks. This means that creating things like swales (and dams) is easier said than done.

None of this ‘just dig out the subsoil and make a nice mound downhill’ business at Milkwood when it came to making our swales. We had bedrock popping through the surface at inconvinient points, shale where we needed soil and nice reams of flint for good measure. Sort of like the difference between playing toy bulldozers in a sandpit to a gravel bed. You get the idea.

Re-setting the top spillway next to the top dam (note that this dam is now holding water!)

Anyway. Last weekend, we go the dump we had been looking for all this time. Our swales did their job perfectly and our dams are now full. Fuller than full. The spillways along the swales just needed a bit of nudging to perform as they should – to spill the right amount of water from each swale down into the next one, filling up the system from top to bottom.

Patting the middle spillway flat after re-setting

Our spillways save our dams in times of heavy rain, but they also feed the system below them. In heavy rain, the swales harvest the runoff and fill slowly, directing the water to any dam that’s placed at the end of them by default as they fill. The spillways are measured to be at the right height so that, when the dams are full enough, the water level rises above the spillway and ever-so-gently flows out and over it, rippling down across the landscape, and into the next water harvesting feature below…

Jesha the cattledog seems satisfied with the result

In order to nudge our spillways to the right height we used two things: the water in the swales (as i said, the best indication of level around) and Justin with his little excavator. This guy used his excavator just like an extension of his hand – a scrape here, a flick there, a pat and a nudge there. And in no time flat, our spillways were perfect in level and in height in relation to the rest of the swale and dam system. Hurrah!

We live on a lake! Or we will, once we move in...

Don't worry, we're as high-tech as ever

Hi there everyone. Welcome to our new website. It looks like the old website, but a little more streamlined and alot more stable. Plus it’s not selling weird pharmaceuticals from china, which is what our old website had started doing via some nasty spam-bot that had hacked its way in and started wreaking havoc with our blog.

You might want to re-subscribe to blog posts via the thingy on the right of this page, plus pick up our new RSS feeds and such, as our old feeds no longer work.

We’ll be fleshing out the resources of this new site over the coming weeks and you might find some internal links are dead, but you can always use the search function at right and find what you were after. Sadly all our old comments are gone, so feel free to wax lyrical if you wish! It’s good to finally be in greener pastures. We hope you like it here too.

Given that we are currently teaching a PDC with 40 students in the same precinct’s community centre each weekend this winter, it seemed to make sense that we should harness some of this influx of energy and point it at the garden. So with the help of Sydney Permablitz crew we put out the word and look what happened – a truly amazing day that saw the planting of a 70m living fence, new garden beds, no-dig potato patches, a new community worm farm and the beginnings of a food forest. Catch and store energy, indeed…

Nick gives the earlybirds a rundown of what we’re hoping to achieve in this Permablitz

The Alexandria Park Community Garden (zone 3) is on the south side of a soccer field. Which is great, except when there’s a soccer game on (like today). Then its more like guerilla gardening, in the sense that you’re constantly dodging missiles coming at you at high speed. Planting a living fence of bushy, hardy, flexible, fast-growing trees along the perimeter seemed to be our only available solution to lessen the barrage for the future.

And so that’s just what we did – the beginnings of a living fence made with a compact row of 140 tree seedlings planted between the soccer field and the garden, along all 70 meters of the space.

One of the tasty contributions from Blitzers.. “Carrot in the dirt” muffins! Mmm chocolate dirt…

Making a no-dig potato patch – thick layers of newspaper, followed by some blood-and-bone. Ontop will go mulch, seed potatoes, then more mulch. Simple yet effective.

No-dig potato patch all done. Be careful not to water it till the first green tips come through the mulch!

We constructed a series of new beds for the community garden to plant out. We mapped them out (double-reach beds), dug out and overturned the soil from the paths onto the beds, added a little lime followed by a barrier of newspaper to kill any grass shoots that germinate…

Both beds and paths now very well covered in newspaper. Now ontop goes great piles of horse-bedding mulch (pea straw with fresh horse poo and urine it it) which will need to sit for 6 weeks to compost down for safety.

New no-dig raised beds are now finished, complete with woodchip paths. In 6 weeks they will be ready to plant whatever the community garden chooses as their early spring delights.

Paul the master worm-wrangler provided worm-farming workshops as they installed the funky new bathtub wormfarm.

Digging a hole for the new self-pollinating cherry tree

Planting fruiting vines along the back fence, warmed by the north-facing wall: passionfruit, kiwi, grape and hardenbergia. The public access lane just behind the fence is going to be Alexandria’s favourite fast-food outlet by next year, with all these tasty treats dripping from the fence!

Our bub Ashar planting some of the hardenbergia along the fence, to act as both general bee forage and also nitrogen-fixer for the male + female kiwifruits on either side.

Mid afternoon. Getting there.

And finally by days end, all done and dusted. We all smelt a bit horsey and most of us were aching in places we didn’t know we had, but it was worth it. An amazing day. Big thanks to everyone who came, and also all those who contributed.

If you want to go along and experience the fire and the fury that is a Permablitz, you can (and should!). In Australia get in touch with either Melbourne or Sydney Permablitz crews, or join Permablitz on Facebook. If you’re further afield, contact one of these crews about starting up your own Permablitz network – they’ll be happy to help.

Special thanks to Jo Fletcher of Connect Redfern for her ongoing enthusiasim, Maria Grunder from Alexandria Park Community Garden, Jess Miller from Sydney Permablitz, Dan + Adam from Melbourne Permablitz for starting the whole thing, LoveGrub for the delish lunch and Adam Kennedy, Milkwood Permaculture intern extrodinare. And thanks to all the Surry Hills police horses for pooing so much in all that pea straw – you made a hot mulch which will soon become some amazing vegetables for the community.

