

Growing Food In Small Spaces
The Plummery’s vegie patch is the productive heart of our urban permaculture system. Measuring a modest 30 m2 (including paths), it has been managed through just a couple of hours a week. We swap our persimmons for pumpkins and buy a sack of potatoes, but…

Your Guide To Growing Brassicas
Despite their strange sounding name, brassicas are easily recognisable vegetables from the mustard family of plants, otherwise known as Brassicaceae. Vegies that belong to this family are broccoli, cauliflower, kale, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, radish, turnips, and even rocket.

David Holmgren
David Holmgren is a thinker. David not only questions the status quo, but redesigns it and creates an alternative. In the 70s, faced with a world that he questioned, he came up with the permaculture concept, along with his mentor Bill Mollison.

Preserving Pomodori: Your Complete Guide To Tomato Preservation
Preserving tomatoes is one of the easiest ways to get a homemade larder started. Over summer and autumn, tomatoes are so abundant, whether you grow them yourself or buy them by the box from your favourite fruit and veg shop or market. If you’re organised…

Natural Hair Care
Unless you’ve embraced the ‘no poo’ method (where you eschew shampoo), you’ll be regularly pouring hair products onto your head. Shampoo, conditioner, perhaps a hair treatment mask every now and then, texturising spray, styling pomade, colour treatment …

Commoning Sense: Growing Food In Public Places
The phrase ‘eating the suburbs’ is for many of us a rare pleasure. Most of the time, public vegetation means ‘don’t eat it’. Look at it, stand under it, breathe it in… but not too deeply in case your allergies flare, and whatever you do,…

Finding Community Through Gardening
These five inspiring people from refugee backgrounds have come to Australia and found their sense of community through gardening. By either joining or creating community gardening groups, they have become part of a network of people sharing ideas, knowledge and food, supporting one another through…

Retrosuburbia: The Downshifter’ Guide To A Resilient Future
Retrofitting our homes, gardens and lifestyles to be more self-reliant and resilient promises both a more fulfilling life for us and multiple benefits for society and the environment.

International Permaculture Convergence, India
International permaculture convergences (IPCs) are an opportunity for people from all over the world to get together and share their passion for permaculture. With 1200 participants from over 60 countries at the latest IPC held in India last November and December, there was a wide…

Rosewood Farm: A Radical Retrofit
When I first came to look at the property we now call home, the house was far from ideal. It faced south, had small dark rooms, the kitchen was poky and a wide verandah ran down the length of the north side, preventing any sunlight…

Hand Made In Heidelberg: Fd Ryan Toolmakers
Hidden amongst the factories and warehouses of Heidelberg West, FD Ryan Toolmakers is a father and son collaboration between Matthew and James King. They specialise in hand making bespoke garden tools that are built to last. While the collaboration may be young, this fledgling business…

Sew Away Don’t Throw Away: DIY Plastic Free Ideas
DIY VEGIE BAGS Instructions by Transition Town Guildford Photos by Robyn Rosenfeldt You will need: Some lightweight fabricA4 paper x 2 sheets, a ruler, pencil and glueCord (about 75 cm for this pattern)Sewing machine, thread and pins Step 1. Make your pattern Take one of…

Make Your Own Worm Tower
A worm tower provides an easy way to have selffertilising stations throughout the garden. They’re a good option for people not wanting to get ‘down and dirty’ with their worms. Traditional worm farms require checking of temperatures, moisture, food uptake, etc., but with a worm…

Purple Pear Farm: Growing Food And Community
As urban centres expand and suburbs sprawl, farmers sometimes find their rural idyll hemmed in by the reach of the city. When they found they were losing their quiet country surrounds, Kate Beveridge and her partner Mark Brown of Purple Pear Farm faced the choice…

