And I think all in all, it went pretty well. Ever since the gazillions of tomato plants (in numerous heritage varieties) were planted in the Milkwood Market Garden, we’ve been waiting for this great day. The inaugural squishing of the harvest.

And check out our new, fancy-pants passata machine! In the spirit of multi-function, it also transforms into a meat mincer and a juicer, so we can harvest every which way. And harvest we will…

Rose, nearly beside herself with the glory of passata

This was admittedly a test run of the passata machine… we’re about a week off from coming into full-blown tomato harvest, which should continue for a month or so.

We expect this machine to get quite a workout over the coming months, between making passata by the truckload, juicing tonnes of apples from the little orchard down the road we’ve made friends with, and, of course, mincing meat in the interests of sausage. Mmmm sausage.

The passata machine was a labor of love in terms of research to choose which model to buy – we asked around, we rung up tomato growers, we canvassed all the passata-making Nonnas we knew.

We weighed up hand-cranked versus mechanised. Cheap versus expensive. 1/3 horsepower motors vs 1 horse power motors. Single use vs multifunctional. And all this went on for months.

In the end, we settled on a machine that could do three of the many things we need done during harvest: make large quantities of passata, juice a great deal of fruit (mostly apples) and mince meat. All these tasks need to be done on a large-ish scale here at Milkwood Farm, so we needed something with a lot of grunt.

The machine we ended up with is a 1 horsepower Fabio Leonardi MR9, with both tomato crusher and mincer attachments. It is one serious machine. It’s also much bigger than I expected (not sure why i though it would be small, but i did). And it works a treat.

My plan with this machine was basically ‘get it right the first time’ and get something that can be used by us and whoever else we know in our area that needs to mince or squish something, for decades into the future.

I have been told of people that have been using these machines for 30 years, and they’re still going strong. And I know it will pay for itself within a year or two in terms of allowing us to process a huge quantity of organic produce to then be preserved and eaten year round.

Anyway. We’ll let you know how it goes. But we’re pretty happy with it so far!

We got the passata machine online from Bake and Brew (based in Adelaide), who stock lots of the Leonardi stuff. They also sell 1/2 hp and 1/4 hp models, and they were great to deal with and knew all the answers to my questions. Yay for them.

Olivier (incidentally whose Nonna recommended a Leonardi passata maker) with about to be planted tomato, November 2011

Tomatoes in, ready to be mulched

Mid December 2011

Passata!

(Just a note on the passata machine + Bake and Brew shop: we didn’t receive a kickback  for this purchase in any way, we just like it, and wanted to share what we’ve learned.)

Related posts:

• Tick, tock, Tomato A’clock
• Market Garden update: Midsummer
• How to make a planting calendar, Allsun Style

Earthship in Brighton, England

Guess what? We’re hosting a great evening talk with Michael Reynolds, that world-leading sustainability pioneer of Earthship Biotecture, in Sydney on the 26th Feb. Do you want to come?

This community event is going to be a uniquely inspiring & informative evening of radical architecture, ideas and discussion about Earthship building and living. >> Book tickets here.

Ok Earthships: a building technique you may have heard about, using recycled tires and bottle walls, passive solar gain, no energy needed to heat or cool, etc. Yep, that one. The totally self-sufficient building thing. It’s been going 25 years as a active concept, and every step of the way has been fascinating.

Apart from the fact that Earthships are quite basically awesome, this is a chance to listen to and Q&A with a bloke who, perhaps more than any other architect of the last 25 years, has had an unprecedented influence on eco-architecture world-wide, and how we think about sustainability.

Michael Reynolds

Completed Earthship in Taos, New Mexico

Inside a completed Earthship in the desert

We’re inviting community and biotecture related crews to set up stalls as part of the event, so all in all it should be a corker of a night of knowledge, networking and downright interesting company that will leave you considering just what the boundaries of achievable sustainability are.

We’re really looking forward to it. We hope to see you there! >> Book tickets here.

