Dovecotes are a great addition to any small farm (and possibly your backyard too). Keeping doves is like keeping chickens, in a way, except there’s minimal feeding involved if you take the traditional approach. The doves fly off every morning, forage within their natural radius, and come home each night to roost.

And when they come home, they deliver to the floor of the dovecote free nutrients, in the form of guano. So firstly there’s free fertilizer, with no feeding costs. Secondly. if you’re that way inclined, there’s a seasonal supply of dove eggs, and squabs. Wild protein, delivered to your door. 

Dovecotes in Egypt

European wooden dovecote, with rotating ladder for easy squab collection

It’s the wild protein that we’re most interested in, to be blunt. We’re looking for more resilient systems to stack together at Milkwood Farm – to provide multiple  intermittent streams of animal protein for the lowest possible inputs.

We have our flock of laying and utility (multi-purpose) chickens, and they’re great. So are the ducks. But they all take an awful lot of supplementary grain and pellets to supplement their grassland scratch-and-pick diet.

Doves, however. They don’t, in theory, require daily feeding, except in particularly bad drought conditions. They fly off, forage as they may, and come home at dusk to roost. Gotta love that as a daily routine.

In addition to being 100% foragers, your average dovecote is quite fox-proof, which are the main predator around these parts. Rats we will have to guard against, but i rekon that’s doable.

Just to flag it, the term dove and pigeon is considered by most folks to be interchangeable (at the risk of bringing both dove and pigeon fanciers down on me here). Some refer to the larger breeds as pigeons and the smaller breeds as doves.

William Holman Hunt: 1827-1910: The Dovecote

Dove life Cycle:

Doves start laying in mid-spring from what I can tell, with an average of two eggs per clutch. After hatching, the young doves (squabs) can’t fly until after the 4-week old mark.

Until then, the squabs sit in their parents’ pigeonhole within their dovecote, and get fed ‘pigeon milk’ (regurgitated food) by their parents. They grow rapidly until they learn to fly, then get shoo-ed off by their parents at about 5 weeks old.

The kicker here is that, at the 4 week old mark, squabs cannot fly. This means they are composed of tender meat which has not yet ‘muscled up’ through daily flying. Yet at 4 weeks old, squabs are at least 1/2 the size of their parents, and sometimes closer to 3/4 of the size.

Of course if you don’t want to eat them you could just let them go. Or sell them. Or collect the eggs, so that you never end up with squabs.

But if you do like the idea of adding an occasional amount of zero-footprint, forage fed, hyper-local, non-factory bird meat to your diet, squab pie it is for you. And for us, hopefully one day soonish.

Adult doves can raise between 10-15 squabs a year, for up to 10 years, which sounds like a pretty resilient system to me. Some adult doves live up to 30.

Squabs ‘dress out’ at about 200g a bird from a ‘wild fed’ operation, which is admittedly not heaps. The industrially-farmed versions of squabs dress out at around 600g, either by artificial feeding or by feeding the parent doves god knows what. But that’s not the system we’re looking at so let’s leave that there.

So – 200g of dark meat which is apparently lusciously tender and somewhere between chicken and duck, with reasonable fat content. A batch of them sounds like a fine occasional pie.

Keeping in mind also that all (yep, ALL) the chicken that you have ever eaten in your entire life (unless it was your own roosters or hens) was killed when it was between 4-6 weeks of age (though some  broiler operations take them to the ripe old age of 8 weeks) , the above age for squabs is… well, it is what it is.

So. If you’re ok with all of the above, then a Dovecote could be a darn fine idea.

Dovecotes: the options:

Dovecotes range from cutesy i-dont-even-have-doves garden versions to magnificently large contraptions of stone or adobe, depending where you’re from.

Traditionally dovecotes in Europe were a sign of status, with various laws decreeing that only the upper classes could have them. Therefore squab was also an upper-class meat in those areas.

The dovecotes in the middle east seem to be a different affair. They’re just another layer of food security, especially in urban areas. They are big or small, round or square, and made of adobe.

The dovecotes of Mit Ghamr, Egypt

Dovecote at Newark Castle, England

Keeping Utility Pigeons:

There’s many varieties of doves and pigeons. The majority are bred for showing or for keeping or for racing, not so much (at least in the west) for eating.

The ones bred for meat (utility pigeons) vary also, depending on whether you’re looking for foraging birds who fly out on a daily basis or (to put it nicely) the stay-at-home types…

Once you’ve got your doves and built your dovecote, your pigeons need to be ‘homed’. This is the process of re-setting the doves’ ground-zero, as it were… resetting their internal compasses to ensure they actually come home (to the home you’ve built them) each day at dusk.

To home your pigeons  you need to shut them inside the dovecote (if it is large) or alternately in a netted area immediately around the dovecote (if it is small) for an entire lunar cycle. Or up to 6 weeks, if the birds are older.

Once the moon has gone through one complete month (during which time of course you need to feed and water them inside the dovecote area), your pigeons’ internal compasses are apparently re-set to where they’re currently housed as the new dovecote. And then you are in business of keeping doves.

White King Pigeon

What type of Pigeon:

From what we have gathered so far, the most common utility pigeon in Australia is the White King Pigeon.

