Planting Milkwood

Links for 2010-03-17 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 00:00:00 PDT

Urban Biofilter
The Urban Biofilter purifies waste to improve quality of life in inner-cities. A micro-industrial forestry project grown with waste water on brownfields, the Urban Biofilter bioremediates water, soil and air while shielding residents from industry and transportation routes and beautifying neighborhoods. By valuing ecosystem services the project enables a green economy that serves environmental justice.

Links for 2010-03-16 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:00:00 PDT

Why is Food Connect taking off? | www.pacific-edge.info
FOOD CONNECT… it’s a bit like a contagion really, something that is rapidly spreading through viral replication. The contagion has now spread as far as Adelaide and it’s sure to replicate its way further along the coast, perhaps making the hop across Bass Strait to Tasmania and to inland towns and cities as well.
CERES FoodConnect
Melbourne Food Connect
Holistic Management with Kirk Gadzia | RegenAG.com
Join Kirk Gadzia as he tours Australia & New Zealand exclusively with RegenAG. This workshop module focuses on improving soil health and the biodiversity of rangelands and pastures, increasing grazing and wildlife capacity, increasing annual profits and enhancing livelihoods.
The First Millimeter: Healing the Earth
video on Holistic Management
Grazinglands Reduce Greenhouse Gases
Through effective policy implementation, grazinglands can reduce greenhouse gases through carbon sequestration and emissions reductions offset credits.
Multi-paddock grazing provides efficiency and profits for ranchers
VERNON – Short grazing periods on multiple paddocks within a pasture can not only restore forage conditions, but also profit margins, according to a Texas AgriLife Research scientist. Dr. Richard Teague, AgriLife Research range ecologist in Vernon, has been studying the benefits of multi-paddock grazing for the past eight years.
Grass - the future of sustainable agriculture | News | Farmers Guardian
WITH food security and climate change now on top of the Government’s list of priorities, there is a growing band of farmers talking up the virtues of grassland farming.
Announcing the Release of ‘Can Totnes and District Feed Itself?’ » Transition Culture
The report is a key part of the Totnes EDAP, taking Simon Fairlie’s Can Britain Feed Itself paper and applying it to Totnes and District.
Prepare for new farming revolution, CSIRO says - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
Australia's peak scientific body, farmers and supermarkets say they are gearing up for a new Green Revolution. In 50 years the world's population will be more than nine billion people, supplies of fertiliser could be severely depleted, and competition for land will have increased.
Western Sydney 2030
Western Sydney Regional Organisation of Councils (WSROC) has assembled a panel of leading experts on regional planning, transport, infrastructure and the environment to put forward a vision for how Western Sydney should be in 2030.

Links for 2010-03-15 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 00:00:00 PDT

Woodbridge Fruit Trees - heritage fruit tree varieties on dwarfing and semi-dwarfing stock

Links for 2010-03-08 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:00:00 PST

Microcosms in Melbourne

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 05:12:27 +0000

Just a little note of an off-site project of ours happening in Melbourne this month as part of the 2010 Food and Wine Festival. Westspace's series of rooftop installations entitled 'The High Life' is part of The Edible Garden initiative being spearheaded by the venerable Diggers Club as part of this year's festival.

Kirsten's contribution to this series is a seed ball project entitled The Latent Power of Germination and will be up on the rooftop of the Order of Melbourne from the 16-23 March, and also throughout the city thanks to hundreds of complimentary packets of seed balls. You can read all about it at Westspace's The High Life project page.

So if you live in Melbourne, please come along, sneak a peek, pick up a packet and off you go, a veritable harbringer of bloom.