Stacks more info on Earthships can be found at the Earthship Biotecture website.

So just over a year ago, our house dam filled for the first time. And then went into scary nearly-melt-down. So we pumped the water out, fixed it, and then waited for it to fill again. And waited. For a year.

Do excuse multiple soggy shots of muddy pools, but this is big news at Milkwood Farm. Last weekend, for the first time, our swale and dam system filled, thanks to a big downpour on the tail of a very wet spring. And nothing went wrong. Yay!

If you’d like to read about our imperfect (but ultimately triumphant) history with earthworks at the farm, please read the Saga of the Top Dam and the Saga of the Middle Dam.

You could also read these if you’re just feeling sad, and need to be cheered up by the fact that at least you don’t have multiple heart-stopping earthworks structural oddities that nearly took your best-laid plans apart.

But that’s all behind us now. The house dam is full! Not that it will stay full in this climate, we know that. But we are fairly sure that all the dams on our little farm work now. And that makes me extremely relived, for all sorts of reasons.

As you can also see, the tinyhouse is nearing completion. Hoping we’ll be in for Easter, but hoping in a ‘I hope The Decemberists play Sydney and I can escape child-free  for a whole weekend to see them’ type way… it would be great (really great), but we’ll live if it doesn’t happen.

We’ll be swimming + fishing off the deck in no time….

The pond below the house dam, created to acquire material to repair the dam wall the time it nearly failed due to dodgy construction in December 2010. Now a frog and goose haven.

Thanks to Stephen Couling for the photos…

We have been searching for seeds of the Siberian Pea Tree (Caragana arborescens) for years. Permies in North America and Europe rave about this plant for it’s hardiness, growth, nitrogen fixing and forage capabilities. But find it in Australia, we could not. Until we found Phoenix Seeds!

Phoenix Seeds is a little seed company in Tasmania. Their catalog is awesome. They have no website. They seem ardently and unashamedly old-school. And I love them to bits. Because they, unlike every other Australian seed company I’ve talked to, stock Siberian Pea Shrub seeds…

Siberian Pea shrub is similar to Honey Locust (no spikes tho, which is great) in many ways, but the reason we’ve been searching for it is because it is a great addition to Milkwood Farm, for the following attributes:

• Drought hardy
• Frost hardy
• Puts up with crappy soil
• Nitrogen fixing
• Fast growing
• Chicken forage
• Edible peas (they make great dahl, apparently)
• Deciduous (yay biomass + soil creation)

So there you have it. It won’t replace our fabulous acacias range, nor the tagasaste, nor the honey locusts. But it will hopefully be another addition of a very multifaceted, useful tree that will help build Milkwood into an amazing, fertile place.

You can read more about the delights of the Siberian Pea Tree at Plants for a Future.

Related articles on Milkwood.net:

• Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture – book review
• Seed Balls: how to grow trees without really trying
• Forest Garden posts

More beautiful shots by Cathy X from our current Urban Permaculture Design Certificate that Nick is teaching in Sydney.

Featuring Michele Margolis’ amazing urban permaculture garden, Adam Grubb teaching soil, and permaculture design! And mini bulldozers, of course…

First, a visit to Michele Margolis’s rockin’ urban permaculture forest garden in inner-city Marrickville…

Then a spot of earthmoving talk, in relation to building dams, swales and other permaculture earthworks. How best to make everyone in the room feel comfortable with the knowledge? Keep it playful…

And then enters Adam Grubb from Very Edible Gardens – to talk soil, permablitz and urban design…

Who says you can’t get your hands dirty in the city…

Many thanks to Cathy X for her continuing ability to make a PDC experience look as lush and wonderful as it actually is, but in photographs.