However I haven’t been able to get anyone to tell me if the currently bred utility version of this breed can actually fly when fully grown, if allowed. It seems highly geared to the commercial barn-raised pigeon market where they just hobble about.

Other possibilities include Yellow Carneau’s and American Reds. I also like the look of the Texan pioneer although, as one breeder states, they’re not chickens.

An Australian bred Carneau Pigeon – another utility breed

From the research I’ve done so far, however, most western pigeon keepers who breed utility birds for the table now seem to keep them in cages, not in dovecotes. I think this is probably for ease of handling, to allow for grain feeding and to maximise body mass in both the adults and the squabs.

And also possibly because the breeds have had flight bred out of them, through a focus on weight gain and also because of the weight gain. Not dissimilar to broiler chickens who are bred to come to full size at 6 weeks old and which couldn’t fly if they tried.

However the system we’re looking at is the old-school version… shut the doves in for one month, then let them fly and forage, coming home to roost. Becuase the main components of this system that I’m interested is the pigeons gathering of nutrient from the surrounding countryside, and bringing that back to our farm, so we can harvest it as nutrient rich guano, and squab meat.

I think I might need to join the Australian National Pigeon Association and see if i can find some like-minded folks.

Fielding

Fielding is a term to describe when racing pigeons don’t come home on time because they’ve literally found a field. With things in it to eat. And so they stop and have a peck, instead of racing home again in record time.

So I suppose what we’re going for is a dovecote full of pro-fielding pigeons. Not that we live in a area with many grain fields at all – it’s all sheep and grapes and cattle around Mudgee, But there’s plenty of forage out there in the form of seeding grasses, all the year round.

Eating

Here’s something to look forward to… there’s some pretty tasty recipes out there – here’s a great list that also includes a pigeon plucking guide.

So there you have it – another strategy for catching and storing energy, and also valuing the marginal and the edges to strengthen the overall resilience of a system. A little peck here, a bit of grass seed there… And occasionally,  BBQed squab.

And nitrogen-rich guano for our food growing systems, composed of foraged nutrients and minerals. Sounds like a pretty good small-farm animal system to us.

>> More posts about small farm animal systems here…

After a fabulous summer of yielding buckets apon buckets of organic veggies, our market garden needs a rest. This system is a cycle of give and take, and it is definitely time to go into a giving phase for our not-that-brilliant soils.

Also, Michael’s been having ideas. It’s re-design time. We’re two seasons in from the start of this veggie growing project, and we’ve all agreed it’s time to get funky. Designing for resilience, you might call it… 

The market garden on the 26th March… little did it know…

The market garden 2 days later. Somewhat different, and in the middle of being ripped. But Michael was happy…

The first step in this re-design is to get our soils as happy and healthy as they can possibly be, given our land and climate and resources. We’ve ‘mined’ these soils for nutrients over the summer in the form of vegetables that have grown here, and that we’ve picked and eaten.

While we’ve been giving plenty back  to our soils over summer in the form of compost and biofertilizers, we want to create really great soils on our creekflat, not just she’ll be right soils. This is our farm’s little food bowl. It’s what gives our bodies 80% of our nutrients.

Also, there’s the weather. Ah yes, that. Now considering my little rant about doing what we can in the face of climate change, it’s time to get designing for the future. So we can get on with living it. Preferably with a beautiful year-round supply of amazing food for us and everyone who comes to the farm.

So. Planning for resilience. Planning for crazy weather patterns. Planning for drought. Planning for flood.

Yep, I know you’re with me – it’s time to perennialise the crops in the market garden. Bits of it, anyway.

So we’re thinking (and Michael is currently designing) to create a quasi row-based, simplified forest garden system with annual beds in between, starting this Spring. There will be high-yielding fruit trees. There will be understorey pick-n-mix type greens. And there will also be rows of normal annual vegetables in there too.

This is an interesting trajectory, given that 2 years ago we decided to veer away from the widely espoused permaculture ‘polyculture bed’ method of growing, at least in our market garden. And I’m glad we where we did.   We managed to grow bulk veggies via intensive, organic agriculture, on a small piece of land.

Now, though, we’re progressing the garden to provide what we need, and what we want. Which is more staples, for more of the year, in the face of more possible variances of climate.

What we won’t have is 1/2 acre of annual veggies, all at the mercy of the next big dry (or next big wet). What we will have is a resilient food growing system that swaps variety for the most suitable veggies, berries, tubers and tree crops for our climate (and it’s projections), that we can grow in the best soils we have at Milkwood.

Also, it means more rhubarb. What could possibly go wrong?

So – first things first. Soil fertility.

Unless you have the budget to source tonnes and tonnes of excellent compost and truck it all in, or a large mob of attendant cows (wouldn’t that be great – maybe one day), soil fertility is necessarily a DIY affair with soils like ours.

While our composting systems have yielded massive piles of goodness, we need more nutrient inputs to account for our large amount of veggie outputs.

So green manure crops are crucial here, on top of the compost and the biofertilizers and the seaweed extract and the rock dusts and the chicken manure and all the rest.

As this garden space is in overhaul, we decided now was a good time to rip it. With a sub-soil plow, which will break up the hard-pan in the sub soil, while not upturning the topsoil. This way we don’t turn our soil food web upside down, but we do get some de-compaction.