Links for 2010-02-21 [del.icio.us]

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 00:00:00 PST

The Great Grocery Smackdown - The Atlantic (March 2010)
"The program, which Walmart calls Heritage Agriculture, will encourage farms within a day’s drive of one of its warehouses to grow crops that now take days to arrive in trucks from states like Florida and California. In many cases the crops once flourished in the places where Walmart is encouraging their revival, but vanished because of Big Agriculture competition."
Food Connect Sydney — Connecting farmers with city folk
It is with great excitement and much hard work that Sydney Food Connect can now announce that our first delivery has been completed!
Food Connect Adelaide
Food Connect Adelaide is a socially and environmentally progressive organisation dedicated to connecting consumers with local farmers through the mechanism of a fairer and fresher approach to food production and delivery. We are actively working on practical solutions to overcome serious problems in our current mainstream food distribution networks.
Everybody Eats :: How a Community Food System Works
It begins with small farms working with natural cycles and ends with fresh food and stronger communities in nearby cities.
Policy Brief No.4: The Multiple Functions and Benefits of Small Farm Agriculture | Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy
In the United States farms of 27 acres or less have more than ten times greater dollar output per acre than larger farms.

Links for 2010-02-20 [del.icio.us]

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 00:00:00 PST

OPERATION SRI MADAGASCAR
OPERATION SRI MADAGASCAR seeks to provide support to the Malagasy members of organization TEFY SAINA and to promote the spread of the System of Rice Intensification and agrobiology through press and informational materials as well as projects and partnerships. Organic

Links for 2010-02-13 [del.icio.us]

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 00:00:00 PST

Bustan Qaraaqa
Bustan Qaraaqa (the Tortoise Garden) is a community permaculture project, based in the West Bank town of Beit Sahour (Shepherds’ Fields), close to the city of Bethlehem. The aim of the project is to propagate a grassroots environmental movement in the Palestinian Territories to address the problems of food insecurity and environmental degradation that threaten the well-being of the population; problems that are going unaddressed as a result of the ongoing Israeli military occupation which impedes effective development.
Ragged Chutes
At Ragged Chute, 16 km southeast of Cobalt on the Montreal River, stands the world's only water-powered compressed air plant. Built in 1910, at the peak of the Cobalt silver boom, Ragged Chute Compressed Air Plant transmits air-power to the local mining industry. Compressed air, rather than electricity, is the main power source used by heavy mining equipment such as drilling machines, grinders and hoists.
ecovative design
Whoohoo! Fungi will rule the world - mushroom-based insulation, packaging and more.
Permacultura America Latina
Permacultura America Latina (PAL) is a 15-year old, Santa Fe, NM-based non-profit organization supporting grassroots sustainable development initiatives and low impact economic practices in poor and indigenous communities throughout Latin America.
Permaculture house & land tips for the Jordan Valley
Baes on Nadia Lawton's families house, re-designed after she
Financial Permaculture
During the 2009 Financial Permaculture course, Eric Toensmeier of Perennial Solutions consulting presented two excellent talks on community economic development and perennial agriculture enterprise ideas. View the slideshows

Abundance in Drylands

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Drylands greywater kitchen garden at Ampersand Sustainable Learning Center, Arizona

In the course of researching for our upcoming Permaculture Design Course in Alice Springs this April, I've come across quite a few great new resources for food security and regeneration for desert environments.

And it would seem to me, as is usually the case, the main blockage between most modern drylands habitats becoming abundant places to inhabit is the time-worn problem of access to appropriate knowledge.

Fortunately, and somewhat mysteriously, our species has a very long history of living in seemingly inhospitable environments the world over. Traditional techniques that served previous generations with food and housing are not always possible in todays world, and so much knowledge has been lost in the last century with the arrival of industrialised (and colonial) everything.

In Australia, our own red centre is a case in point. Despite being the homeland of the oldest continuing civilisation on the planet (yup, really), many of Australia's indigenous nations have been disenfranchised by industrialised food systems which have brought almost complete dependance on the multi-national supermarket for nutrition. I'll leave the cataclysm of other aspects of indigenous disenfranchisement for you to ponder - I'm sure you have some idea of what has, and continues, to be affecting our indigenous nations. If not, start here.

Digging a greywater system at Bustan Qaraaqa, Palestine.