Next Milkwood Urban PDC‘s in Sydney: 17 March – 10 June (Part Time), and 1-14 July (intensive)… please join us if you’re ready to get rolling on a regenerative future…

Once you’ve harvested your natural honeycomb from your Warré (or other kind of top bar) beehive, it’s time to make get some of that goodness into jars! Fortunately, like many other aspects of natural beekeeping, getting the honey out of natural comb is easy and simple, once you know how.

We’re just at the start of our beekeeping journey, but still, even though we don’t have whizz-bang equipment, we found this a wonderfully tactile and rewarding experience. It’s prettymuch just a case of crushing the comb, sieving it, and bottling the results. 100% organic yum, with all the goodness of the honey still utterly intact.

At first, this seemed just a bit to easy – don’t we need extractors, hot knives, spinning things and somewhere to store all the frames? Not when doing natural beekeeping, you don’t. You simply cut the comb off the top bar, crush it up, strain it through a sieve and, um, that’s it.

Tim cuts the honeycomb off the top-bars

Warré honeycomb, all ready to crush...

Nick tucks into a spare piece of semi-capped honeycomb

The comb is crushed and mashed...

Then into the sieve over the honey bucket...

Getting all the crushed comb in, including some older stuff from a previous harvest

And proceed to get squishy! It's quite a sensation...

The result - pure, cold-pressed organic honey

Mmmm honey...

The advantages of harvesting honey in this way include:

• You get everything that was in the comb, in your honey. Pollen, propolis, the lot. Which is ridiculously good for you, in all sorts of ways.
• Because the natural comb is not re-used year after year, there’s less chance that environmental toxins that might be present in the comb can build up, affecting both the colony, and the honey.
• You get a big glob of organic beeswax, which you can then use creatively (we’re using ours for sealing the ends of our shiitake mushroom logs).
• You get honey that is not heated in any way during the process, which means none of the delicate antibiotics and enzymes within the honey are destroyed. It all makes it into the jar.

The advantages to the bees by harvesting honey from hives managed in this way include:

• The bees get to build natural comb, with no plastic or pre-set foundation. This benefits the colony in heaps of ways including but not limited to: communication (vibrating the comb to send messages), general hive health, toxin accumulation, etc and so on.
• By getting to build new comb, the bees get to re-set their cell size according to what is needed in that comb at that point (did you know they make all different gauges of cell size, given the chance?).

Tim Malfroy’s tips for a happy honey harvest from Warré comb:

• Have all your gear washed and ready, and process the comb soon after you return from collecting it in the hive. The honey will be more liquid at this point.
• If for some reason you have to wait to process the comb, put it in the sun before crushing it to gently warm it. It will make everything quicker and easier
• If you’re not going to process the comb straight away, cut if off the frames and store it in slabs of comb. While it’s in the comb, it is sealed and pure, and will last much longer than broken up.

For this harvest, we placed a big sieve on top of a honey bucket with a ‘gate’ on the front, then simply crushed the comb in a bucket and then tipped it into the sieve. To speed the process up, we all squished the comb by grabbing great handfuls – this meant we expelled the honey from the wax much quicker.

At the end of this process we had about 5kg of strained honey (from 3 combs – we’ll be harvesting more later) and about 0.5kg of beeswax in lumps.

The beeswax we’ll melt down in water and skim off, from which brew we’ll be left with honey water, which is what mead is made from! But we’ll probably just drink that straight – it’s an awesome cocktail-like honey hit of propolis, pollen and honey.

So there you have it. Honey harvest the simple way. I dare say we’ll get more experimental and advanced in our techniques as we go, but as a starting point, this was great fun!

If you’d like to read more about Warré beekeeping, head to Tim Malfroy’s Natural Beekeeping website, which is full of great info about this very permaculture-minded approach to bees.

And the journey of Warré beekeeping at Milkwood Farm is here.

Sunlight in a jar. So many millions of flowers went into making this... many thanks, Milkwood bees!