Sub-soil plowing is not something to be done every year. Infact we may not ever do it again. But in the interests of fast-tracking this garden and its attendant tree crops, rather than waiting the extra 5 years for the tree roots, daikon radish and all the rest to de-compact the sub soil, we brought in the ripper.

And we only broke the tractor once in the process – hoorah! The gearbox popped out. Presently it got popped back in again, and we finished the job. Gotta love the judicious use of fossil fuels and heavy machinery occasionally.

Next step – green manure cover crop – over everywhere. Michael broadcast a mix of inoculated vetch, oats, clover, lucerne and brassicas, and then raked it all in so the birds couldn’t get to it all.

This green manure mix will provide a combination of nitrogen fixation (via the vetch, clover and lucerne) and green biomass which will then be ‘dug in’ in Spring. By spring planting, this soil should be pretty darn happy.

Of course, it helps if autumn rain arrives to help germinate the seeds. Which the rain duly did not. And so it was time for sprinklers.

Michael set up big sprinklers across the entire market garden. Normally we wouldn’t use these for watering, partly as they make everything (including the weeds) grow, rather than the specific plants we’ve set in. But in this particular context, that was the idea. Grow, everything, grow…

Market garden in May, with green manures popping up despite the copious lack of rain…

And now the market garden is a green carpet. It would be much greener if we’d had any rain in the last three months, just for the record. So this is what several weeks of conservative overhead watering looks like, at this time of year, at Milkwood.

In a corner of the market garden, down the western end, Michael’s also planted out our year’s garlic supply, which has all come up and is looking truly cheerful. We’ve moved this crop’s growing area from a patch below the chicken run to the main market garden.

The reason for this is to get all the high-value food crops close together – we’ve decided that, overall with a climate and on a site like ours, it’s best to concentrate as much of our high-need (read: needs more than watering every other month) crops on the flat, for now.

Well hellooo there, garlic!

This way, we all see them every day and we know they’ll get weeded and watered as much as they need. And coddled, if necessary, depending on the needs of the season.

This last point might seem like a no-brainer to those on small or flat blocks… but if you’re growing on a hilly site where this crop is here and that crop is way over there and there’s a nook of this and a nook of that… well, sometimes things don’t get seen to the day that they should. Because we’re all busy, and they’re not right there.

So. In the interests of efficiency, we’re condensing our food crops to the creekflat. Mostly. Apart from the hill and dehesa plantings, which are another story again.

The frosts have arrived, now, so the growth of the green manures will slow down a fair bit. But they’ll continue to grow through the winter and come spring will have converted much sunlight into goodness for our garden and the future crops we’ll be feeding everyone with next Spring…

>> More posts about market gardening at Milkwood farm

Next market gardening courses are coming up in September! A Market Garden Masterclass down at Allsun Farm and a Starting a Market Garden workshop at Milkwood Farm. See you in the Spring, maybe.

Big thanks to Rob Laurie for the subsoil plow, to Karl for the tractor, and to everyone who helped get the green manures in. And to Michael for keeping his creative and problem-solving approach firmly fastened in all weathers.

Following on from raising the walls of this roundhouse in four days, Floyd and Shane have been focussed on getting this little place finished before Winter. And yep, we’ve all noticed the speed at which things progress when you go from a crew of twenty four to a crew of two!

Mind you, once the walls were up and the bones of the roof were on, this natural building project was firmly into the ‘fiddly bits’ part of the build. So perhaps it’s just as well there were 2 and not 20 people working on it. But we’re getting there now! Progress shots below… 

When last we blogged… the building looked like this -

And the mud render on the inside walls were still drying…

Nick and Floyd. Undaunted crew of wood and clay and coffee…

The ceiling – roundwood rafters with recycled hardwood board infill

The ceiling from the outside – every piece fitted to the curve. Not that tricky once you get the hang of it…

Shane in process.

Ceiling complete, time for a layer of hessian before the insulation goes on top

Floyd at the front door – featuring the wonky log as an entrance feature

And the roof hole is now plugged. We decided this was best under the circumstances, for now at least. Less head loss, and less possible leaky bits.

Pepper inspects the progress of the roof

Roof is Pepper approved.

Roof insulation goes on – recycled coolroom panel innards…

Waterproof lining goes on next

Waterproof lining over insulation, with lots of cross-bars to help hold soil in place, once we add that on top

The roundhouse in temporary Darth Vader mode. This will pass. Soon there will be soil on the roof, and then grasses waving in the breeze…

So the roof is on, and now insulated, and not leaky. Huzzah. Next it’s all about the soil, and the the plants on top, and we will have one living roof.

After that, it will be time to create the earthen floor, chink any remaining cracks, install the pot belly stove and (drum roll) get ready to turn this structure into a home…

And with all said and done, it may well be that we’re finished by Winter, in 3 weeks time. Whoohoo.

As with the Tinyhouse, this natural building project will represent what is possible to make primarily with recycled materials, the resources of the site, a limited budget and a lot of gumption. It’s great to see this earth-bound home rising out of the clay of Milkwood Farm.

p.s. we should be releasing the next and highly anticipated Natural Building workshop details this week, so jump on our mailing list if you’re not there already, and we’ll let you know when it’s happening. 

