Cafe au Lait dahlias, – pic by Veggie & Flower Garden Seeds We all know that dahlias are delicious to the eye and the heart, but also – great news! Dahlias (Acocoxochitl) are edible. Flower and tuber. Hooray. However, as with many edible plants… there’s edible, and then there’s tasty. All dahlias are edible, which is a great starting point for experimenting with. And some varieties are delicious, which is even better. Dahlias come in abundant diversity… because of the type of plant that they are, and also because their seeds don’t grow true to type – which means that folks have been breedi ..read more

melukerdee country, Randalls Bay, lutruwita Tasmania Alrighty – Habits for Hope, here we go (what is this? Go here to learn more about the series)… Let’s start with what we see as an utterly essential habit for everyone – learning the story of the Country that you’re on. This usually means learning whose land you are on, and learning how to show respect for and solidarity with Indigenous people and Country where you live, and beyond. Why is this habit so important? Because showing respect for First Nations people and the Country that has been stewarded by them for millennia, and which currentl ..read more

I’m going to start off here with an extract from the intro section of our latest book The Milkwood Permaculture Living Handbook – I’ll explain why later – let’s dive straight in. Habits, hope and connection – how can we use the first one to create more of the other two? Cultivating connection gives our lives meaning and, importantly, places us in relationship – to each other, to land and to other animals and plants. These relationships require reciprocity, attention and care. These relationships also change us. In this time of ever-escalating and overlapping crises, the health of our ecosyste ..read more

Growing mushrooms at home in a hot summer is entirely possible, and it can actually increase your household and backyard resilience (and nutrition!) in all kinds of ways – it’s all about working with the seasons, and designing different functions to work together. Quite doable, in any backyard. From providing a diverse harvest for your household in wonky weather, to helping cool your house and actively support your bushfire preparedness, mushroom cultivation can play it’s part, while providing you with delish mushrooms now, and with the promise of future harvests once the heat recedes. This i ..read more

We’re taking The Milkwood Permaculture Living Handbook on the road! Just a little bit. If there’s a location near you, I’d love to see you there. We’re also cooking up a very special online book club series of events, which everyone can come to! Details about that will be available to our subscribers, quite soon. Thanks so much to all the community badasses who have cooked up all these events! I can’t wait to be a part of them. And a few of these events are nearly full already, so hop to it, lovelies. NSW book events Sept 13th: Tharawal country – Bulli: A front-yard community chat w the Food ..read more

“The Milkwood Permaculture Living Handbook is a guide to improving your home, health and happiness – and the planet – one simple step at a time. Packed with meaningful action for the everyday, it’s full of practical skills and projects – regenerative living for busy people who want to make a positive impact in a world out of balance.” So sayeth our new book’s cover. Because it’s important to go-in-softly, in book land, if you want to bring as many people as possible along with you… from learning to pickle, all the way to organising collectively, in order to change everything. Because this boo ..read more

Welcome to the first year of our garden, in which we transformed our backyard from a grassy slope into a terraced land of veggies, fruit trees, berries and chickens, with so many flowers in between that the bees are spoilt for choice. We live on un-ceded melukerdee country in southern lutruwita Tasmania, on a 1/2 acre block with an 1980’s brick veneer house with a lovely aspect and a leaky roof. We’ve been here since mid 2020, and started on the garden in mid 2021. The block is on the edge of a village, and slopes gently to the north, with most of the yard on the northern side. We came here w ..read more

Fi’s kitchen garden, Tharawal country / Gerringong At its heart, The Milkwood Permaculture Living Handbook is about helping you cultivate habits for living with meaningful connection and purpose. Because this is how we cultivate hope. But how to get started with habits that are truly world-changing? And how do you ground yourself and create resolve to keep going in the face of so much grief, challenge and change? Happily, there’s a design and thinking system called permaculture that can help us chart a course forward to the futures we need. What is permaculture? Permaculture is, in many ways ..read more

Winter is a great time of year to welcome new strains of tasty mushrooms into your backyard. You can even gather some edible species from around your local ‘hood, and then multiply them at home with this easy mushroom cloning technique – to make DIY mushroom spawn on cardboard. All you need is some fresh grown or foraged mushrooms, some cardboard, and a little time. And in a few weeks, once your DIY mushroom spawn is growing, happy and healthy, you can then tuck them in all around your garden, (along with woodchips, which have been prepped with a simple technique we will show you) to create a ..read more

We cannot help transform a world that does not know us – audio In a few short months, our next book will come out – The Milkwood Permaculture Living Handbook. It’s a book I wrote about small, positive, everyday changes and habits – that you can consider, try out, and add to your daily life if they suit you. We do not expect you to take on all the habits suggested, or turn your life upside down in 7 days. Choosing and then taking on one new habit, one new tweaked way of being that leans towards life and towards the futures that we need to co-create, would be a fine start. Because each one of t ..read more