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The local farm shop

2016/03/30 Danielle 0

Local may be overstating it slightly, but still. We recently visited our closest and most convenient farm shop. Like real grown-up farmers.   For those who may not know, a farm shop is a retailer which specialises in equipment and supplies for farms and farmers. It’s a little like the love-child of a Bunnings style hardware store and the rural bakery/deli that inevitably exists in every small town. They carry everything from reticulation pipes & connectors to worming medications for animals to pasture seed. Which is what we were there for.   This winter is not the time for goats, […]

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Our First Winter

2012/05/23 Danielle 0

Winter is here, and the rains have started. Or at least – we had two weeks of rainy weather, and now we have Melbourne winter weather. Cold and dry. It’s lovely for going out in, but my poor baby trees need the wet. K commented the other day that being a permahippy has the unexpected consequence of making you respond to a rainy day with excitement and happiness. So much precious water, so many things that can grow as a result. The current objective is to extend the tree cover as much as we can before next summer, to provide […]

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“The Machine” – An instructional

2012/05/09 kai 0

It’s only been 2 days since we set up this blog, and already D has gone crazy with the writings below. I figured it was probably about time I contributed somewhat to the effort and I thought the best place I could add value was in giving a bit of a breakdown on how we made the seedball machine and the costs/effort involved. We’d first seen a seedball making machine on youtube in a video which, sadly, I’ve not been able to find again. There are quite a few other videos out there but it was really the only one […]

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Seed Balls

2012/05/09 Danielle 6

Seed balls are an ingenious idea, developed and pioneered by Masanobu Fukuoka. Fukuoka was a Japanese farmer and philosopher, and an early proponent of natural farming. He suggested that much of the effort that humans put into agriculture is wasted, and that we should instead be working with the natural environment. Seed balls are one way of doing that. Fukuoka wrote “If rice is sown in the autumn and left uncovered, the seeds are often eaten by mice and birds, or they sometimes rot on the ground, and so I enclose the rice seeds in little clay pellets before sowing. […]