Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 16 i Pip Magazine

MARA RIPANI Mara has been a sustainability educator for 20 years, working for non-profit groups and local government. She has always really loved the ‘realness’ of permaculture living. With her partner, Mara has created a permaculture farm called ORTO near Daylesford, that includes fruit orchards, straw buildings, kitchen garden and a wetland. She runs a cooking school and tours of her property and hosts guests at her farm stay. Mara has been documenting her permaculture practice on her social media site Village Dreaming and on Instagram @maravillagedreaming JOHN NEWTON John is a freelance writer, journalist and novelist. He writes about food, eating, travel, farming and associated environmental issues. His most recent books are The Getting of Garlic (2018); The Oldest Foods on Earth (2016), which won the Gourmand World Cookbook…

HOLLYBURTON ORGANIC WOOL DOONA Sleep in creature comfort with a breathable organic wool doona that is 100% natural and compostable. Enjoy the wool filling, sourced from sheep grown on Hollyburton Farm in Victoria, the organic, unbleached cotton casing and the 100% cotton or wool thread used to complete the doona. You won’t find these beauties in any landfill. There’s a world of difference between a Hollyburton organic wool doona and a washable ‘natural’ wool doona that is treated with a polymer resin (a kind of plastic). Summer doonas come in 400 gsm, with a double layer for a winter doona. www.hollyburton.com.au From $308 MYSTERY BAY KELP Seaweed is becoming a popular superfood, packed with iodine and other mineral and trace elements, in a very absorbable form, that are essential for…

PERMACULTURE COURSES & OPEN DAYS SOUTH COAST NSW WITH JOHN CHAMPAGNE PDC – 28 March to 9 April www.permaculturedesign.com.au brogopg@bigpond.net.au PH(02) 64927306 ONLINE PERMACULTURE EDUCATORS’ PROGRAM with global permaculture ambassador Morag Gamble Permaculture opens doors to “the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible” and offers a barrow load of practical skills to make a difference. Find your authentic voice to lead positive change. Start anytime. Work at your own pace in your own place. www.permacultureeducationinstitute.org NOOSA FOREST RETREAT Permaculture Community & Course Provider www.NoosaForestRetreat.com PERMACULTURE COURSE ONLINE FREE introduction course & online community. Full PDC from $49 per week. www.PermacultureCourseOnline.com Permaculture Teaching, Facilitation and Group Leadership Courses, Social Permaculture, Training Resources and Card Games…with Robin Clayfield at Crystal Waters Permaculture EcoVillage SE Qld. Next Courses - Teacher Training…

Seafood has traditionally been a nutritional powerhouse for humans, being high in protein, minerals and vitamins and low in saturated fats. It’s often touted as a food we should be eating to get our omega-3 fatty acids, lose weight or to give our children the best start in life. Seafood is entwined in Australian culinary culture, from smoked salmon and prawns on the barbeque to fish and chips. Australians eat 25 kg of seafood per person each year. But is our abundant Australian appetite for seafood sustainable? Is the fish or shellfish we eat caught or farmed in a way that does not affect the long-term health of the species, or the marine habitat where it is harvested? Current data shows Australian fish stocks are following the worldwide trend of…

Conversation has been a powerful tool for bringing about change in the life of Nicky Harris. A conversation with a neighbour was how she discovered permaculture. Conversations, workshops and TAFE courses have all been part of Nicky’s journey to learning an incredible range of skills. Conversation is where she finds joy when talking to customers who buy the nutritious and delectable treats she sells from her market van. For Nicky, conversation is both the journey and the destination. Nicky and her partner, Chris Aitken, live in a mudbrick home on a 20-acre property in Brogo on the NSW Far South Coast, with a large vegetable garden and fruit trees. They sell handmade healthy ‘treats’, fermented and pickled vegetables such as kimchi and a range of flavoured and medicinal kombucha drinks,…

Jane Amunga is a Kenyan grandmother, community leader and farmer. She lives in a mud house in the rural village of Kambiri in Kakamega, close to the only remaining equatorial rainforest in the country. But the rain is sparse. The soil on her tiny farm is depleted and her plants are struggling. Getting water means a long walk. Her husband is dying. Her daughter and grandchildren have moved back in because they have nowhere else to go. The whole region is struggling. A severe drought has been affecting Kenya for years. Crops are failing and millions of people face acute food insecurity. Climate change is affecting the lives of local communities throughout the region and the already degraded landscapes, ecosystems and soils are under increasing pressure. A local nurse, Jane…