Please join us this coming Monday for an all-out, fabulous explosion which will create biodiversity, edibility and community along the edge of a football field in Alexandria, Sydney. It’s a Permablitz! 10am-3pm on Monday 14th June: everyone’s welcome. Bring your friends, your granny and your gloves. And it’s free! A combined effort by Sydney Permablitz, Alexandria Park Community Garden and Milkwood Permaculture.

A Permablitz is an event formed by a group of people who come together for a short period to contribute time and energy towards creating edible landscapes and facets of permaculture systems, wherever these might be needed. This Permablitz will see us all implement features of a permaculture design within Alexandria Park Community Garden. APCG is a distributed community garden throughout Alexandria Park Community School, an amazing primary school in inner-city Sydney with a hugely diverse catchment of cultures, languages and backgrounds, including many resources for their large proportion of indigenous kids.

During this Permablitz we will be creating living fences, and vertical gardens, putting in a no-dig potato crop, doing some bio-remediation and creating a small orchard and a worm farm. The day will feature free workshops by Milkwood Permaculture’s Nick Ritar, Sydney Permablitz crew and students from our current Urban Permaculture Design Certificate. Light lunch + drinks provided, additional contributions of snacks and fruit welcome.

What to bring: hats, sensible shoes, gloves, a water bottle, snacks to share, any garden tools you don’t mind others using

What will be provided: drinks, light lunch, garden tools & some gloves, lots of plants to put in

And if you have any contributions of seedlings or cardboard or compost or newspaper, bring them along!We look forward to seeing you there and helping the wider community at Alexandria Park grow and bloom through this extra influx of goodwill, elbow grease and permaculture at its finest. And please feel free to spread the word.

Permablitz location: Alexandria Park Community Garden, Zone 3. Enter via either the Community Centre gates on the corner of Power Avenue and Park Street, or alternatively by Belmont Street at the back of the school (the better option if you need to unload contributions!). The garden is on the west end of the football field, next to the shipping containers. View an interactive map of the location here.

Getting there by Train: The venue is 15 minutes walk from Redfern Station. Take the Gibbons St exit and continue south. Gibbons St will become Wynyard St, and soon you will reach Alexandria Park on your right. Cut through the park to the corner of Park Rd and Power Avenue, and there you are. Cityrail website.

Getting there by Bus: The 370 and 355 bus routes run along McEvoy St, one block from the venue. Sydney Buses website.

Parking: There is street parking around the school, or you can park in the school carpark during this Permablitz by entering via Belmont Street, at the rear of the school.

After a summer of sparse rain, sporadic growth and mostly only greywater irrigation, we took a day or two last month to glean what we could from the basecamp vegie garden and the top food forest, before the first frosts take hold here at Milkwood.

This past summer has taught us a lot about what edible plants are the most drought-hardy in our climate, and it’s information we’re greatfully storing in our brains. Come next spring we’ll be doing our food growing a bit differently – the Milkwood kitchen garden will be up and running and the food forest understorey will be able to get well established, now that our new top dam is full…

So this autumn has represented the final phase of our basecamp grden as a vegie patch. This vegie patch was built with love and has fed us, our interns and our students for the last two years, seen us through a pregnancy and into our new phase as a small family, and we’re very thankful for it all. In retrospect, the very simple greywater swale system that we set up to provide water for the two main beds worked well, and we’d recommend this design to anyone in a similar situation. Simple, effective and passive water harvesting at its best.

From here on in the garden around Basecamp will be relegated to a plentiful year-round herb and greens garden, which will supplement the Milkwood food supply for our interns and also our on-farm courses. The basecamp caravan will now be the catering kitchen van full time! Best bush kitchen this side of the pacific, too. And surrounded by tasty greywater-fed herbs and greens, we’ll be cooking up many a feast within.

We were lucky enough to have a wonderful crew for harvest in the form of Rob and Michelle Avis from Verge Permaculture in Canada. Rob and Michelle are both from an oil and gas industry engineering background, which makes their perspective on all things Permaculture very interesting indeed. These two cool cats were a joy to have around, and we all talked long into the night about Permaculture and the possible futures of our planet as we see it. They also helped us shell scarlet runner beans, harvest deep-muched potatoes and pick all the pumpkins from the food forest understorey.

So now we’re bedding down for winter with pumpkins aplenty, rocket pesto for everyone in the valley, vast quantities of tomatillo chutney, and similar quantities of green tomato pickles and roast capsicum. Not bad for a little organic bush garden. And next year is going to be even better.

Quirindi School Garden Permaculture Design by Milkwod Permaculture – larger image here

Here’s a design we did a while back for Quirindi Public School Community Garden. Quirindi Public School is the centre of a diverse farming community in a small town in Central West NSW. Their climate is temperate and not dissimilar to Milkwood – heavy frosts in Winter, quite hot in Summer, and rainfall once predictable and now erratic. Quirindi, like much for the Central West, has also been in and out of drought for the past 7 years.

Late last year Quirindi Public School invited Nick along to do a consultancy and design a permaculture community garden and outdoor classroom. Nick took along Milkwood Permaculture interns Stephen Couling and Ko Oishii, this is what they collectively came up with – a design incorporating current and future use, active learning areas, butterfly garden, vegetable beds, rainwater harvesting, community composting and multiple opportunities for a growing community involvement.

We look forward to seeing Quirindi Public School’s garden grow, blossom and fruit with many good things.