Swimming Pool to Garden Pool
Fish, Food Plants - Annual, Food Plants - Perennial, Food Shortages, Health & Disease, Plant Systems, Urban Projects, peak oil — by Craig Mackintosh August 31, 2010
When I was in Australia over a year ago, Geoff mentioned that a former student and her partner were converting their pool into a fish farm. I didn’t have a lot of time to spare, but told him I had to go. A day or so later I was poking around Vanessa and Justin’s pool, fussing about with my camera and notepad. The resulting article has since become one of the more popular ones on the site.
Perhaps there are a lot of people out there with useless, empty swimming pools? If so, here’s even more encouragement to get busy and do something with it! This family has, apparently, become self-sufficient in food production in record time – just by making clever use of their disused swimming pool.
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Permacooking – Milk, Tongue, Eel and Pizza Night
Animal Forage, Animal Processing, Consumerism, Demonstration Sites, Education Centres, Health & Disease, Livestock, Medicinal Plants, Recipes — by Marcelo Severo August 13, 2010
More Meat
I promised last week that I would tell you about the cows here at Zaytuna and I’m going to do just that. I’d like for the vegetarians out there (who will find most of this menu unpalatable) to still be interested in reading about these cows because it’s not just about the beef that ended up on our plates….
Zaytuna cow
Photo © Craig Mackintosh
PermaCooking – Your Goose is Cooked
Animal Processing, Bird Life, Demonstration Sites, Education Centres, Livestock, Processing & Food Preservation, Recipes — by Marcelo Severo July 29, 2010
One of several Zaytuna Farm geese
All photographs © Craig Mackintosh except where credited otherwise
We killed a goose at Zaytuna Farm the other day and by my count we served out 60+ student meals from it, plus two day’s worth of wonderful breakfasts for the staff. Not a bad effort I thought. Pretty good use of a bird. Here’s what we did….
Comments (2)Home Cheese-Making DVD Hits the Road!
Animal Processing, DVDs/Books, Fermenting, Livestock, News, Processing & Food Preservation — by Ecofilms July 8, 2010
Okay, it’s taken a while and we were expecting to release this title last year. We even had a few people ask for it for last year’s Christmas, but the truth is we took too long to finish it. So now it’s here, ready to go! Elisabeth Fekonia’s Home Cheesemaking and All Things Dairy DVD has finally been released!
Comments (13)Mobile Chicken House Construction
Animal Housing, Bird Life, Building, Fencing, Land, Livestock, Working Animals — by Paul Kean
by Paul Kean, aka ‘Ringo’, who, incidentally, recently returned from Afghanistan.
Several years ago I was living and working at Dalpura Farm in Moriac,Victoria a 100 or so acre silvapastoral project. The client, George Howson, was interested in implementing an aquaponics system so we all went for a day and a half trip to Melbourne to attend a seminar on the subject.
Leading up to this I had started gathering chickens and roosters from the local area, from people giving them away for one reason or another, to start using as workers on the farm. At that time I had sourced 21 birds, a third being roosters. The plan was to eventually separate them into tractoring groups to reduce the competition and fighting between roosters. Long term they would go into a set of 4 cell grazing areas and rotate with crop systems. Even longer term the roosters would be our meat source and hens kept for egg production. (I have always been an avid poultry enthusiast and had raised a good flock in past years in Humpty Doo, NT. I always loved to just sit and watch new chicks making their way and learning from their parents. The breed I had were ‘Old English Game Fowl’ and the hen (Ruby) and rooster (Rudy) were a fantastic pair for parenting and protection of their young.)
We had always been present on the farm during the day and the chooks would free range after being let out of their house in the mornings. Everything was great and eggs were coming daily and the animals seemed happy. Unbeknownst to us though, there was a menace lurking.
Comments (2)How to Make a Home Made Chicken Feeder
Animal Housing, Bird Life, Livestock — by Peter Dilley June 23, 2010
Photo copyright © Craig Mackintosh
In the old days, farmers would have lots of left over pieces of galvanized tin sheeting. To make a chicken feeder they made the tin into a tube cylinder and suspended it above a plate and hung it in the coop.
Today, unfortunately, most people forget how easily people made these things for a dollar or less. I went to our local Feed Store and they wanted $70 to buy a galvanized chicken feeder. I was so angry.
Comments (11)How to Make a Home Made Bee Hive
Insects, Processing & Food Preservation, Urban Projects — by Peter Dilley June 21, 2010
The photograph above is of my home made bee hive. This is the ultimate beginner bee hive and the one I highly recommend you consider. Its benefits are that it is horizontal and not vertical so you don’t break your back lifting heavy boxes. The legs are cut to make the top of the hive at your own waist level. Now you can tend your bees without much bending and in a very comfortable relaxed state. This hive does not use bee frames. Instead of forcing bees to make comb cells the size we humans want, bees in the hive design I run build their entire comb themselves with their own wax (store bought wax has chemicals and pesticides treatment that stores in the wax fat, so your bees get medication even if you don’t want them to, or other potential diseases). Because the bees make all their own wax you get lots of honey like with traditional hives but you also get lots of wax. This is perfect for the homestead as you can make so many useful things from wax – from furniture and wood polishes, to candles, and so on! This hive is also perfect for beginners because you don’t have to buy thousands of dollars of honey extraction equipment. I bought a bread knife from a dollar shop and use that to harvest comb.