Food security is something we should all be deeply passionate and active about. Really truly. By the way, what will you be eating for your very next meal after you read this article? Have a look on your plate. Know where any of it actually came from, in more than a vague i-hope-it's-from-somewhere-nearby sense? Know for a fact that any of it was produced within a truly sustainable framework?

Hmm. See what i mean? This is bigtime.

Designing resilience and security into our communities, in terms of food, livability and durability, is something we all need to attend to, starting today. But that need is perhaps more starkly apparent in environments where water is exquisitely valuable, any topsoil is not to be sniffed at and perceptions of what 'should grow' may be not very accurate.

Dry and brittle environments hold possibilities for both deep disappointment and joy for Permaculture designers. If you design + implement your system right, you get an amazing, resilient oasis. Get it wrong, and everything dies.

Which is why good design principles are so important. Design from pattern to details. Catch and store energy. Value the edge. Slow, small solutions. Observe and interact. Take these principles any way you want, on a micro or macrocosmic scale. Interpret them in terms of species selection, water harvesting, people care, family dynamics, urban planning, you name it. And if you do get it wrong, go back to the principles and re-design with the benefit of hindsight, observing and interacting as you go.

I think our PDC in Alice is going to be very energising and challenging for everyone involved. Challenging for us in terms of teaching (and learning from) students who deal with a desert biosphere and its associated parameters (environmental and social) every day, and energising for those who attend in terms of what possibilities are out there for designing communities for endurance and abundance.

Greywater oasis at Whoville Gardens, New Mexico

Fortunately, we'll be standing on the shoulders of giants in terms of sharing knowledge and skills for better living in drylands - here's a couple of the stellar resources we'll be working with:

Introduction to induced meandering: Bill Zeedyk is a legend of drylands regeneration. This introductory article merges good design with first-peoples understanding of hydrology to produce super simple and ardently effective solutions for managing and preventing waterway erosion in drylands and beyond.
Quivira Coalition: This group is fast emerging in the Americas as a locus for innovative restoration and sustainable agriculture working with larger scale projects. The website seems a bit stuffy, but there's many jewels pointing to further research.
Bustan Qaraaqa (the Tortoise Garden) is a community Permaculture project, based in the West Bank town of Beit Sahour (Shepherds’ Fields), close to the city of Bethlehem. A really solid Palestinian crew who are going from strength to strength. Also their blog at Green Intifada.
Water Harvesting For Drylands: a book series by Brad Landcaster that I've mentioned before, but I'm mentioning it again because it kicks butt. Any community or council presented with a decent slideshow of the images in these books would then be ready for a full-blown discussion on how to move forward on this stuff.
Oasis Design: Art Luwdig's extensive work throughout Latin America on building safe greywater gardens and waste systems can't be overstated in terms of relevance and importance given what's going on around the world right now. Tried and tested techniques. Don't let their simplicity fool you - this is design elegance at its most basic and immediately effective level.
Jordan family house: A little overview of techniques suggested for better living + gardening in Jordan, one of the lowest and driest places on earth, by the infatigable Lawton family.
Sink and Wall garden: simple yet effective. A small blog post from the Fantons on the road in India.

From a certain world view, the drylands of this planet represent possibilities for the ultimate in economical living, and the exquisite duality which comes with the idea of the oasis (so deeply embedded in all our cultural memories).

Add to that the extensive and far-reaching indigenous knowledge of country, some of which we will have access to during our time in the Alice, and i think the possibilities are endless for future drylands living which fuses many forms of knowledge together to make truly abundant communities possible - both in Australia, and beyond.

J9's vege garden in Alice Springs. We're looking forward to taking a peek at this one in April.

CarriageWorks' Kitchen Garden Project

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 05:58:26 +0000

Just a wee heads-up that a most encouraging initiative is being launched in Sydney this coming Saturday 6th Feb. Namely CarriageWorks' Kitchen Garden Project. Another nudge in the direction of local food security. Huzzah!