1. Find a feather. It can be a feather from a chicken or other bird, but make sure it’s big enough to hold comfortably in your hand for writing. 2. Using a pair of scissors or a knife, cut the end of the feather so it makes a point (see picture for where to cut). 3. Then cut a small line upwards towards the feather part. This helps the ink stay on the pen. 4. You can pluck or pick off some of the lower fluffy, feathery pieces, so you have room for your hand to hold the feather like a pen. 5. You may like to decorate your feather. You can paint on it with acrylic or other paints and, while wet, you could stick on glitter or other…

Hello readers, As I write this, fires are burning out of control around the country, lives have been lost, millions of animals have perished, thousands of homes have been razed to the ground and over 8 million hectares of land has burned. As we hear more and more about the environmental crises around the world, interspersed with the lack of action by our governments or even an acknowledgement of the cause of the situation, it can weigh heavy on our hearts and minds. For many there is a feeling of grief and despair. But through all this we mustn’t forget the positive. In amongst the ashes people are finding a beauty as they come together with their communities to care for one another and work out how best to support…

A chicken coop deep litter system is a compost heap inside your coop, where chook poo is deposited under where the chickens roost; or in the chicken run. Your chicken house should allow quite a bit of airflow. Closed housing risks building up ammonia levels that are harmful to chooks. HOW IT WORKS Carbon-rich materials are layered and mixed with nutrient-rich chook droppings forming a composting litter. Chickens dig through the litter, eating worms, slaters and other insects. The scratching and foraging activity turns the compost and can reduce insect pests such as lice and mites. PREPARATION You’ll need to start with a clean space, so give the whole coop, including perches and nesting boxes, a good scrub down with natural cleaning spray. Scrub and scrape dried manure with a…

COOL TEMPERATE Words by Fabian Capomolla What to sow: • 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.• April: Brussels sprouts, broad beans, beetroot, broccoli, cabbage, carrot, cauliflower, chives, endive, fennel, garlic (plant cloves), kale, kohlrabi, lettuce, mizuna, mustard greens, onions, pak choy/bok choy, parsley, peas, radish, rocket, shallots (plant bulbs), silverbeet, spinach, turnip.• May: Broad beans, beetroot, carrot, chives, fennel, garlic, kale, kohlrabi, lettuce, mizuna, mustard greens, onions, parsley, peas, radish, shallots (plant bulb), silverbeet, spinach, turnip.• June: Broad beans, garlic (plant cloves), mustard greens, onions, peas, radish. What to do: • Look to make the most of your summer…

Regenerative agriculture is attracting a lot of attention as a way to reverse declining soil fertility while pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and stashing it back in the ground. Yet, restoring soil health is not just for farms. It is something we can do in urban places, too, and gardeners can lead the way in their small corners of the world. Proponents say that regenerative farming, if adopted broadly, could help slow the rate of global warming. With better management, global croplands could store up to an additional 1.85 gigatonnes of carbon each year, or as much as the entire transportation sector emits. Researchers at the Rodale Institute calculated that replacing conventional farming practices around the world with regenerative ones would allow us to sequester 100 percent of annual…

Pip is all about simple solutions for Earth-friendly living. Subscribe and you’ll never miss an issue and receive every issue delivered directly to you. Subscribe from $35.85. Save up to $17.55! Learn the skills to reduce waste, grow food, make compost, forage for food, save seeds, preserve your fruit, keep bees and backyard chooks, build eco homes, repair your things, make your own clothes, and much more. subscribe.pipmagazine.com.au e: subscribe@pipmagazine.com.au p: (02) 8227 6486 (M–F, 9am – 5pm)…

Hands up if you’re feeling a bit helpless in the face of climate change? It seems our governments are doing little to help, our pleas for change are falling on deaf ears; and big business and greed seem to have more say than good people caring for the Earth. Don’t be disheartened though. Activism comes in many forms and there are many ways we can help heal the planet. Focusing on change at the global level can feel disempowering and may lead to inaction and despair. While for some people, focusing on the global is their calling, we need to find how best we can contribute in a way that calls to our own passions and interests, whether that be reducing plastic, planting trees, growing food, caring for people or…

Macramé is making a resurgence. For some people, this may invoke cringing memories of kitsch décor of the 1970s: knotted hanging baskets and wall hangings made from gaudy-looking jute and twine. Other people may smile in memory of a bygone era. However you remember macramé, or whether you are new to the art of knotting cord, the craft is making a comeback. Macramé is the art of knotting cord into decorative pieces where the square knot and half-hitch are the most common knots used. Macramé is believed to have originated with 13th century Arab weavers, from the word migramah meaning ‘fringe’. Another belief is that macramé, derived from the word makrama, originated in Turkey as a way of decoratively securing the end threads from woven fabric. Any type of yarn,…