Kids’ Patch
ROHANNA 5 YRS, HILLDENE, VIC HOLLY 1 YEAR, NORTH MELBOURNE, VIC KURT ALLWOOD 2YRS, KENDALL, NSW ELLIOT, 10 MONTHS, ADELAIDE, SA We love seeing kids getting out into the garden and enjoying home-grown produce. Here are some of our littlest Pip folk sharing what they’ve…

Shamba La Jamii: Garden For The Community In Kenya
The Green Garden Group (GGG) of Iviani Primary School in the Eastern Province of Ukumbani, Kenya, started in 2013. Back then it had around 60 teachers, students and community members who were eager to learn about and practise permaculture. I facilitated the start of GGG…

Permaculture Around The World
How we address food in our communities is a powerful agent for positive change. Incredible Edible Todmorden is an example of community permaculture in action. People from this old textile town in West Yorkshire are coming together as volunteers to grow fruits, herbs and vegetables…

Permaculture Plant: Mulberry
Mulberries are a wonderful example of a multifunctional permaculture plant. Most well-known for their abundance of delicious and nutritious berries, they are also a great shade plant, providing shade in summer and allowing sun in during winter.

Top 10 Productive Plants To Grow In Small Spaces
If you want something tiny, nutritious and delicious, try micro greens. Long revered by chefs for their subtle flavours and delicate textures, they are very easy to grow and will add some extra street cred to any kitchen. Because plants are not grown to full…

Better Baking Habits: Changing The Way You Bake
In our household it’s all about the golden jars of drippy honey, blocks of creamy butter, big bags of wholemeal spelt flour lining the floor, and tiny bottles of homemade vanilla extract. This is the simple basis for most of our family baking.

Permaculture Animal: Worm
Composting worms can be considered the ultimate suburban animal. They’re quiet, cheap, loyal and useful. They don’t need walking, grooming or vets. As a permaculture animal, they excel. They survive entirely on leftovers and waste, and their voracious appetites can reduce landfill contributions by up…

Eat Your Weeds: Nettle
Nettle grows all over Australia, preferring partially shady spots with fertile soils. The Australian native nettle, Urtica incisa (scrub nettle), is an upright perennial found in streams and rainforests. You can find other introduced varieties everywhere, such as the annuals Urtica urens (dwarf nettle) and…

Pip Picks: Things We Like
BIOME BEE HOUSE This house is crafted so beautifully that if we weren’t way too big to fit, we’d be moving right in. The Biome Bee House is designed to provide a safe home for Australian native bees, who are more fragile than the European…

Pip Brains Trust
I like to let the tree flower, as it contributes to the bigger picture of biodiversity. The flower provides nectar to bees and other insects, and this invitation into the garden can contribute to other plant species in the garden being pollinated by those same…

Save Your Seeds: Pumpkin
Cucurbita maxima. This translates from Latin to largest (maxima) gourd (cucurbita).

In The Garden: March – June
March: Brussels sprouts (seedling tray), broad beans, beetroot, broccoli (seedling tray), cabbage (seedling tray), carrot, chives, coriander, daikon, endive, fennel, kale, kohlrabi, leeks, lettuce, Mizuna, mustard greens, pak choy/ bok choy, radish, rocket, shallots (plant bulbs), silverbeet, turnips.

Book Reviews
GROW FOOD ANYWHERE: THE NEW GUIDE TO SMALL-SPACE GARDENING by Mat Pember and Dillon Seitchik-Reardon (Hardie Grant 2017) Review by Patrick Lias The latest offering by The Little Veggie Patch Co is like a good urban garden—colourful, full of diversity, well-planned and organised. Grow Food…

Editorial
In this issue, I invite you into my family home to see what we’ve done to retrofit it to make it run more efficiently and be a more comfortable place to live. We also meet people around the country who are growing food in public…

Noticeboard
Featuring 30 artists and collectives, the 15th Dandenong Ranges Open Studios event offers visitors a unique exhibition and open studio weekend. Explore and connect with artists, ignite your creative imagination