• Natural Beekeeping courses at Milkwood Farm + inner-city Sydney
• More Milkwood.net How-to’s on everything from planting spuds to shiitake logs

On 28-29 Jan 2012 we’re running a intensive mushroom workshop at Milkwood Farm with Will Borowski – we’ll be learning how to cultivate oyster and shiitake mushrooms, cultivate mycellium on agar, make grain spawn, set up mushroom gardens, inoculate logs and more! Please join us.

For this workshop we’re sticking to getting the basics of mushroom propagation and spawn creation right. Once we’ve all mastered those, we can expand into the more advanced mushroom cultivation techniques. We’ve got big plans for all sorts of fungi cultivation in our forest garden…

Growing mushrooms doesn't need to be complicated. Image © Miguel Angel Rodríguez Martínez

Growing oyster mushrooms on a bag

From the course material:

Growing your own mushrooms is a fabulous way to broaden your family’s home-grown nutrition, and has many benefits for your nearby garden as well. This workshop includes a host of take-home mushroom resources to get you growing.

In this workshop Will Borowski will cover the basics of home mushroom propagation as well as multiple specific techniques for growing different types of mushrooms that you can do in your own home with minimal equipment, and using recycled materials.

Will Borowski’s approach is perfect for permaculture-minded gardeners. Will uses minimal intervention with his mushroom propagation and focuses on creating resilient strains of mycelium which can better handle natural environments, rather than the climate-controlled approach of conventional mushroom propagation.

Making shiitake logs at Will's June 2011 workshop

Shiitake logs in situ

This workshop covers:

• The basics of how mycelium works in nature
• An overview of the fungi of Australia
• Making grain spawn for oyster mushrooms
• How to inoculate a log with spawn in order to grow shiitake mushrooms
• How to make agar for mushroom propagation
• How to grow oyster mushrooms in bags
• How to create a mushroom garden in your backyard

>> More info and course bookings here.

We’re also doing the same course in Sydney in March 2012, the details of which are here.

Will Borowski showing how to make agar for mycellium substrate

The next generation of Borowski's. Everyone loves mushrooms!

Related articles on Milkwood.net:

• How to make a shiitake mushroom log
• What we’re reading: Mycellium Running

It seems unbelievable that only 5 months ago our now abundant market garden was a scruffy bare creek flat. But it’s true! And now we’ve got produce coming out our ears, thanks to many fabulous folks coming together to make it so.

Up in the hills as we are, it’s a bit of a harsh climate for growing stuff. About 4 frost free months for growing only, poor soils, 600mm annual rainfall, crazy dry winds, etc and so on. We’re not complaining, but I’d just like to flag that this is a garden created in non-ideal conditions. Except for gumption. We’ve got plenty of that.

Nick breaks ground for a soil sample in July 2011, while Joyce and Mike from Allsun consider the possibilities...

The pictures tell the story. We fenced the creek flat, brought in a pig tractor, then followed that up with a whole lot of human labor, hard-won knowledge shared with us, trial and error, and nutrients.

The lynchpin of all this action has been Stephen Couling, our Organic Market Garden trainee. Trainee doesn’t seem the right word at all however, as he’s managed this whole garden project. At any rate, he’s the dude. The keeper of the carrots. The OMG.

I wrote a fair bit about how we wanted this garden to be when it was just starting, and somehow we’re now in mid-summer, and it’s all up over our heads. Hooray! Stephen has had many thrills and spills along the way, all recorded with aplomb and dexterity over at the Milkwood Market Garden Blog.

Nick’s currently in Sydney teaching the Urban PDC and I’m bouncing around the place, but I’m headed home shortly to start to put things in place for the next round of fun at Milkwood Farm that starts this week: Rose is back, wwoofers + crew are back… it’s all on again!