If you're a Sydneysider you're probably already familiar with CarriageWorks' Saturday farmer's market, which has a darn fine range of yummy regional produce and is fast becoming the biggest farmers market in Sydney. With this Kitchen Garden Project, CarriageWorks are pushing the notion of 'creative sustainability' through a series of events and workshops which I hope will result in more kitchen gardens outside (or inside) more local kitchens.

The launch on Saturday includes talks and stalls from 1pm after the farmers' market and will generally be good fun and a chance to talk about important things like how to grow stuff where you live and the finer points of how to make Kale tasty (there is a way!).

The whole Milkwood family will be there with our bicycle-powered seed ball machine, a bunch of great books on Permaculture and urban farming, Permaculture course information, and many little brown paper bags containing stealth salad seed balls, for you to take away and try a bit of guerilla gardening on your home turf.

Come by and say hello!

The saga of the top dam

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 10:41:34 +0000

Nick and Mark discussing the merits of DIY dam sealing techniques

A leaky dam is an embarrassment to everyone concerned. The earthworks operator who built it feels terrible. The people who paid for it feel indignant. The folks who designed it feel responsible. And the ground beneath the dam wall feels wet.

In the case of our top dam, wet is an understatement. Small babbling brook, gushing forth from beneath the pipe in the dam wall, is more accurate. Hmm. What to do.

Suffice to say an unfortunate combination of road-base like soil (ok not really soil, more just small rocks), bad luck and something called 'dispersive clays' all played a part. Usually when you build a dam, if you find some good clay down the bottom you get all excited. And then the dozer driver carefully spreads that clay over the inside of your dam wall, to make it hold water. And your dam doesn't leak, and you feel very chuffed. Unless your secret valley is, unbeknownst to you, locally famous for having 'dispersive clays' - which, wait for it, disperse in water. Creating the opposite effect from what you would normally expect from a clay-like medium and henceforth, doing less than nothing to seal your dam wall.

The leak where it exited the dam wall. Note rivulet heading off downhill. Not good.

The leak in our dam wall was also next to the pipe. This pipe sat in the bottom of the dam and delivered water to a tap on the outside of the dam wall, from which we could water plantings via passive water pressure. Carefully constructed, with baffle-plates to stop water passing along the pipe as it went through the dam wall, with removable filters at either end, this was our pipe of dreams. It would be our food forest's lifeline in dry summers, and eventually supply our bathouse with water.

Following some decent rain, the leak in the top dam got worse and produced a rivulet which ran through the food forest planted directly below the dam. This food forest was sited specifically to benefit from the slow plume of water which would emanate from the dam uphill via osmosis. Our carefully selected, hardy, drylands food trees that were in the direct path of this rivulet promptly turned up their toes and died from wet feet.

Following a bunch of research and talking to Permaculture earthworks experts, we were still at a loss. It turned out that all the dams along the valley leaked, regardless of their having a keyway or not, or a pipe or no pipe through their dam wall. We tried attempting to seal the dam with lucerne and bentonite (which was easy to apply as the leak had helpfully emptied the dam entirely), to no effect. We considered various techniques, and in retrospect perhaps should have borrowed some pigs and attempted to seal the dam via a method called glaying - a technique which uses a large number of animals, penned into a dry dam for a short period of time, to seal the dam by smushing their manure into the surface of the inner dam wall so effectively that it seals the deal. Apparently works great with pigs, even on pure shale, according to Joel Salatin.

So unless we wanted to seal the top dam with a very expensive, condom-like, custom-made, non-food grade, emanating who-knows-what plastic lining (we didn't), or just hope the leak would reduce in time (and have no irrigation water in the meantime without constant pumping - no thanks), our options were few.

New dam is lump to the left, old dam (new suntrap) is lump to the right. House building site is infront to the right.