The impact of long-term drought in Australia means we need to be thinking about better ways to get water to our gardens with the least amount of waste and fuss. With sprayers, sprinklers and hoses, there is inevitably a fair bit of water that goes on paths and surrounding areas, which not only wastes water but also encourages weeds. To get water directly to plants’ roots, drip irrigation is one of the most efficient and focused forms of irrigation. Drip lines, also known as drippers, dripline and drip tube, have come a long way in the past few years. The most popular and easy to find at major gardening and hardware retailers are extruded, ‘self-cleaning’ inline drip emitters, or ‘drip irrigation tube’. This (generally) 13 mm polypipe has three litres/hour…

COOL EARTH FACTS • Most of planet Earth (70%) is covered with ocean.• The longest mountain range on Earth is underwater.• It takes eight minutes for light from the sun to reach Earth.• Liquid magma inside the Earth’s core is hotter than the surface of the Sun.• The Earth is not perfectly round, but more like a squashed sphere, fatter in the middle.• The hottest recorded temperature on Earth was in Libya, 57 degrees Celsius.• The coldest recorded temperature on Earth was in Antarctica, -100 degrees Celsius.• The Earth is thought to be four to five billion years old. Q. WHY DID THE SUN GO TO SCHOOL? A. TOGETBRIGHTER Q. WHAT IS A TREE’S LEAST FAVOURITE MONTH? A. SEP-TIMBER WORD FIND ABALONE ARTICHOKE BEANS CAFE CARBON CLIMATE CRAB CROP EARTH…

1. OBSERVE AND INTERACT ‘By taking the time to engage with nature we can design solutions that suit our particular situation.’ 2. CATCH AND STORE ENERGY ‘By developing systems that collect resources when they are abundant, we can use them in times of need.’ 3. OBTAIN A YIELD ‘Ensure that you are getting truly useful rewards as part of the work you are doing.’ 4. APPLY SELF-REGULATION AND ACCEPT FEEDBACK ‘We need to discourage inappropriate activity to ensure that systems continue to function well.’ 5. USE AND VALUE RENEWABLE RESOURCES AND SERVICES ‘Make the best use of nature’s abundance to reduce our consumption and dependence on non-renewable resources.’ 6. PRODUCE NO WASTE ‘By valuing and making use of all the resources that are available to us, nothing goes to waste.’…

When it says pole and line fishing on a tin of tuna, what does that mean exactly and is it sustainable? (Renee, Adelaide Hills SA) This means the tuna is caught using a mix of old-fashioned and new fishing methods that aren’t indiscriminate, but are sustainable. The important bit is that fish are caught on a fishing rod, not in a huge net, and that is probably the best way to ensure the tuna is caught from a population that is sustainable. When we go fishing on holidays we never seem to catch many fish, yet older people talk of how decades ago they would come home with buckets of fish. What is the cause of the lack of fish in the oceans or are we just bad at fishing?…

In more than 230 years of occupation, European Australians turned their backs on the vast majority of foods the country’s Indigenous people have eaten for more than 50,000 years. We have ignored their sage and intricate management of the environment and overlaid an alien system of agriculture, leading to a process of ecological imbalance. We lived on and not in this continent. We did not put down roots and did not see, as American food historian Waverley Root asserted, that ‘food is a function of the soul, for which reason every country has a food naturally fit for it’. Every country, that is, except Australia. Food is more than nourishment. Food is culture, food shapes culture, food binds us together and forces us apart. Is the rejection of our native…

Shamus O’Reilly believes that strawbale is the best natural building material of them all. He recently finished building his own strawbale home for himself and his family. He also builds strawbale homes for other people through his construction company, SO’R Construction. He has repeatedly seen firsthand the benefits of building with strawbale alongside passive solar design. Shamus and Jayde and their two young children recently moved into their strawbale home, located on a rural two-acre block in Inverleigh, Victoria. It was important to the couple to bring up their children in an environment free from chemicals and pollutants. So every material used in the build was selected for performance and low toxicity, and is renewable or recyclable. They love that every time they walk into their new home, it feels…

