Top box with worms and worm casting, bottom box with worm liquid.
If you want to start growing your own food using Permaculture, soil would be a great place to start. A lot of people in urban areas do not have access to soil, so they would need to buy or make their own. Making your own is very satisfying, and a quick and easy way to start is to make a worm farm. Continue reading
We have a space on our demonstration site which is currently used as teaching space, but which is to be our home in the future. This space has a small (fenced off) area around it, which makes it ideal to become an Urban Demonstration site. The building is ideally located, north facing and solar passively designed by Tom. I have drawn up a design for this Urban space, which needed to be part of the greater design for the property, but will also eventually be a fully self contained Urban Demonstration site. Continue reading
On the 18th of March we started our Biogas project. This project involves making a bio-digester which will turn manure into methane gas for cooking and other energy needs. Tom had to re-do some fencing and clear the site for the bio-digester. He calculated that with the amount of manure we are getting (around 30kg per day), we need a 5 cubic metre bio-digester, which will give us around 1 1/2 cubic metres of gas per day. Continue reading
We currently have 2 Jersey cows in milk, having had their beautiful babies not so long ago. As breastfeeding mums can attest, the more the babies feed the more the mums produce, which is a wonderful natural system. We milk our cows 4 times a week and which gives us around 50 litres of milk and the cows still have plenty of milk left for their babies. We stagger the milking: 2 days at the beginning of the week, 2 days towards the middle/end of the week. Per 2 days we get around 25 litres of milk. On the second milking day, we combine the 2 days of milk and put it through a cream separator. Continue reading