Pig tractor in action. August 2011

Spading time. August 2011

Stephen makes the first beds. Sept 2011

Soil block seedlings ready to jumpstart the garden. Sept 2011

Stephen sowing the very first seedlings - lettuce! Sept 2011

Making beds, first time round. Lots of clods of cooch grass to break up! Sept 2011

Rocket in and rolling. Sept 2011

Frost! Kills slugs, slows growth. The problem is the solution. Sometimes. Sept 2011

Starting an Organic Market Garden course. Sept 2011

Students getting into bed making. Sept 2011

Rocket coming on. Oct 2011

In which we install nutrient trenches in every path: horse bedding (sawdust and horse poo) covered in woodchips. Oct 2011

First bok choi harvest! 13 Oct 2011

Stephen the day the sprinklers got installed. Happy. Oct 2011

Mulched beds. We couldnt help ourselves. Oct 2011

The inaugral radish. 23 Oct 2011

Nick planting a tomato. Oct 2011

Tomatoes off and running. Nov 2011

The harvest starts to come in in bucket loads. Hurrah! Nov 2011

Rose with 100% Milkwood OMG salad. Nov 2011

And here comes spring... late Nov 2011

Let there be lettuce. Nov 2011

Harvest moves from bucket loads to barrow loads! Dec 2011

Beans beginning to climb. Dec 2011

Michael harvesting spring onions. Dec 2011

Christmas eve family pickathon. Dec 2011

Beans and corn. Jan 2012

And here come the tomatoes! Jan 2012

Many thanks to Stephen Couling the OMG, Joyce and Michael of Allsun Farm, Michael Hewins the super-wwoofer, Georgie and James from Ormiston all the rest of you beautiful folk that have helped get the market garden at Milkwood Farm rolling.

And if we can make it happen here at Milkwood Farm with our scruffy soils and non-ideal conditions, I’m confident that local food security for Australia is really truly possible, given the ‘good land’ that every town or community generally has.

It’s just a matter of really wanting to, good planning, and gathering enough like-minded crew and knowledge to make it happen.

Organic Market Gardening resources + articles:

• Allsun’s Market Gardening CD ROM
• Eliot Coleman’s Fertile Dozen (book list)
• Milkwood Starting an Organic Market Garden Workshops

Right now Nick’s in the the middle of teaching Milkwood Permaculture’s annual summer Urban Permaculture Design Certificate in Sydney, which is always a fabulous two weeks. This year, we have the wonderful Cathy X as one of the students, and she’s documenting the process in pictures.

I love this course. It’s so similar, yet so different to the PDCs we run at Milkwood Farm – same core curriculum, principles and Nick’s fabulous + infectious energy, but realized in the middle of the city, instead of way out in the backwoods. And once again we’re blessed to have an awesome group of students to work with for 2 weeks.

Playing David Holmgren's Permaculture Principles card game. Photo by Cathy X

And as always, we’ve got a crew of fabulous guest teachers bringing their specialist knowledge and experience to the course. It’s great to be able to engage the students with a range of perspectives during this time – it makes the course so much richer, and i think it helps the knowledge sink in…

This edition, we’ve got Dan Harris Pascal talking trees, Alexia Martinez talking climate, Adam Grubb talking soils, urban permaculture design and PERMABLITZ (coming to that?) and a couple of other short guest sessions.

All this learning is topped off by site visits to Michele Margolis‘s brilliant urban permaculture system in Marrickville, and Michael Mobbs’ acclaimed Sustainable House in Chippendale. It’s a big two weeks…

Here’s a couple of pics from the course so far. All photos by Cathy X, with thanks.

Our next two Urban Permaculture Design Courses in Sydney are in March-June (part time) 2012 and July (2 week intensive) 2012

Knowledge can only be transferred with succicient tea. Photo by Cathy X

Compost making. Photo by Cathy X

Compost making, with all students bringing inputs along to contribute to the pile. Photo by Cathy X

Shredded office paper as carbon inputs for urban compost making. Photo by Cathy X

Coffee bean husks from Campos Coffee Roasters - great carbon input for compost! Photo by Cathy X

Chopping up compost inputs. Photo by Cathy X

And compost pile finished - 1m cubed of extremely diverse inputs, to be turned as needed through the course. Photo by Cathy X

Classtime. Photo by Cathy X

Group work exploring interrelationships within natural systems. Photo by Cathy X

Two heads are often better than one when figuring out the solution. Photo by Cathy X

Nick taking the class through a surveying exercise in the park next door. Photo by Cathy X

Learning surveying techniques in the park. Photo by Cathy X

And a quick note that, as part of this 2 week session we’re hosting a Permablitz info night on Monday which everyone is welcome to attend. It will be great.