>> More posts about natural building at Milkwood…

Hooray to Floyd and Shane and Gianna, and to Nick and Michael too. Nearly there guys! Thanks also to Gianna for some of the photos above.

It has become clear that without pikelets, we would be lost. They may be small, and innocuous, but they are the shield against the storm, around here.

So you’ve worked all day and it’s now time to magically and quickly fabricate a wholesome dinner for 6 out of carrots, potatoes and carrots. So soup it is. But with soup there must be bread. Ah, yes. I didn’t quite make any, again. Oops. Aha. Pikelets. 

My Mum’s pikelet recipe, on which my world is frequently based. Not that I stick to it very much, but it’s good to have.

A little while ago a group of local gardeners came to check out Milkwood Farm. As one lady, who’d lived out in the central west all her days said as she got out of the car:

“Wow, you’re really far out of town. You must be pikelet people, yeah?”

It took me a while to get her drift but she was right. We are pikelet people. Pikelet, pakora and pancake people, to be precise.

One of the things I love about choosing to minimise consumption from the supermarket is that it makes you more creative when it comes to feeding yourself, and encourages you to prioritise growing amazing food.

What we don’t grow, we buy in bulk – the flour, the grains, the pulses, the nuts.

The main items on our shopping list in town now are things like milk, pasta (yes I know I should be making that too), matches, butter.

Oh and frozen berries. Hey, he’s 4 years old, and I want him to eat the whole bowl of breakfast so we don’t have a ‘I’m sooooooo hunnnnngry’ melt-down at 9am.

The point I’m coming to is that we try not to buy bread. We make it. Home made bread is the best. I personally am a big fan of the New York no-knead bread side of things (i’m not much of a kneader) but for others at Milkwood, sourdough reigns supreme (and it does with me also, when all I have to do is eat it).

So there’s no secret loaf in the cupboard, and there’s no ‘i’ll just pop out and get some’ bread action when we run out. We’re 45 minutes drive from the closest shop, so that hits that one on the head.

Enter the blessed pikelet. It might just be flour, milk, egg and oil, but it has saved many hungry souls around here.

Pikelets take about 5 minutes to mix up and then you’re pouring them into the pan before you know it. They come out warm and fluffy and they chink the cracks and soak up the soup.

And if we’re talking fresh organic flour, todays egg and our olive oil, they’re probably far nutritionally superior to anything I would buy at the shops, even if I could.

Chickens not laying? No eggs about? Have you run out of milk? Fear not. The pakora is what you’re after.

Pakoras. Like pikelets, but not. Sometimes better. These ones contain grated potato + onion…

Pakoras might be even better than pikelets in many ways. As long as you ensure a good supply of besan (chickpea) flower is in the pantry, you are set – anytime, anywhere.

We make pakoras with a large bowl of grated vegetables (carrot and potato, at this time of year) and maybe one handful of besan flour to every two handfuls of grated veggies.

Mix it all up with your hands, add whatever spices and seasonings you like,  and add very small amounts of water until you have a mix like mud and straw cobb (or, if you are not a cobber, till it’s all sticking together nicely, but not too wet).

Then fry table-spoon lumps in your frypan in plenty of oil, on low. They come out like fritters, but with a certain meatiness to them, which goes perfectly with soup, or in lunchboxes.

Given that I can get both my father and my son to eat pakoras in quantity (both of whom have, shall we say, strong views relating to foodstuffs that do not fit within their particular spectrum of acceptability), I say pakoras are a winner.

And then there’s the pancake. Which I’m sure you know all about. We like pancakes, they make Sunday mornings roll around here.

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t think running out of bread is that big a deal – there’s always plenty else to eat, and we know how lucky we are to have what we have. But you know that evening when you’re knackered and trying to get everyone fed pronto?

One of the things I’m coming around to living like we do now is that the slow, handmade life is all very well until you hit one of those evenings.

It’s your turn to cook. You want to get the kid to bed within an hour or so. You did not spend all day preparing slow-cooked wonderment for everyone. You are tired and you have been working very hard and this is the point when, previous to living out on the Farm, you would make the call: we are getting takeaway tonight.

But there is no takeaway and there isn’t even any takeaway leftovers in the fridge. There is no leftovers at all. Your kitchen is bursting with wonderful preserves and wholesome wholefoods, most of which will take a moderate amount of time to transform into a nourishing meal.

The garlic is braided, the carrots are outside in a sack, the forest garden is full of herbs and you know if you could just get your head together you could whip up something zesty and tasty and new and amazing and fresh and funky and you’d all be eating in an hour, glasses of local wine being poured across a table so full of the colours and smells and spices of fresh farm food. Oh huzzah the simple life.

But you can’t think straight right now and all you know is that there are lots of carrots, and that you need to start the fire, and that you are tired. And that 5 adults and one kiddo will all tromp in and sit down for dinner in one hour. And you do remember how to make soup, at least.

Which is why the pikelet and its friends are really and truly a lynchpin of simple living. Because they provide fundamental solutions to evenings like these, without anyone getting hurt.