The one other thing was that the top dam was not quite in the best spot. It was a little close to the building envelope that was slowly developing downhill, and I was having visions of my family tumbled out of their beds by a wall of water when a once-in-a-lifetime earthquake shook the top dam wall to bits. So we made a deal with our earthworks operator (who, as I mentioned above, luckily felt terrible about the leak) and decided to move the top dam south a bit.

Believe it or not, this all worked out quite well. We turned the 'old dam' into a north-facing amphitheater / suntrap which will be great fun as an experimental microclimate. I have hopes for bananas in about 5 years, once the protective ring of bamboo gets up. The 'new dam' we took no chances with, however, and lined it with plastic the minute it was finished. Yes, builder's plastic. I know. Most un-permaculture. But let me tell you something: it worked a treat. And now we've got water.

Topsoil being slowly and carefully loaded ontop of the builders plastic, from the bottom up.

And so a note on lining dams on the cheap, for the poor wretches among us that suffer from similar disasters:

First of all we put down a thick layer of lucerne hay, all over the inside wall of the dam. We basically stood large, cylindrical rolls of the stuff on the dam wall and unrolled them down the slope to the bottom of the dam. This was then wetted down with a pump and hose. This will rot down under the plastic in time, and also helped to protect the plastic from punctures from below as we laid topsoil ontop of it. If you can't get lucerne you could use other hay, but lucerne is great because of its high nitrogen content which will help it turn into a more sludgey impermeable layer as it rots down under the plastic.
Next we unrolled long rolls of black builders plastic down the slope of the inner wall, covering the lucerne hay. We made sure the strips overlapped by a good 40cm on each side, and weighed the whole palava down with rocks. Carefully, so we didnt puncture the plastic.
Then we got the dozer driver to place loads of topsoil on top of the builders plastic, to a depth of about 30cm, starting at the bottom of the dam wall and working his way up so it didn't slump off. This way he also didnt have to risk puncturing the plastic by driving a great heavy bulldozer over it. The depth of topsoil on the builders plastic means we aren't so concerned about our catchment coming from a giant plastic cup.
Then, when it was all covered, sealed and looked just like a new dam, we said a little prayer and crossed our fingers.

At time of writing, 6 months later, the top dam is full to the brim of water and the most water-tight dam on Milkwood. We ended up using a simple syphon, held a meter below the surface, to provide water to the food forest and other plantings below. We've still got great passive water pressure (about 6m of head) and no babbling brook at the base of the wall. The new dam is on the same contour as the old dam, and so is still fed by the 2km of top swale to the north and south.

We've mulched and planted the dam wall with oats, vetch and clover, and we look forward to a long, loving and hard-won relationship with our passively harvested water supply.

Vetch doing its thing on the dam wall, fixing nitrogen and holding the situation together.

Seedballs: from Fukuoka to Green Guerillas

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 23:00:00 +0000

Seed balls in the making at Milkwood

The poetry of the Seedball concept is simple, yet immense. Encase a seed (or seeds) in a protective jacket of clay, creating a Seed ball. Distribute Seedballs across ground, not worrying if this day, or this month even, is the best time to 'sow'. Protected from insects, buirds, heat and sunlight until the time is right, the seedball activates with a rain event which is sufficient to soak through the clay coating to germinate the seed. Which incidentally is the sort of rain event that you want to have directly following the perfect seed sowing day. And that's it. But that's not all.

Let's talk ferment. Add compost to the clay. Now you have something to kickstart those seeds after germination. Add more growing medium to the Seedball. Even better, for some situations. Add more that one seed. Different seeds. Compatible seeds. Now you're companion planting in the palm of your hand. Seedbombs the size of mandarins, which contain the beginnings of a field of wildflowers, or a hardy herb patch, or a bunch of soil-conditioning legumes. Now you're talking revolution.