Comments (10)Sad Truth About Sow Stalls
Animal Housing, Animal Processing, Consumerism, Livestock, Society — by Doron Francis June 17, 2010
by Doron Francis, CERES Food Connect
Sow Stalls, legal in Australia
Recently I was chatting to a bunch of seemingly well informed people about Food Inc the movie. One of the comments made was that the film was about industrial agricultural in the USA, so wasn’t ‘relevant’ to Australians. It’s interesting to see how very little we actually know about where our food comes from, how it’s produced and how we are willing to believe that it ‘couldn’t happen here’. The truth is often obscured because it’s ugly and bad for business.
Comments (2)Grazing and Browsing? Forage Trees and Shrubs for Horses
Animal Forage, Livestock, Working Animals — by Mariette van den Berg June 4, 2010
By Mariette van den Berg B.(Hons), MSc. (Equine Nutrition)
This photograph © copyright Craig Mackintosh
Introduction
Within the Equine industry there is next to no research based on alternate feeding sources such as forage trees and shrubs for horses. Adding trees in and around pastures can be beneficial for a number of reasons; it not only plays a major role in the hydration of the land and the control of erosion, but it can also provide shade, shelter and fodder. Many of you may be familiar with feeding tree and shrub forage to livestock but not a lot of horse owners know about the use of fodder tree and shrub for horses. In this article I will describe the benefits of trees and scrubs as a fodder and will give a small selection of potential forage trees and shrubs for horses.
Comments (3)Urban Worm Farm Solution – Step by Step Setup
Compost, Rehabilitation, Soil Conservation, Urban Projects, Working Animals — by Patrick Blampied May 24, 2010
After discovering our family compost bin was in a dangerously anaerobic state I decided a worm farm would be a much more suitable and productive way to deal with organic waste from the kitchen.
Comments (3)Holistic Management: Herbivores, Hats, and Hope
Commercial Farm Projects, Livestock, Plant Systems, Rehabilitation, Soil Conservation — by Milkwood Permaculture May 7, 2010
Image by Granny Buttons
Grazing animals bad, undisturbed grass good. That’s how we personally thought regeneration worked, five years ago. And we were not alone. You could be forgiven for thinking that any and all grazing animals (particularly of the introduced kind) have no role whatsoever to play in regenerating pastures, soils and land, simply because we know how much damage badly-managed grazing and animal management can do. And we as a society do love a good bit of polarity, especially when it comes to nature. Perhaps it’s our quest for simplicity. At the same time, we inherently know that an ecosystem cannot be simplified down to a set of polar opposites.
Comments (7)Life at Zaytuna – Rob the Milkman
Livestock — by Rob Avis April 14, 2010
Zaytuna Farm (Permaculture Research Institute of Australia) has a small scale dairy. In this clip, Rob Avis explains what steps are taken to ensure healthy cows and a healthy farm.
Comments (7)Small Scale and Urban Food Production
Bird Life, Food Shortages, Livestock, Society, Urban Projects, Village Development — by Matt Whittley April 12, 2010
An important and often overlooked detail is appropriate size. What is the ideal size of car, house, meal, lawn or farm? Bigger is not always better. In the case of modern monoculture farms this is very apparent.
Going out of scale in farming can cause soil erosion, water pollution and the need for massive subsidies.
Our romantic ideas of what food production is supposed to look like (with corn for as far as the eye can see), may cloud our view for the greatest and most efficient opportunity for growing our food. Backyard gardens and urban gardens lend themselves to producing food that is eaten locally, produced without fossil fuels, utilizing urban wastes and do not require government subsidies.
Comments (5)Make Your Own Worm Farm from Car Tyres
Compost, Fungi, Plant Systems, Rehabilitation, Soil Biology, Soil Composition, Soil Conservation, Structure, Waste Systems & Recycling, Working Animals — by Craig Mackintosh April 8, 2010
A certain truck driver in Asia has discovered the value of good road-hugging (or bridge barrier-hugging, as the case may be) tyres.
But, that’s not the topic of this post. Here, instead, we offer the suggestion of taking well worn tyres not capable of such extreme feats, and putting them to other worthwhile purposes – like feeding your garden with nutrient rich worm casts.
At Zaytuna Farm we use a couple of old bathtubs for this purpose, but if you don’t have a bathtub at your disposal, this simple car tyre system (700kb PDF) looks like a great alternative.
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