So pour the wine, and raise a glass to the pikelet. I love you, simple living. Thanks for teaching me tenacity, and to respect the small things in life…

>> More posts about farm life at Milkwood

Just reporting back from the awesomeness that was SEED CIRCUS in Redfern yesterday… my goodness. Thank you to the 300+ folks who came from all over to learn and to swap and chat and help us eat through our glut of apples. Crikey there were a lot of you!

I think my favorite part of the day (ok equal favourite with the workshops) was the incredible diversity of the swapmeet. There were boxes of braided garlic, antique scarf collections, nepalese bell pepper seeds, cupcakes, books (from self sufficiency manuals to vampire bodice rippers), and just about everything else… 

Michael and Gi preparing 200 thank you bags of seeds and such (thought this would be stacks but we ran out by Midday…)

Milkwood apples, ready to swap…

The inaugural swappers arrive…

First seed saving workshop kicks off – cucurbits and friends

Swap it! Whoohoo

Plant swap heaven

Beautiful amaranth

Seed ball making workshop. We went for an edibles/pollinator mix for these: zinnias, calendula, fennel, parsley

Many muddy hands make… stacks and stacks of seed balls.

Seed balls drying in the sun outside…

The primo swap of the day… 3 jars of Milkwood pickles for one ute. Seriously. But more on that another day (extremely stoked and thankful in the meantime on this one)

Boxes of braided garlic! Swapping legends.

Gigi of Milkwood and Diego, who led a weed walk to Prince Alfred Park…

Still more swapping… so many treasures

Michael talking winnowing techniques to a full house

I love it when the home-made seed packets live up to the personality of the plants contained within…

So the workshops were all most excellent and we had this lovely loose crew of folk who stayed for the whole day. I was hoping this space would become a ‘hangout’ of sorts for the day and it really did – lots of people just mooching, going to get lunch, coming back for another chat, another workshop and more swappery…

The swap meet went so well it surprised us all, I think. So very many people brought wonderful small and large contributions, and everyone left with something useful and/or tasty.

We also allowed for ‘pay it forward’ swapping. In this format you basically invite people to just show up and take something home if there was something that they needed, on the proviso that they give something to someone, sometime later…

While this one was a bit of a loose concept, it was based on the sort of behaviours that we’d like to see more of in our community, and also something that is at the heart of permaculture ethics – fair share.

A big fat thank you to everyone who came along – it was great to see so many Milkwood alumni faces as well as Redfern locals and everyone else besides. Such beautiful swapping!

A special thanks to Michael, Floyd and Gigi for being such Milkwood legends from dawn till dusk, and also to Helena and Diego for their workshops. AND to Stephen and Jess for all their help. And to International Permaculture Day. And to Chris. And 107 Projects. And to Sydney for being the special mix of humanity that it is.

We’ll see you all next time, beautiful Sydney folks! It takes a lot of energy and time to organise these fair-share events, and we really do thank everyone for coming along to celebrate what community can be. So happy planting all, and may all your broadbeans grow high and plump…

>> More posts about community projects…

Right! The workshops are up: seed saving, city foraging, tortilla making – yep, it’s all happening at our Seed Circus this Sunday at 107 Redfern St…

And then, of course, there’s the ongoing swapmeet – a day of fearless barter of absolutely everything. What will you arrive with? What will you leave with? These are big questions. We’ve got a car full of dried apples and preserved everything, ready to go. So, what are you bringing?

We don’t have enough swapmeets these days. You should come along just to practice your swapping skills, if nothing else. It’s not scary at all, and you don’t even have to talk to anyone, if you don’t want to.

Don’t worry, this is not an iniquitous den of people pressing pickles apon each other with long and tortured stories of their origin. The idea is that there are long tables of awesome things. You put yours down. You pick something else up. If you feel the worth is equal, your swap is complete. Simple as that.

Ok so there will probably be some people that want to talk to each other. Lots, even. And that’s fine too. Tell us the stories of your awesome thing! The secret recipe behind your best-ever pickled beetroot. The weird and wonderful traits of the silverbeet that you’ve saved seeds from… if you’ve got a story, bring it on.

What are we bringing to swap? Milkwood Farm dried apples (grown at the end of our street and dried with love at Milkwood Farm), fresh apples and a selection of passata, pickled carrots, nashi pears in honey with star anise and pickled green tomatoes.

Oh and we’re also making up little bags of goodness for everyone containing winter green manure seeds, broad beans and who knows what else, to get you growing.

Once you’re all swapped out, join us for one of the day’s workshops, which will be casual spectaculars…

11am – Seed Saving with Michael Hewins: zucchini, pumpkins and other cucurbits. Michael heads up the organic Market Garden program at Milkwood Farm, and he knows a thing or two about growing vegetables.

Cucurbits, while sometimes exhausting in their abundance, are a very important family of foodstuffs that you should learnt to seedsave, properly.

12pm – City Weed Foraging with Diego Bonnetto (a short walk to Redfern Park). Have you been on a weed walk with Diego of Wild Stories? You should. He’s a wealth of knowledge with a unique spin on the wild nature that surrounds us.

