As we wrap up our fifth Home Harvest edible garden trail, it’s always good to pause and take a moment to reflect on the greatness that just was. Cause it was really great. I’ve organised countless community events and projects over the decades and I reckon this is one of the most successful. Why? Good question…. Credit: Libby McKay People. Turn. Up: When events book as quickly as this one does it’s direct and undeniable feedback that you’re helping to meet a strong community need. In this case people wanna see urban back/front yards growing edible produce and they wanna learn how they could do ..read more

2023 was a particularly hard year for my little family. There were numerous work and personal stresses which just kept piling up. My partner (Anton) and I kept saying to each other – it’s going to get easier, surely nothing else challenging is going to happen. But 2023 was relentlessly hard for us on all levels. And then in late October, shortly before my second book came out and I embarked on a hefty national book tour, Anton broke his hip (skateboarding) and needed emergency surgery to pin it all back together. Turns out that breaking your hip is quite bad. As in you can’t walk for three mon ..read more

We’re happy to announce we’re working with Eat Well Tasmania and Sustainable Living Tasmania to hold our fifth annual “Home Harvest” garden tour in the nipaluna/Hobart region!  Special thanks to the City of Hobart for funding this great initiative. Home Harvest is going to be a one day event on Sunday March 16th, 2024 in and around nipaluna/Hobart where productive gardens open their gates to invite the public in to have a look – best day ever right?! The main aim is that people are inspired to start (or continue) to grow their own food to increase local resil ..read more

It brings me great joy to let you know that after living without goats for the past 6 months, we now have some again :-). If you’re new here a bit of back story. I had goats for almost 6 years and loved them dearly – milking and feeding them daily (you can read a bit about them here). But as my work got busier and busier and I couldn’t find folks to help I made the tough decision to re-home them back to the country. They’re now living their best life in some rolling green paddocks. But it turns out I don’t like being goat-less. So I started really asking around and happily found two great peop ..read more

I’m a big fan of reinforcement mesh (aka reo mash) as a material to use for making simple and super strong and versatile structures for plants to grow on. I’m always keeping an eye out for scraps of the meh at our local tip shop, alas it’s highly sort after. So recently I splurged (it’s around $200 for a full sheet) so I could get on with building the archways of my recent garden dreams. A full sheet is 6m long x 2.4m and can be used whole, or cut up as you want. I cut mine up into three lengths (with an angle grinder) of 6m to make three arches. Perfect. Me, trying to demo the reo’s bendy-ne ..read more

In 2022/23 I collaborated with Australia reMade to ask people living in lutruwita/Tasmania what they wanted a climate-safe future to look like for their island – we received hundreds of responses. We then worked with local animator Vivien Mason to turn them into a short animation to tell their stories as one. But why? Using our imaginations to dream up another (more desired) reality is one of the first steps to creating it. Once we have those dreams out in the open, we can use them to guide our thinking and actions towards living it into reality. Embracing the arts to tell these stories is a ..read more

Later this year (2023) Australia we’ll be asked to vote in a referendum on whether we should change our constitution to enshrine a First Nations Voice to Parliament. This is a moment not to be underestimated, rather a moment to join in on, a moment to get deeply educated on, to shine a light on, to embrace and to celebrate because, if successful it will be a mighty move towards a more inclusive and just country. Something I like to believe most Australians want and support. This article is written for everyone, but I have specifically written it for non-Indigenous Australians in mind with the ..read more

A new project is brewing. This one has come from my dear friend Nadia Danti’s brain and I was lucky enough to be invited to join in – it’s a goody. It’s a seasonal project where we grow flowers (mostly dahlias) specifically to give away* to people doing meaningful work in our geographic community as a way of saying thanks for their good work. Also, it’s a project to create small explosions of joy and love in us and others. Why? Well firstly, why not! And also, because these are two of the most wonderful and needed ingredients to cultivate a good life.  So this winter we’re busy planning f ..read more

Over the past few years I’ve been trying to figure out what’s wrong with my two apricot trees as they’ve never really thrived. Symptoms included not fruiting well, sparse leaf and dead wood starting to appear in the canopy branches. Finally this year while we were doing some pruning (after the leaves had dropped) we noticed some internal rot on the lower branches. After a bit of research and a few tears, we realised it was Verticillium wilt, aka Blackheart. This soil-borne fungal disease impacts all stone fruit and nut trees, but really loves hanging out in apricots trees and sadly there is no ..read more

I grew Yacon/Peruvian ground apple (Smallanthus sonchifolius) for the first time this past season and I’m a huge fan. I scored the tubers from a fellow keen gardener, Matt, who lives around the corner from me. He popped a few tubers in my hand and I popped them in my soil and honestly, I kinda just forgot about them. But they proceeded to flourish so I started paying attention. As winter kicked in, their leaves dyed back and I harvested all the tubers from three plants. When harvesting them you’ll see two distinct type of tubers – large whiter tubers (you eat these ones) and smaller purple tub ..read more