Seedballing was probably initiated by Masanobu Fukuoka as part of his experiments in gentle, non-invasive farming methods at his family farm in Japan. A gentle pioneer of the organic farming movement, Fukuoka practiced a system of farming he called 'Do Nothing Farming', which is code for setting up a passive system that is as self regulating as possibe (how very permaculture). Fukuoka used a combination of powdered clay, fine compost and seeds, with simple tools like a series of screens, to make hundreds of seedballs every year as a part of his farming regime.

Fukuoka called seedballs 'a small universe in themselves'. His seed ball theory and methods are well outlined in his small manifesto on farming, eating and the limits of human knowledge, the delightfully readable One Straw Revolution, which incidentally has just been re-issued as a new translation in paperback (yay).

The beauty of the seed ball principle is not only its simplicity and economy of production. Seedballing can be used like a sort of amplified natural selection... Nature, ultimately, still decides what to grow where, but if the conditions in a particular place are right, you now have a crop. Or a stand of fast-growing pioneer trees, or a meadow.

There is a patience needed for this method - call it stealth sowing. The seeds may germinate next week, or next Spring. Or not at all. Wait and see. And in the meantime, move on to another chore. Or make more seed balls and seed elsewhere!

Guerilla seed ball action in Vancouver - before and after. Photos by Urbanwild

Seed selection is of course a fundamental factor in this method. You will be broadcasting these seedballs and probably leaving them to fend for themselves. The hardier and more appropriate to the environment the plant, the greater the chance of success. Here at Milkwood we are currently seedballing a wide mixture of acacia seeds and nitrogen-fixing tree seeds, with a sprinkling of woody ground covers and hardy native grasses. These are all being broadcast along our riparian zones, swales and future shelter belts.

We can now 'plant' thousands of trees in a day, in un-favourable conditions, and leave Nature to do her thing...

Since Fukuoka got the ball rolling, so to speak, many others have since been getting their hands dirty and producing seed balls, seed bombs, seed grenades and other heroic-sounding lumps of clay with seeds in. There is a heap of info out there on technique, but not much documentation on results that I have found, apart from anecdotes and Fukuoka's plainly successful examples.

Moving from the rural to the urban, seed balls and seed bombs are now firmly in the domain of the worldwide guerilla gardening movement. If your community doesn't have one, it's probably time to start a guerilla gardening group, which is both a funky way to spend your spare time (or all your time) and might just increase your food security. And a seed balling workshop would be a very fine, inspirational and easy inaugral event to hold.

Anitya by Anne Cooper - Land Art piece involving seed balls, unfired clay bowls, mulch, and time. Photo by Deanna Nichols

Milkwood is currently being sprinkled in seed balls, and we will be sure to document the results (and how to make a bicycle powered seed balling machine - stay tuned!). In the meantime, here's a smattering of where the seed ball craze has spread so far:

Masanobu Fukuoka: Firstly, Fukuoka's texts, including Seed Balling technique, are all bunked at the Soil Health Library, an amazing online resource which has thousands of seminal farming texts available for download. Make sure if you use this option to donate, to keep this resource breathing.

Jim Bones: Who used to have an extensive website on the subject called seedball.com which is now defunct. Happily, his how-to and why-to video, The Seed Ball Story, has found its way to Youtube.

Kathryn Miller's Seed Bombs: an early example of Seed Bombs as art from 1992. 'As a form of urban and suburban guerrilla activity, it was a small scale, non-sanctioned intervention in the landscape. The seed bombs were made available to museum visitors to take and throw somewhere they felt needed native plants, and in the process they assisted me with my project.'

The Vancouver Guerilla Gardening Group: have done various seed balling workshops, with great success. Probably the best bunch of urban seed ballers i know.

Seed Bomb how-to: there are heaps of videos up now in this technique, but this is one of the most concise. The host, Richard Reynolds, also has the best hair.

Seed Ball land art by Anne Cooper: Anitya is a gorgeous piece from New Mexico set in a field involving seed balls, clay balls, the land, and time.