Associated permaculture bits on Milkwood.net

• David Holmgren’s Permaculture Principles
• Living close: Strata Title Permaculture
• Funky Urban Permaculture Designs by VEG

And…

All out posts about permaculture…

Join Adam Grubb of the original Permablitz crew for a fabulous and free info night on how to devise and run a great permablitz. Come along and learn skills and tricks for running a successful permablitz that your whole community can get inspired by…

This free event is for any permablitz enthusiast who wants to see successful, awesome and safe Permablitzes become a regular part of the Sydney community’s active permaculture fabric. Let’s skill up, learn from experience, get some tips, and get going!

Photo courtesy of Melbourne Permablitz

During the blitz - photo courtesy of Melbourne Permablitz

and 6 months later! Photo courtesy of Melbourne Permablitz

Time: 6.00pm – 7.30pm

Venue: Alexandria Park Community Center, Park Road Alexandria (10 mins walk from Redfern Station) – venue directions here

Maybe you’ve already been to a permablitz in Sydney, or even run one. So have we! We’re hosting this event to try and improve our blitzing skills, and build the Sydney network.

But Permablitzes aren’t just a working bee. They’re also an excellent opportunity for permaculture designers to hone their skills and, when it’s implementation time, receive immediate feedback as the work to install that design occurs. Permablitzes grow good permaculture designers!

Adam Grubb founded Permablitz as part of a crew of Melbourne permaculturalists in 2006. Since then, Melbourne Permblitz has delivered many, many successful permablitzes in the greater Melbourne area, and the concept of Permablitz has spread to Sydney, Adelaide, Alice Springs, Darwin, Canberra, Tasmania, Bega, the Sunshine Coast, California, Montreal, Istanbul and Uganda.

This night is a great opportunity for the Sydney community (including active permablitz-ers) to grill one of the original Permablitz crew on how to create a safe, awesome and well-attended permablitz event.

There’s a lot of experience we can learn from this crew about active permaculture in community.

Permablitz Melbourne have recently released a range of ‘how-to’ guides for helping great permablitzes to happen.

So what is a Permablitz?

Permablitz (noun): An informal gathering involving a day on which a group of at least two people come together to achieve the following:

- create or add to edible gardens where someone lives
- share skills related to permaculture and sustainable living
- build community networks
- have fun

Permablitzes are free events, open to the public, with free workshops, shared food, where you get some exercise and have a wonderful time.  To be defined as a permablitz each event must also be preceded by a permaculture design by a designer with a Permaculture Design Certificate. 

The network runs on reciprocity, and in order to qualify for a permablitz you usually need to come to some first, although there can be exceptions in this case.

Designers presenting their design that the permablitz will implement - Photo courtesy of Melbourne Permablitz

Photo courtesy of Melbourne Permablitz

So if you’re in Sydney and you think getting your hands dirty, permaculture, good design, organic food security and creating community are cool, please join us! Free organic popcorn, organic fruit, and tea and coffee provided. Families welcome.

For more info on Permablitz, see the Melbourne website http://www.permablitz.net

Please invite your friends and spread the word! Here’s the Facebook Event for you to share also.

Current permablitz resources for Sydney:

• Sydney Permablitz ning
• Sydney Permablitz Facebook Group
• Sydney Permablitz how-to guide

This event is hosted by Mikwood Permaculture as part of our Fair Share.

Photo courtesy of Melbourne Permablitz