Category 4

A Look Inside The Hive: A Guide To Choosing The Best Honeybee Hive

flow

With so much focus on the plight of honeybees in the media these days, beekeeping has had a huge resurgence. Beehives are popping up in every suburb, in every city of the world. Everybody wants to help the bees!

WHY AND WHERE TO KEEP BEES?

Bees are the best pollinators: our gardens thrive with fruit and vegetables when we have a hive in the vicinity. Raw honey and wax are amazing gifts of nature. And the enjoyment bees give can be overwhelming. Bees need all the help we can offer them at the moment, by giving them clean organic gardens to forage in they will be much healthier.

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Pip Picks

pip-picks

In late 2013 Patrick, Meg and their family, Zephyr (10), Woody (1) and Zero the Jack Russell, set off on an epic 6000 kilometre year-long cycling journey up Australia’s east coast and back.

Their aim was to live as cheaply as possible − guerrilla camping, hunting, foraging and bartering their permaculture skills – and on a diet of free food, bush tucker and the occasional fresh roadkill. They joined an anti-fracking blockade, spent time in Aboriginal communities, documented edible plants along the way, and braved the country’s most hazardous highways. The Art of Free Travel is the remarkable story of a rule-breaking year of ethical living.

Release date is 1 October 2015. Price is $29.99 plus postage. Pre-order at www.pipmagazine.com.au/shop

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Towards A Permaculture Diet

permaculture-diet

A permaculture-designed diet is healthy, local and sustainable, with much of the food grown in our own gardens, farms and communities. When we choose to eat what’s in season, and to eat locally grown foods, we reduce or remove the harmful and wasteful aspects of processing, packaging, transport, storage and additives, and we begin to take control of what we eat.

Most people want to know what a good diet is, and many want to heal their bodies through eating natural foods. For some it’s because they appreciate good food and diversity of tastes. But for many it’s because our wealthy Western diet is making them sick. Millions of Australians suffer from a range of serious digestive diseases including diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, irritable bowel syndrome, coeliac disease and food allergies.

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Permaculture Around The World

ermaculture-world

Project Bona Fide is an internationally recognised ten and a half hectare permaculture demonstration and education farm situated on the stunning volcanic Ometepe Island on Lake Nicaragua. Its focus is support for community selfreliance and regenerative living.

The project researches and develops agro-ecological systems, and cultivates a diversity of resilient food plants to support greater food security in Nicaragua. It demonstrates permaculture strategies, off-grid living, natural building, and the use of biochar and appropriate technology. It includes a seedbank, extensive nursery, bamboo plantings, forestry plot, diverse orchard, medicinal gardens, terraced vegetable gardens, composting toilets, buildings using local materials, renewable energy systems and water harvesting.

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Book Reviews

book-reviews

The second book from the author of Whole Larder Love: Grow, Gather, Hunt, Cook (Power House Books 2012), A Year of Practiculture focuses on ‘a way of living where daily choices are made based on their practical outcome’. When you give up your main source of income and stop buying food from the supermarket, you need to know how to survive by hunting, foraging and growing your own food, and knowing how to cook it.

Starting in spring and working through the year, this book takes you on a journey of living with the seasons and off the land. The 100 recipes are interspersed with Rohan’s humorous and honest insights and observations of a life of ‘practiculture’ As always with Rohan, beautiful photography and design make this book a pleasure to read and cook from. It’s about simple food straight from nature, and delicious ways to cook it.

Although Rohan does claim that this lifestyle isn’t for everyone – beware! – you might be inspired to give up your job and spend your days in nature, gathering and providing food for yourself and your loved ones.

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Editorial

robyn

I am so happy to bring you issue four of Pip Magazine, with its bee friendly focus.

I have learnt so much about bees and their lives, their needs and their importance to our lives on this planet. A huge thank you to Adrian Iodice, whose infectious passion and enthusiasm about bees has opened my eyes to the wonder of our tiny friends.

My own passion for bees slowly crept in as I began to hear and read about natural beekeeping and the importance of caring for bees. I then got a beehive of my own and did a natural beekeeping course, and now I am hooked.

Putting together this issue I have talked to many dedicated bee advocates and have come to realise that everyone needs to understand how much we need bees, and it is crucial that we make major changes – right now – to help save them.

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A Complete Guide To Permaculture Courses

guide-permaculture-courses

Undertaking a permaculture course is a very rewarding experience. Not only will you gain skills and knowledge, but you may end up viewing the world in a new way. You will also interact with a group which is interested in similar things as you, and learn from practitioners with plenty of experience.

There is a wide range of permaculture courses on the market in Australia. This article outlines the main types. It also summarises what you should look for when choosing a course.

PERMACULTURE DESIGN COURSES (PDCS)

The PDC is the classic permaculture course. PDCs have been running since the early 1980s, and many participants describe the experience of a PDC as ‘life changing’.

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Australian Natives: In A Food Forest Garden

australian-natives

Well-designed food forests and forest gardens are a versatile food production solution that, in addition to producing food, are able to provide for a wide range of animals and fungi that create the connections between the plants in our garden.

As well as being focused on food for the people who are involved in the project, the plants that are selected for a food forest garden need to provide food and habitat for beneficial birds, insects and other animals. Without these supporting elements, these creatures will not inhabit a forest garden and instead of a designed plant community that mimics the patterns and processes of a natural ecosystem, there will simply be a collection of plants.

While there is a wealth of information about the plants that can be grown to produce a fruit or food yield for people, there is much less available about the support plants to incorporate into a food forest garden. The books that are available on the subject generally feature species from the northern hemisphere, and it can be difficult to understand where Australian species fit in.

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Permaculture Design Process

permaculture-design-process

For us at Good Life Permaculture, permaculture design incites deep excitement of what’s possible, but it also humbles us: landscapes and people-scapes are vast, complex, ever-changing and unique. I think that’s why we hold onto permaculture so strongly. Permaculture is the best tool I’ve found to date (I’m always open and looking) which: helps navigate not just landscapes, but life; grounds you in a solid ethical framework; but still allows you to be responsive, and work in any context.

We design from urban to small farm properties, and offer a sliding scale of design options which allow everything from a one-off site visit for a casual chat, through to detailed concept designs with fat, written reports. In recent months we’ve started collaborating with Tasmanian building designer Jane Hilliard, from Designful. Together we design both the house and landscape to develop the ultimate, integrated package for clients to work with. Combining the house and landscape allows us to design holistically, something that any permaculturalist craves. The following steps through a recent collaborative process for a property in central Hobart.

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Save Your Seeds: Lettuce

lettuce

Lettuce is self-pollinating, so it is an excellent choice for beginner seed savers and those with urban gardens with neighbouring vegetable growers. The flowers are pollinated before they open, so there is little chance of varieties getting crossed. It is usually enough to keep flowering varieties separated by just a few metres.

Sometimes things go a little awry: perhaps an insect damages the flower bud and transfers pollen into it early; or maybe flowers of two different varieties rub directly against each other and manage to transfer the pollen that way. Some sources suggest that it would not be surprising if up to five per cent of lettuce seed is actually cross-pollinated. If the other parent is the same variety we’d never notice. Carol Deppe, author of Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties: the Gardener’s and Farmer’s Guide to Plant Breeding and Seed Saving (Chelsea Green Publishing 2000, second edition), says that she gets many more unexpected crosses than commercial seed producers. Her take on this is that her organic garden has a much higher number of pollinator insects than are found in the monoculture fields of large producers.

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