Unlike most whopper tales, this one comes with photos!

A cheap and simple home-made chicken processing station. It also doubles as a very handy outdoor sink for washing vegetables, plant pots and tools.

A complete summary of the costs for our first foray into raising our own pigs for meat, from piglet purchase right through to slaughter and butchering.

If you want to clear a large area of land with little effort, you can’t beat a pig tractor!

By “chopping and dropping” your weeds you not only mulch and return nutrients to the soil, but you avoid disturbing the soil surface and prevent more weed seeds germinating.

A few weeks ago I attended another Sustainable Illawarra workshop – “Starting a Backyard Veggie Patch” at Jamberoo Primary School. Megan then attended the repeat of the workshop a week later. It was great that we were both able to do effectively the same workshop without need to organise child care!

The workshop was delivered by [...]

Soil blockers are a great way to start seeds for your garden, but some of the recipes you’ll find around the web aren’t exactly sustainable – including things like peat moss and artificial nutrients.

I’ve tried to take the general ideas from other recipes, and make a more environmentally-friendly soil blocker mix. The main change is [...]

A couple of years ago I bought a soil blocker with some birthday money.

Incidentally, it was way cheaper to get it sent from the US than to buy it in Australia – something like 40% cheaper for exactly the same product made by the same manufacturer. It seems the manufacturer or distributor is not very responsive [...]

Earlier this year, Megan and I worked with some other local families to start a gardening club called the Jamberoo Family Growers. Unlike traditional garden clubs, this group will have a focus on helping people to grow fruit and vegetables at home, using healthy natural methods and tapping into local knowledge and experience. It will [...]

I was recently interviewed for another gardening article in the Illawarra Mercury. My last interview was back in March, on the subject of lunar planting. Unfortunately they don’t put these articles online, so you’ll have to make do with this dodgy scan – click on the image to make it bigger (be warned, it’s a [...]