Live It Up For A Day

On June 17th we are running a full day of practicals about Permaculture Fundamentals. A big part of the day’s fun is about what you can do in your kitchen (or an outdoor kitchen).

Winter is a great time to sit and think, especially in front of a fire. This is a great time to evaluate ways to save money and tread a gentle footprint. Let us show you how to get extra perks such as reducing the toxins in your home, building community and connecting your family with nature.

Sunday the 17th June will be a lively workshop for creative hands. Learn a host of permaculture skills to enjoy indoors and out.  Best of all, enjoy learning in a mature food forest with delicious food prepared on solar ovens and our specialty wood-fire stoves.

9.30 am Morning Tea Welcome

Handmade and homegrown treats. Tour the gardens.

10.00 am Pick and Prepare Homegrown Food

Tour our mature and diverse permaculture food forest bush tucker plants and rare tropical fruits. Little Silkie chickens roam freely and are protected by a border patrol of geese.

We will pass the hen house then visit the Taro glade which is resting over winter, then the nursery and Scare-crow garden with a range of vegetables. Here we will pick some greens and herbs for our cooking in the range of solar ovens. You will see how they cook differently and which ones are super fast and which ones you can set and forget until you get hungry.

10.20 Solar and Fire Cooking

Quick theory about Solar and Fire then practical skills. If you are new to fire technology, don’t be shy. We will help you get good at starting a fire.

Fire up the rocket stove, Meet the little yet powerful gasifier. A wide range of solar ovens, and our Indoor Wood-Stoves.  Discover uses for the odd looking specialty tools/pots/trolley.  Find out how to see if the Solar cookers are facing the sun and how often they need to be checked. Watch out for the the Solar cooker that is too powerful to be left unattended.

11.00 Tea herbs

Drying and processing home-grown herbs (Bushtucker Myrtles or classic White Tea). Process and package your own air-dried aniseed myrtle from our garden.  We overwinter our Peppermint tea in recycled esky pots.

11.30 Grow For Ferments

Our Jun, Kombucha and Milk Keffir love home-grown tea leaves. Taste our home-grown tea and home-grown sugarcane. The honey is from our neighour, we make Jun and Kombucha. Thanks to our previous workshop on Kombucha we have a recipe and starter SCOBY to share.  (take home own recipe and SCOBY). We add ginger and tumeric to our Kombucha 2nd ferment, see how Tumeric and Ginger grow in pots and in our garden.

12.00 Get New Plants from Old

Prep your lunch and save seeds and sort discards as you prep. Discover wet and dry seed saving and cuttings from the foods you buy. (sweet potato, shallots, kangkong, taro, and seasonal supplies) Sprouts. See alternatives for Propagating cuttings without chemicals.  (using whey from the milk keffir and honey).

12.30 Cook on Rocket Fogoa stove

Cook your own lunch on our hybrid Rocket Fogoa stove. Compare the different Solar cookers (see their efficiency at the lowest solar time of the year). They should be warmed up by now.

13.00 LUNCH

13.30 Compost with a twist

Composting our own waste and the waste of others has built our beautiful garden. Once we had an acre of lawn, we used card-board and grass clippings to convert it to gardens. This also built a network of community engagement. Now we make cardboard Papier-Mâché swales to hold water, reduce the risk of erosion and convert waste.

You might be surprised to learn that we don’t have a compost bin because we found fruit fly love composting fruit so we have a series of processing units [chickens, geese and worms]. Make your own beautiful indoor worm-farm (take home own starter).

14.00 Green Cleaners

There is a whole aisle in the supermarket that you need never traverse again. Make your own safe and inexpensive home-made green cleaning products including hand-soap, bench cleaner, cockroach spray and laundry detergent.  (Take home own bench cleaner)

14.30 Afternoon Tea

15.00 Wicking To Pamper Your Plants

Get a little theory about Wicking (Open and Closed Wicking Systems). Wicking is a great way to save greenhouse plants. They need no longer die of thirst. You will build a mini Bathroom garden or wicking pot for your balcony.  Wicking systems reduce stress for indoor plants. Outdoor plants with wicking systems will also be more resilient during drought. (Take home a little wicking garden.)

Wicking pots also enable you to grow plants in super dry areas under eaves or a dense canopy of trees. They also suit the growing of food in areas where it is hard to grow anything. The soil could be sick from accidental oil spill or it may contain allelopathic chemicals from trees like Eucalyptus. Growing food in pots enables us to use clean soil.

END THE DAY

Pack up your great collection of stuff and ideas. (Booklet with ideas and recipes, urban permaculture garden plan, indoor worm farm starter, tea herbs, kombucha SCOBY if desired, Cleaning product, wicking garden).

Putting this all together you can create your own urban or indoor permaculture garden.