Goats In A Permaculture System

Goats are entertaining, intelligent and productive animals and can offer a lot of inputs into a permaculture system.

Due to their varied palate, they can be very useful in managing woody and weedy vegetation, as well as blackberries. In fact, much of their feed can come…

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Urban Goat Co-Operative

Hibi Farm is nestled on a sprawling suburban block in a quiet court in Melbourne’s not-quite-inner north. You could be forgiven for forgetting you were in the middle of postwar-built suburbia and instead had been transported back in time to the Swiss Alps, Heidi-style.

Chickens peck…

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Ecoburbia: An Experiment In Urban Living

When Shani Graham and Tim Darby learned about peak oil and climate change, their first instincts were to leg it to the country. ‘I was keen to stay in the city, although I couldn’t see how we could make that happen,’ recalls Shani.

After much consideration,…

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Rosemary Morrow: A Permaculture Pioneer

Living a committed life of service to humanity and this beautiful planet is natural for Rosemary (Rowe) Morrow. She has been working and supporting people in areas of need for more than four decades through teaching permaculture in places where others don’t go. Without permaculture,…

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Grow Your Own Mulch

A key objective for the organic farmer is to create a closed-loop system that recycles all of the nutrients and organic matter back into the property from where it came.

Directed by principles such as ‘Catch and Store Energy’ and ‘Use and Value Renewable Resources and…

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Earthship Ironbank

Nestled among gums in South Australia’s Adelaide Hills lies an elegant home, made largely of rubbish – old car tyres, glass bottles and recycled cans. Such unconventional materials are key to constructing an Earthship, the now global ‘radically sustainable’ building technique pioneered by renegade American…

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Adventures In Urban Sustainability: Ten Years On

Inspired by their experiences WWOOFING around Australia and volunteering at their local community garden, Alison Mellor and her partner Richard Walter embarked on an urban sustainability adventure. They retrofitted their 1950s suburban house in Wollongong (on NSW’s south coast) and transformed their backyard into a…

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Neo-Peasantry: A Way Of Life

As a culture we have chosen climate change. We have created it through unbridled desires, our modes of travel, consuming passions and our gluttonous economic form. As a family, on a household income that would be considered below the poverty line, we have chosen another…

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Urban Abundance: Productive Small Space Growers

The Plummery sounds like a sprawling countryside property. Its garden beds grow an abundance of vegetables, with surrounding fruit and nut trees underplanted with shrubs, herbs and flowers. Bubblegum grape shades the house and there’s a greenhouse with bananas and babaco. A quail aviary sits…

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Basic Beanie Pattern

This simple beanie pattern is a breeze to whip up in sizes for everyone in the family and is perfect for early rising gardeners to take the chill off winter mornings. The simple construction makes it a great step up for beginner knitters who are…

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Perth City Farm

Close to Perth’s central business district, something is growing by the Midland railway line. For over 20 years, Perth City Farm (a not-for-profit community garden, educational centre and urban oasis) has been welcoming members of the community through its gates.

The team that started Perth City…

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DIY Bucket Compost Toilet

Our family has been recycling and reusing our humanure (human waste) for around seven years. We have used a bucket toilet system in both a suburban home on a small town block and on our current farm. We have always used bucket toilets alongside the…

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Enough: The Story Of A Peace Community In Kabul

n an unnumbered house on a dirt road in Kabul lives a small community, the Afghan Peace Volunteers (APVs). The members are mostly Hazaras, people who have been appallingly discriminated against in invasions and wars. They have no reason to believe in peace nor even…

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Bush Schools: Connecting To Nature

Many adults think back to their childhoods with fond memories of being outdoors, roaming freely, with long periods of time playing on the farm or beach, in the creeks, fields and forests, being out from sunrise to sunset. This freedom and time to connect with…

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Kids’ Patch

The winner this issue is Levi Orenshaw, aged 6 from Kincumber. Congratulations Levi you receive a set of Little Permies activity cards.

Parents send in photos of your kids in the garden or with their homegrown produce to win a download of Grow Do It, the…

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Permaculture Around The World

What’s it like to do permaculture in icy climates? Quite different from anything we have here in Australia? There seems to be a growing movement of permaculture in Iceland, and this is where the Nordic Festival of Permaculture is happening this July.

A new permaculture farm…

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Noticeboard

To place your event here, email hello@pipmagazine.com.au

SCHOOLS TREE DAY ON 28 JULY 2017

Each year, around 200,000 Australian school students participate in a special National Tree Day event designed just for children, called Schools Tree Day. It’s a wonderful opportunity to get kids into nature, instill…

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Pip Picks: Things We Like

BeeKeeper backpacks help reduce waste by using fabric remnants discarded by local factories that would otherwise be thrown into landfill. For every BeeKeeper backpack you buy, you will send one child in rural Cambodia to English class for one whole year. That is an incredible…

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Letters To The Editor

Write to us and let us know what you think of the mag and your thoughts on any of the articles. The best letter will receive a Pip Magazine art print. Printed with archival inks on beautiful textured archival 300 gsm rag paper.

Dear Robyn,

I would…

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Permaculture Plant: Raspberries

There is nothing quite as exquisite as fresh homegrown raspberries. Tasting a homegrown plump and juicy berry, you realise that the supermarket raspberries you have tasted just don’t compare. Bought raspberries are expensive and have often been sprayed with chemicals and travelled hundreds of kilometres…

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Eat Your Weeds: Small-Flowered Mallow

The small-flowered mallow (Malva parviflora L.), is also known as whorled mallow, whorl-flower mallow, ringleaf marshmallow and cheeseweed. It originated in the Mediterranean and south-western Europe, but is considered native to Asia and North Africa too. It has naturalised throughout the world including all states…

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Save your seeds: Nasturtium

BOTANICAL NAME: Tropaeolum majus – the genus name comes from the Latin word for trophy, an allusion to the likeness of the flowers to the helmets and shields displayed at Roman triumphs.

ORIGIN: Peru’s cool highlands.

DESCRIPTION: An annual which behaves as a perennial in warm climates….

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In The Garden: July – October

• July: English spinach, peas and broad beans, spring onions and radishes. Divide and share, perennials such as rhubarb, asparagus, Jerusalem artichokes, globe artichokes, chives, garlic chives, horseradish, potato onions and shallots. Propagate cane fruit like raspberries, currants, gooseberries and silvan berries and loganberries.

• August:…

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Book Reviews

This book is a guide to profitable, vibrant and sustainable permaculture-based market gardening. Zach Loeks is an educator, designer, consultant and farmer from Canada who says that we must balance the mimicry of natural systems with the practice of profit.

You won’t find plant charts and…

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Pip Brains Trust

We have access to lots of coffee grounds. Just wondering about putting it around the fruit trees in the orchard which is also the chook run? Will they bother eating it and is it bad for them? Or will they be cackling and crowing all…

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Editorial

In bringing together this issue of the mag, I am reminded more and more that permaculture offers so much in the way of solutions to the challenges facing many of us today, from rising house and food prices, work and time pressures, and the industrialisation…

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