Redfern Park is one block from the Seed Circus venue, and at 12pm Diego will take whoever is up for it on a 45 minute jaunt to explore for unusual edibles. Do you know your oxalis from your mallow? You will by the end of this…

1pm – Seed Ball making with Floyd Constable – learn how to make seed bombs for urban guerrilla edibles. Or for acacia establishment on small farms. Or for increasing pollinator species along your nearest railway line.

We’ve been working with seed balls for some years now at Milkwood Farm as part of a low energy, low cost strategy to establish biomass and biodiversity in drought years.  They’ve been very useful for us, and they can be for you too. Read the backstory of our seed ball experiments here.

2pm – Seed Saving with Michael Hewins: beautiful beans! shucking, winnowing and saving for spring. yay beans. We’ve bringing a couple of boxes of blue lake and scarlet runner bean pods from the Milkwood market garden to share with you, so come and get shucking.

In this workshop Michael will also look at winnowing, which is a technique for separating small seeds from their husks. Things like lemon balm, wild rocket, mint and amaranth. If you have anything in seed in your garden, BRING SOME ALONG and we can help you winnow it…

3pm – Soil Blocking with Michael Hewins: learn to make soil blocks and boost your spring seedling production. We love soil blocks – they’re great for getting the jump on the season for certain types of seedlings, and allow for planting out with no transplant shock. And they’re fun to make, if you get your mix just right.

While soil blocks do necessarily require a soil blocker to make, once you have one, you’re set. They’re also a perfect piece of kit to share between friends, or buy collectively. Or better yet, to have in your community tool library. Which I’m sure you’re planning to set up sometime soon.

3pm – Corn Tortilla making with Helena Garcia Garza of Fuego de la Tierra. Tortillas rock the house. They are also made from corn, that special seed that has such a crucial place in many cultures and which is also at the center of the GMO debate.

Corn, at its best, is a fantastic food. And once you learn to craft the simple awesomeness that is fresh tortillas made from freshly ground corn, you will never go back. So come and learn to make them with the best Mexican chef in town.

So that’s what we have planned. Also, if you have any seeds (or seed heads, or things like tomatoes or whatever) that you want to save seed from but need advice on how to do so, bring them along and we’ll talk you through it. Any more bean pods or winnowable (assuming that’s a word) contributions to add to the mix are welcome.

And don’t forget to bring stuff to swap! It could be a book, a bike part or a bbq. It could be seedlings, sourdough or sushi. It could be your favourite recipe, written down.

It could be a super shoulder massage (actually anyone wants to swap one of those, please come see me directly). It could be secret directions to the best unlocked dumpster + which day of the week the warehouse de-stocks their perfectly fine produce. It could be a great pair of boots. It could be a promise of lunch, or a beer, or 1 hrs help with something.

Seed Circus kicks off at 11am, and we’ll all be there till 4pm… at 107 Redfern St, Redfern. FREE for everyone.

We hope you can come. If  you’re wanting to make a day of it, check out www.PermacultureDay.org for all the amazing things happening across Sydney (and the rest of the planet) on this Sunday 5th May International Permaculture Day, which Seed Circus is a part of.

Right! That’s it. We have at the farm this morning a truck and a station wagon packed brim-full of seeds, winnowing gear, dried apples, preserves, soil block ingredients and all the rest. We’re ready to roll. Sydney, here we come….

Also feel free to rsvp and invite your friends to the Seed Circus facebook event… we actually have no idea how many of y’all are coming, and it would be fun to know, so we can ensure seeds and apples for all… thanks xx

Two good years. Two full Spring to Autumn seasons stacked with sourdough, rabbit ravioli and crazy beautiful desserts. And a quietly grounding presence for our entire farm crew, and for every student lucky enough to share a taste.

Tragic (no, really) though it is, I must share with you that Rose, the permachef whom we do love so, is off to seek the next chapter of her fortune. To design and run a new inner-city eatery in Brisbane, to be exact. I hope those Brisbanites figure out how good they’ve got it coming to them… 

Rose’s sourdough croissants. She didn’t have enough to do that day…

And on, and on. Fresh food, treated with love, cooked with care, and eaten with gusto by us all…

Rose probably wouldn’t want me to make a big deal about this. Every time we threw back our heads when dinner was served and yelled VIVA LA COCINERA (huzzah the cook) someone typically got threatened with a spoon. She’s like that.

But still it must be said. Even if only a little bit.

Milkwood Farm has been a rapidly evolving social enterprise which has careened in various new directions at a great rate of knots in the last two years (or that’s how it feels from the inside, anyway).

And in the middle of all the brainstorming and experimenting and trying and succeeding and failing and succeeding again has been Rose. Always. Quietly serving up yet another amazing meal, in the midst of all the crazy ideas and projects and woofers and interns and crew and piles of things that shouldn’t be on the servery. Again.

Rose has made many things apparent since she arrived at Milkwood Farm in the Spring of 2011. Most of all, that good, simple, nourishing food, cooked with love and served up in a timely fashion, is the key to a happy Milkwood Farm.

A good cook is intrinsic to an operation of our type in every way you can think of. The kitchen is the heart of our farm – it’s where all the harvest goes into, and where so very many meals, preserves and also lots of washing up comes out of.

Before Rose arrived, I was kinda the default cook of Milkwood, though we pretended to rotate throughout the crew. While I enjoyed catering for our early PDC and other courses, once the baby wouldn’t stay strapped to my back throughout, it got a bit tricky.

