Earth Garden

Dear readers, Welcome to the summer issue. As I write this in early November, it feels like we can be confident about positive conditions for the first time all year. Summer sunshine is upon us, Covid lockdowns are behind us (fingers crossed), State

Hi team at EG, Well I have taken a big plunge into another chapter of my life. I’ve found a smaller property in a village on the Fraser coast of Queensland. Hopefully I won’t have to chop wood any more. I am just realising how emotionally attached I

Tess Bryant is a bit of a collector. Her kitchen is filled with jars of onion skins, there are avocado seeds drying in mesh bags and pomegranates sitting on shelves. “Every time we go to a party, if there is leftover food I’m like,‘Ooh, I’ll take tha

SUMMER is upon us! It’s the time for sleeping under the stars, sunset swims and kicking back in the hammock. It’s also the time of everything bitey, scratchy and stingy coming out to play. If you’re anything like our family, we love to head off campi

FIRST, assume you’ll be on your own – no fire trucks. Then understand your particular situation and know what you could be dealing with. Statistics show that far more homes survive when defended. But every place is different: the climate, soils, type

SUMMER is garden time, endless days of sunshine tinkering with your beloved organic gardening empire and getting around to that long list of DIY projects that you’ve been bookmarking in Earth Garden issues all year. But oopsies happen, and whether yo

Q Help please?! Crows stealing eggs from the nesting boxes! They have to walk through a partly-open gate, through the run, and into the chook house and jump up to the enclosed nesting boxes (cat litter boxes). How can we stop them?? TIA. Jodie. A

IT’S A SUNDAY MORNING and we are on a mini bus, the first of four in our timetable today, blindly hoping to navigate through the mountains into Georgia and on to the capital Tbilisi. The road is a national border and as we travel down it, I look left

Walnuts feature heavily in Georgian cuisine, and this fantastic blend of soft herbs commonly served as a salad in certain regions, along with the delicious toasted sunflower seed oil. If you find a bottle anywhere in Oz, please let me know. I will sw

WE’RE stone-cold amateurs with limited coinage so it would be naïve to assume that our first season as market gardeners would be flawless. An unseasonably warm winter growing large quantities of vegies in virgin beds with just us, two wheelbarrows an

I LOVE looking for four-leaf clovers. Every time I find one, I feel happy and even happier when I can give it to someone else to make them smile. As a child I would stick them in those big old telephone books to press them and put them into small fra

DRIVING through the countryside, I feel a contented familiarity here. Although I haven’t visited for years, it’s the same paddocks rolling by that I would have scanned with a child’s eyes. The same warm sun gently lulling thoughts into a contented wa

DEPENDING on where you live in Australia you may be more familiar with rockmelons or canteloupe, but regardless of the words, they both belong to the cucurbit (melon) family, of which there are several varieties to grow. Rockmelons grow in the warmer

1960S WESTERN society’s more radical bookshelves used to feature books called ‘Five Acres and Self Sufficiency’. Elsewhere in the world the classic Aussie backyard was regarded as enough land for a small farm. Fast forward 60 years: today buildings c

A hen that is broody (clucky) will display a variety of behaviours. This includes: not leaving the nest, bad temperedness, not roosting at night, sitting staying in the nesting box, pecking you and even flying at you when you try to remove eggs, and

THE PAULOWNIA was one of the first trees I admired when I moved onto the property, for its alluring perfume and splendid displays of mauve bell flowers that were simply mesmerising. The last lightweight branches fell in autumn and new ideas of creati

WHILE there are lots of very intimidating, anxiety-building, cheeses out there Sonny is here to show you some fantastic ‘easy cheesy’ confidence building yet still super tasty varieties. Sonny’s adventures with cheese started as a homeschooling Engli

IT WAS the Roman poet Virgil, in his epic Aeneid (30 BC), who coined the warning that entered English as “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts”. From the time of the first herbalists chamomile appears as a welcome gift from the Greeks. Let me tell you it i

MESSAGE that could not have come from the editor of any other magazine: “I’m sorry for my slow email — Judith and I went on a ten day camping trip to some remote waterholes in the far north Kimberley. But we shredded two tyres in two hours, so we sp

Hazelcombe Farm is an inspiring beacon of sustainable living located in a fertile valley about 50 km east of Mudgee in NSW. Hazelcombe is run by an indefatigable couple, Nicki and Dan Power. Regular readers will know that they have written for Earth

WE HAD to move some logs that would have been a bit much to do by hand so we decided to get our 1958 Massey Ferguson 35 going. It has been in the shed for four years. I have been using my bullock, Chock, for most jobs around the farm but as I get old

DUNG beetles – they’re shiny and dark and live in dung heaps right? Well that sums up all I knew about these elusive little ‘Nature’s helpers’. But have you ever stopped to look closely at a dung pile? Or better yet, beneath it? While from the top it

ON 11 March two WWOOFers arrived at our place: one from France, one from Germany. They arrived within half an hour of each other, both driving rooftop campers and had never met. They were going to stay two weeks — which was how long most of our WWOOF

SUMMERS bring us long hot days and I think the best part of those days are the lazy dinners at the end. For our family that always includes salad, and lots of it. Sure, salad can be as simple as some lettuce leaves and a few fresh tomatoes. But salad

WE GROW various microgreens including radish, peas and baby spinach. But one of the challenges was even spacing of seeds across the face of the seedling flat — which I am rubbish at. So I put together this little helper. It enables me to plant the la

Judith has been the co-publisher and book review editor of Earth Garden for 30 years. She lives with her husband Alan and children on a solar-powered ‘urban farm’ at Cable Beach in Western Australia. Judith is an accomplished artist, art teacher, and

Created by Richard Telford with contributions from the Permaculture community Available from au.permacultureprinciples. com (yep) $14.95 Another year rolls around and with it another beautifully photographed ‘Permie Calendar’. We love to hang our

www.networkbirdlife.org www.actforbirds.org Download and print your ‘Owl Friendly Garden’ poster. How can you help owls and other birds of prey? Birdlife Australia is putting the call out to all bird loving Australians to help stop owls, kites and ot

The International Energy Agency has declared solar power to be “the cheapest electricity in history,” in the newly released 2020 version of its annual World Energy Outlook. The WEO2020 – which also includes for the first time, a scenario that is broa

CHARACTER HOME, CHANNON STREET, GYMPIE. A 4BR home with charm and character and plenty of opportunity for different uses. Large Queenslander has wrap-around balconies that capture the breezes and let in the light, and give you tons of additional spac