Once you have made your own pasta at home, you will realise that homemade pasta is on a whole other level when it comes to quality and flavour. Not to mention you avoid the plastic and food miles associated with pasta in a packet. Making pasta at home might seem like a lot of work but it is actually much easier than it appears. It’s also heaps of fun and a really great way to spend time with friends. You don’t have to make it every time you need it either, it is possible to make large quantities of pasta in a day’s session and store it in a jar for use over several months. INGREDIENTS The basic recipe for pasta involves two ingredients: water and flour. Although you can…

Many of us spend a lot of time and energy caring for the environment and caring for others in our families and our communities. Sometimes we find that, while spending all this time and energy caring for everyone else, we forget to care for ourselves. Inevitably we get tired and struggle with our own health, happiness and sense of wellbeing, and we stop working effectively. In permaculture, we talk about zones, with zone 0 being the home and inside the home, zone one the area directly around the home and it goes out from there until we reach zone five, which is the wilderness and wild areas. Through these zones we look at how we design, build and maintain our homes, gardens and properties. How we look after our inner…

Modern life tends to pull us away from the simple routines of home. Many of us spend hours each week commuting to work, school and shops so we can come home to rest. But the process of doing this removes us from our local communities and often burns fossil fuels to get us to where we need to go. Spending so much time away from home means we’re often too exhausted or time poor to get the basic day-to-day things like cooking, cleaning and gardening done, so we need to outsource those. We turn to ‘convenience’ food and pre-packaged products in an effort to save time. Then each year (at least), we need to get away from it all and take a holiday so we can regroup. Is this cycle…

Our Kids’ Patch winners for issue 15 are Ruby and Rory. Congratulations! You’ve both won a copy of Easy Peasy Gardening for Kids. In the next issue, we are giving away a copy of Grow Do It, the CD and activity book by the Formidable Vegetable Sound System with songs about growing food, reducing plastic and loving the planet. To be in the running, parents can email a photo through to editorial@pipmagazine.com.au along with your child’s name, age and suburb. SCHOOL GARDEN PROFILE Names: Samuel Johnstone, Rory Deighton and Braedly Armstrong Ages: 12 School: St Patrick’s Primary School, Bega. Describe your garden: It’s very sustainable and eco-friendly. It’s green and tasty. We’ve got a beautiful garden with a cubby and mud hut for the little kids to play in. We…

Do you want your course featured here? Send your details to hello@pipmagazine.com.au: name, location, courses, web, phone, email. PERMACULTURE & SUSTAINABILITY ACT CANBERRA PERMACULTURE DESIGN, Canberra, Intro to Permaculture Principles, Permaculture Zones, Waterwise Gardening, Making Wicking Pots & Beds, www.canberrapermaculturedesign.com.au, 0410 121 272, cally.brennan@gmail.com SOUTHERN HARVEST EDUCATION, Intro to Permaculture, PDC, Specialist courses e.g. Farm Establishment, Homesteading, Forest Gardens, http://southernharvest.org.au/education/, education@southernharvest.org.au NSW A GARDEN FOR LIFE, Helensburgh, Garden Design, 0404 123 747, www.agardenforlife.com.au, narelle@agardenforlife.com.au ALLYN RIVER PERMACULTURE, Allynbrook, PDC, Intro to Permaculture, Soils & Composting, Small Animals, Gardening Sustainably, Garden to Market, (02) 4938 9748, www.allynriverpermaculture.com.au, info@allynriverpermaculture.com.au BLUE MOUNTAINS PERMACULTURE INSTITUTE, Blue Mountains, PDC, Permaculture Teacher Training Course, Permaculture in Development Course, 0407 437 553, www.bmpi.com.au, lis@bmpi.com.au BROGO PERMACULTURE GARDENS, Bermagui, PDC, Earthworks, www.permaculturedesign.com.au, (02) 6492 7306, brogopg@bigpond.net.au BYRON CENTRE…

EAT LIKE A FISH: MY ADVENTURES AS A FISHERMAN TURNED RESTORATIVE OCEAN FARMER By Bren Smith (Alfred A. Knopf 2019) Review by Emily Stokes This is an important book for fishermen, ocean lovers, seafood eaters, environmentalists; in fact, everyone inhabiting the Earth. The oceans are in peril. Seafood stocks are decimated. Bren Smith offers a compelling solution for cleaning up the oceans, growing enough food for a burgeoning global population and capturing enough carbon to make a difference in a climatechanging world – by growing seaweed and bivalves in a vertical ocean farm. The book begins as a rollicking tale of Bren’s youth in Newfoundland and as a commercial fisherman in the Bering Sea, moving to a slow but dramatic evolution into his awareness of the oceans’ problems. He shares…