And then Milkwood started flowering and becoming something bigger than just Nick and I pedalling as hard as we could to make it all work. So cooking for everyone got a bit trickier again.

But we got by with a roster, itinerant input from a range lovely folk including shearers cooks (thanks Vicki) and best friends (thanks Sofie) until one day I cracked it and decided that next Spring we would get a cook during course season.

Rose with yet another batch of beetroot and radish sauerkraut…

Enter Rose. She can break down the carcass of a deer before breakfast and then make sourdough croissants for lunch (just to try them out, you know).

She’s the kind of girl who trots off up the hill with a basket to gather nettles, then adapts instantly to incorporate them alongside the surprise arrival of four just-hunted rabbits for dinner.

She’s the kind of girl who can make a full roast dinner for 40 hungry permaculture students, then make flower sprinkled desserts as well. And then do it all again tomorrow. And she can make 3 rows of pak choi into things other than, er, pak choi.

And the preserves. Ah, the preserves. How many tonnes of just-picked tomatoes this year did you turn into passata, Rose? Because that’s the thing with a garden-to-plate operation. Once the food starts ripening, you better be ready to deal with it. All of it. Now. And deal with it all Rose did – we now have passata to last us all till Christmas.

Ok you get it by now, I’m sure. She rocks. We’re so grateful to have known her and we feel blessed to have been a part of her life’s journey.

Rose, thank you. For your food, your centered presence, and your grace. Thanks for the love (and considerable patience) you’ve showed Ashar, always welcoming him into your kitchen and letting him help wherever you could. He’s a lucky kid to have had an auntie such as you around for two whole seasons of childhood…

So to paraphrase Mr Salatin; may your krauts all foam and your sprouts not. May your sourdough always rise and your goose-fat potatoes crisp up. May your children rise up and call you blessed. You’ve already made a better world than you found.

Any shout-outs of appreciation  for Miss Rosie Rose (remember, we’re all out of spoon range now), bring them on….

>> More posts about making and baking food at Milkwood

So what happens now? Well that’s the question. We’re putting the finishing touches on our ‘wanted: kick-ass farm cook/chef’ position description, and we’ll be putting it about shortly in readiness for our next Spring-Autumn season. If you know anyone suitably awesome (and available), be sure to tell them to get in touch…

p.s. when Rose’s Brisbane joint opens, we’ll be sure to let y’all know.

A guild, in permaculture terms, is usually used to define a harmonious assembly of species clustered around a central element (plant or animal) that acts in relation to this element to assist its health, aid our work in management, or buffer adverse environmental effects (Mollison, via Jacke).

Dave Jacke has taken this concept further and identifies a range of different types of guilds that generally (but not exclusively) can be applied to aid forest garden design process. Like many permaculture design elements, these guild types at once simple, and deeply complex… 

Resource-Sharing or Resource-Partitioning Guild

This type of guild is a group of plants that inhabit the same community niche (ie have the same general needs), but which also find a way to partition resources so that their competition is minimal.

I think we humans have a lot to learn from this guild type in how we relate to each other, but let’s leave that for another day…

Mutual Support Guild

This type of guild is made up of different types of species which form a network of mutual aid and support, for the benefit of all.

Aid in the forms of complimentary nutrient needs, growing condition needs, how each plant interacts with the soil food web, and so on.

Community Function Guild

This guild is a group of elements that are grouped in the old sense of the world guild (ie a guild of craftspeople, all fo the same skilltype). It’s a group of plants that perform the same function, which should be submitted for consideration to be grouped together in a design sense for their ability to backup each other, in the interests of a failsafe system.

Some species in a community function guild may well compete for space or light or nutrients, and that’s something you have to consider in your design… the point of considering community function guilds is to be able to ask yourself things like ‘so if that acacia dies because conditions are too dry/wet/rocky/etc for it just there, what will provide my nitrogen fixation in this part of my design?‘

The upshot of these guild types is that if you usilize them when designing a forest garden (or any other type of garden, for that matter), you will get more bang for your buck; in terms of system stability, garden health, energy expended to keep it all working, and yields.

Also, you’ll notice these guilds are intended as patterns – relationship templates – analogs. This is not a ‘you must plant this species with that species’ type design tool. These guilds are frameworks into which you can insert whatever species best grow in your biosphere.

The point is how these types of species relate, not the particular species themselves…

Planning a garden that incorporates these guild concepts will also give you a much more resilient garden, which is a massive consideration in times of weather uncertainty and stress, as well as general resource (like water and available nutrients) scarcity.

Dave Jacke writes extensively on the details of these guild types (and many, many other extremely useful aspects of forest garden design) in his excellent two-volume work Edible Forest Gardens Vol I & II…

But the above info is a great start to get you thinking about how species in your garden can benefit from super complimentary relationships, when you design it right.

I think, as we all move towards resilience being a primary factor when designing our food, fibre and woodlot plantings, you’ll find yourself thinking in guilds more and more. Because interdependence and complimentary functions will be the name of the game, if we want to create abundance in an environment of uncertainty.

>> More posts about Forest garden design and implementation here…

Hey! We stopped offering forest garden short courses because there didn’t seem to be sufficient interest in them after the first few… has this changed? Do you want to skill up in forest garden design? If so, click here and tell us.

