Category 19

Brains Trust

Brains Trust

What’s better, a compost pile or a worm farm?

It depends on how much material you have. An effective hot compost pile needs to be at least one metre by one metre at the base (even better if it’s 1.5 metres) and the same in height. You can store your garden waste until you have gathered enough material to make a decent-sized pile. If your material is more of a small but continuous stream of kitchen and garden scraps, then you might choose to keep a worm farm instead. Worm castings (or vermicast) can be used in a similar way to compost to fertilise your garden and diluted worm wee makes an excellent liquid tonic.

Good Oils: Homemade Soap

soap

By using oils and fats readily available, soap can be made at home free from synthetic fragrances and colours and can be used to wash everything from your hair and body to household dishes.

There are only two ways to make soap using raw ingredients; cold process and hot process. Cold-process soap making uses heat at the beginning of the process only, while hot-process soap making continues to use heat beyond the initial stages to cure soap faster.

Soap is made from four basic ingredients: animal fat or oil, lye (sodium hydroxide), water and essential oils. This will produce a bar of soap with the colour properties of the fats or oils you use. For example, lard produces a very white soap while olive oil produces a light-green soap, and essential oils are added as fragrance.

Flying Fox

flying fox

Flying foxes are vital for biodiversity, pollination and a healthy ecosystem. And some researchers believe they could be functionally extinct by 2050.

Just as permaculture is an interconnected system, so is Australia’s native ecosystem. Fruit bats, or flying foxes, play an important role in keeping the ecosystem in balance as many plants rely on them for their survival.

They are a keystone species primarily responsible for the pollination and seed dispersal of larger trees, including eucalypts. Flying foxes can travel great distances meaning they’re capable of pollinating forests that have been fragmented by land clearing.

5 Bugs For Biocontrol

bugs

Your garden, big or small, is an ecosystem where living things interact with each other and their environment. An ecosystem is healthy when the relationships – insect/ insect, plant/insect or living/non-living – within it function well. Formed over many thousands of years, these relationships provide services such as pollination, water filtration and biocontrol.

Biocontrol is the process of using living organisms to manage plant and animal pests with minimal negative consequences. Because spraying, whether organic or not, can lead to unhealthy soil and decreasing pollinator numbers. One of the best forms of biocontrol is to have predatory insects feed on unhelpful pests. To attract them, plant diversity is key; the more beneficial insect attracting plant species you have in your garden, the more beneficial insects you’ll have.

It’s okay to have a few pests in your garden – they will feed the beneficial bugs and help prevent an outbreak. Biocontrol is a terrific permaculture concept, making less work for you and more food to share.

On The Side: Kimchi

Ingredients

Kimchi is a spicy fermented side dish traditionally made as a way to preserve vegetables for harsh Korean winters. These days, its significant health benefits have made it popular in many other cultures.

The history of kimchi goes back 3000 years and it still remains an essential item on any Korean table. In Korea, it is served as a side dish with every meal or, by adding extra ingredients, is often turned into a delicious meal in its own right.

Most commonly made using wombok cabbage, there are more than 200 existing modern varieties. Freshly made kimchi has a strong and unique flavour: tangy, spicy and salty with a crunchy texture. Over time, the flavour develops into mature, sour and sweeter tones and its texture softens, making it perfect to use in savoury pancakes, fried rice, soups, stews and dumplings.

Read & Watch

He had me at Ferments. Maybe Regenerative, or Mineral and Biological Extracts, and possibly Locally Sourced. It was a combination of the entire title that captured my regenerative grower’s heart. If you, too, are on a journey to grow nutrient-dense food resistant to pests and diseases which leaves your garden in a better state than when you started, then this is the book for you.

Part one looks at nurturing diversity in our soil, the importance of soil biology and mineralogy, plus how to use a refractometer and take a soil test. The second part teaches us how to make the soil amendments using what we have around us such as fermented plant juice with nettle, egg or oyster shells in apple cider vinegar, how to capture and propagate the microorganisms in our soil, harness the biology of leaf mould and make lactic-acid bacteria from rice and raw milk. Once you are ready to go beyond compost and truly nurture your living soil ecosystem, then this guide to sustainable growing is a must-have resource.

Easy Peasy: Lemon Squeezy

lemon squeezy

If you’ve got a bountiful harvest of citrus to squeeze, you don’t need to mess around with fiddly squeezers or noisy and expensive electric appliances.

There’s nothing quite as satisfying as being able to make something at home that produces just as good – if not better – results than a store-bought appliance. And being able to make it from bits and pieces you’re likely to have lying around is the lemon icing on your homemade cake.

What You Need

A one-metre length of 50 mm by 30 mm timber. Two lengths measuring around 500 mm will also do the trick, as long as they’re a similar width and thickness. Hardwood is best for both strength and longevity, but a softer timber like pine will also be fine. You’ll also need a thinner piece of hardwood the same width, around 8–10 mm thick and 120 mm long. Whatever you choose, ensure none of it is treated in any way.

Pandemic Positives: Silver Linings

Painted

Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can. When it came to thinking outside the box during the enforced restrictions associated with the global pandemic, Arthur Ashe’s words rang loud and true. The result was some great and positive outcomes born out of some otherwise bleak times.

When the enormity of the global pandemic started to become clear this time last year, many people’s lives changed overnight. Forced to reevaluate how we interacted with the world and the people in it, the resulting restrictions and lockdowns represented a stark shift in everyday circumstances for so many. But as the following examples prove, humans can be remarkably resilient and adaptive when presented with adversity.

Connecting Communities: Once And For All

growing food

Permaculture design is successful because it mimics nature’s interconnectedness. An interconnectedness which allows nature to be a self-supporting mechanism that can exist and thrive without added inputs or unnecessary waste, and it’s successful because nothing exists in isolation. If we can implement similar systems into our communities, all of a sudden we’re less reliant on external supply and better equipped to stand and face adversity.

Everything in nature – and in life – is interdependent. The home, workplace, school or organisation, for example, all form parts of a larger neighbourhood. Through permaculture design we can cultivate deeper levels of connection, collaboration and cooperation. It’s something we practise in our gardens and we reap its benefits daily, but if we can apply similar strategies to our communities, we would create self-reliant and fiercely resilient communities capable of bouncing back from anything thrown our way.

Sleep Hygiene: Rest Assured

sleep

One of the most important things to keep us healthy in both body and mind is sleep. But as we strive to juggle families, work and living clean and sustainable lives, the amount of sleep we get is easy to neglect and its quality is often the first thing to suffer.

Sleep plays a far more important role in our lives than simply giving us the energy to live more self-reliant lives. Getting an adequate amount of good-quality sleep goes a long way in protecting us from illness and disease, too, as well as warding off the negative impacts associated with sleep deprivation which can affect our memory, decision-making and even our vision. If we want to be productive in the world and be able to use our time and energy improving ourselves, our communities and our planet, we need to treat sleep as sacred, and make conscious decisions around prioritising a good night’s sleep.