It seems strange somehow that something so simple and small can hold so much power, but I'm beginning to think that's the way of things, these days. And of course it comes back to the power of the seeds themselves. Just the idea of it - portable, potential ecosystems, folded in on themselves many times over. Amazing. I think I'm in love. Thanks, Nature! Thanks, Masanobu!

Happy holidays, everyone. May your next seed experience, whether it be on your salad, in your garden or just out of the corner of your eye, fill you with wonder, joy, and a sense of renewal.

Introducing our TinyHouse

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 23:00:00 +0000

If only building it was as easy as making this mock-up, we'd be done by now...

It's happening, it's happening! After what seems like a thousand stops and starts, most notably a) hiccups with the local council regarding various things (don't even go there), b) the death of a certain piece of essential machinery (still yet to be resurrected - best not go there either), c) the birth of a certain small human, and not forgetting d) our unfortunate need to make a living, it appears that things are truly moving forward on our small dwelling at Milkwood...

2010 Permaculture Diary + Calendar

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 23:00:00 +0000

Getting organised has been an ongoing process at Milkwood - from planning our planting cycles for our kitchen garden to trying to figure out how to build that cottage of ours (getting there!). To keep track of everything that's going on we use a combo of online organisational gizmos, whiteboards, luck, guesswork and of course, my ol' faithful, hardcopy diary. And if i had to pare everything back to one organisational tool, it would be my diary - it doesn't need plugging in and even better i can tuck it under my arm, throw it in a wheelbarrow or use as a flower press for strange unidentified clover-like plants, if needed.

I mention all this because our friends Michelle Margolis + David Arnold have once again compiled a most fabulous Permaculture Diary and also Calendar for 2010. Both publications are building on last years efforts and are chock full of lush images of Permaculture in practice from all over the world, plus planting charts, personal stories, community initiatives and even a wee entry on our Rocket Powered Shower, featuring Nick in the nick - ha. This years' diary is also printed on a textured, recycled paper stock which will be a pleasure to write on throughout the year. We think they're both so great that we're helping to sell them by getting the word out.

And best of all, you can get yerself a copy right here. See below for Diary, Calendar and Diary+Calendar combos, all delivered to your door quicksmart. And once your package arrives, all you need to do is throw it in your actual or conceptual wheelbarrow, and off you go to plan next year's everythings.

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The Edible Urban: Part 1

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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

New Milkwood Permaculture website

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 05:53:08 +0000

A brief but shameless plug for our brand new website over at www.MilkwoodPermaculture.com.au. Over this winter we've been very busy selecting and organising a bunch of great teachers and courses to fill our calendar for Spring 2009 through to Autumn 2010. There's Introductory and also Urban Permaculture courses, Compost Tea workshops, Keyline Design Courses, the full-blown Permaculture Design Certificate course and who knows what else still yet to come.

Oh *and* our courses are FarmReady accredited, so if you're an Australian farmer, land manager or in the family of either, you can do our courses completely free through the FarmReady subsidy scheme. And you even get a refund on travel, accom and childcare. Wow. If I didn't already live here, I'd come here just to attend something. So go on over, have a look at the site and tell us what you think? I think we've even ironed out most of the spelling mistakes now...

Geodesic Chookdomes R Us

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Nick inside his newly completed Geodesic ChookDome, pre-chook.

A while ago we discovered online the ultimate plan for a Chook Dome which was stronger, faster and better than any others we had ever come across before (ok maybe not faster)... Nick whacked one together and it has been helping us establish the top Food Forest ever since, along with its 6 or so feathered residents. What's even more exciting than playing Buckminster Fuller with white plastic piping, however, is being able to share this great construction with the rest of you. The Geodesic ChookDome's creator, Robert Freeman, has kindly offered us to host the plans for this fabulous construction over in our How-To section. So git on down to How To: build a Geodesic Chook Dome and find out how to get your garden's fertility on the up and up. Also watch out for the video how-to here soon. Possibly followed by a run of 'Gosh I love Geodesic ChookDomes' T-shirts and bumper stickers. Maybe.