If we get enough interest, we’ll start up this course stream again. Which would be great, because it’s a brilliant knowledge area with far-reaching implications for everyone’s home and community food security…

Big thanks to Hannah Moloney for drawing up the above guild types into quick posters for teaching tools during the recent Forest Garden Design Intensive with Dave Jacke at Milkwood Farm.

‘Packed with minerals and protein, and easy to grow at home’… too right. Home mushroom cultivation is a good idea, for everyone. You don’t even need a window in your house (though we do hope that you have one), let alone a window sill or outdoor area to grow nutrient dense, protein rich, organic mushroomy goodness…

Check out these gorgeous mushroom cultivation posters by Victor Paiam… 

So now you have no excuse. Before beginning, do check out our posts on growing shiitake mushrooms which has all sorts of excellent ebook resources in it.

And also our post on growing oyster mushrooms in a bucket (actually two buckets, one inside the other) as a great space-saving strategy for homestead mushroom production… oh and you can grow them in laundry baskets also.

And while you’re at it, support artists producing excellent, useful work about skills we all need. You can buy Victor Paiam’s posters in both spanish and english here, and check out the rest of his sustainability-focussed awesomeness here…

Aussies, we have one spot left in our May Mushroom Cultivation workshop in Hobart, Tasmania… so if you’re ready to dive in and learn a lot of new skills in two short days, please join us!

>> More posts about home mushroom cultivation…

Our Urban Permaculture Design Course is coming up fast in July, and is shaping to be pretty special. Leading the learning will be the awesome Hannah Moloney, supported by Nick Ritar and none other that the co-originator of Permaculture, David Holmgren.

The great thing about this teaching team is the breadth of experience and enthusiasm they bring to share with students of urban permaculture design – Hannah is a long-time urban community cultivator, Nick’s focus is the small farm / urban permaculture resurgence, and David Holmgren, well, he’s David Holmgren. Need we say more. But we will. 

Hannah in her most recent rental home garden in Hobart, Tasmaina

We’re really proud to be working with Hannah Moloney as the lead teacher. Hannah has been working in community renewal and practical permaculture for over 10 years, and is a positive force to be rekoned with.

One of the things we like best about Hannah is her ability to teach, without telling. She has this marvelous ability to draw the existing knowledge in the room out of students who didn’t even realise they knew that much, and before you know it, you’ve figured out the solution to the question.

Hannah is also a doer. If you look at her body of work, this becomes quite apparent – she’s not just throwing about theoretical solutions to community renewal and neighbourhood food security, or nutrient cycling, or resilience.

This girl had walked the walk. And we LOVE that in an educator. Inspiration for us all.

Nick making hot thermophilic compost with Urban PDC students

Joining Hannah will be Nick Ritar. Nick probably doesn’t need much introduction on this blog, as he co-founded Milkwood as a social enterprise, farm and network.

Nick’s focus is resilient, intelligent systems and design. Making things work together – geese and sheep, solar energy and tinyhouses, chooks and fruit trees.

And also principles. How and why different kinds of biomimicry works. How to apply patterns from nature for use in the home, in the backyard and in the back lane.

Originally an engineer by training, Nick is amazing at breaking down dauntingly large concepts, stats and projects into simple blocks, so that they’re very understandable. And if you understand, you can design your way towards a solution. And then do it. Whether we’re talking backyard chicken house, DIY solar hot water system or urban farm nutrient cycling, it’s all about good design.

David Holmgren with his Partner Su Dennett on the permaculture small-acre homestead they’ve been developing these last 20+ years

David Holmgren is the co-originator of Permaculture, alongside Bill Mollison. We love working with David partly because of his gigantic brain, but also because of his energy and enthusiasm to share what he knows with others.

David will be guest teaching on this PDC and covering the permaculture principles he has set out. These permaculture principles are simple yet hugely powerful concepts that enable the everyday application of permaculture to the homestead scale and beyond.

Catch and store energy. Design from pattern to details. Use edges and value the marginal. Obtain a yield. And so on…

We will also be drawing on David’s extensive knowledge of weeds and wild nature – what does the probable future hold for our notions of wilderness? Should, when planning for resilience, we take a different attitude to weeds? These questions may seem odd, but they form part of our future, as climates change and plant species migrate…

Milkwood PDC students exploring Michele’s Marrickville verge garden…

Plus, there will be field trips! A tour of Urban Permaculture in Action – rocking verge gardens, urban food forests, appropriate technology and more.

And of course, all of this learning will happen smack-bang in the center of Sydney, at the wonderful community center we call our Sydney education home. Its flourishing veggie and forest gardens, DIY aquaponics system, native beehive and all the rest make for a beautiful setting for learning, thinking and doing.

Milkwood students in the community garden that wraps around our Sydney classroom

So if you’re ready to take on 2 weeks of Urban Permaculture design thinking, designing and doing, please join us! The class is half full already, and the early bird price finishes on the 18th May.

Urban Permaculture Design course: July 2013: Sydney NSW

Milkwood PDC student design for a wicking bed – simple, affordable solutions to everyday needs…

>> More posts about permaculture here…