Five Success Strategies for Your First Orchard

An orchard in your backyard – think of it!  A virtual grocery aisle, providing a ready crop of fruit and livestock to provide your family with healthy, nutritious, free food, enough to enjoy in season and put up for the cold months.  This was what our friend and guest instructor, veteran orchardist Stefan Sobkowiak had […]

How To Make Yacon Syrup

I grew Yacon/Peruvian ground apple (Smallanthus sonchifolius) for the first time this past season and I’m a huge fan. I scored the tubers from a fellow keen gardener, Matt, who lives around the corner from me. He popped a few tubers in my hand and I popped them in my soil and honestly, I kinda […]

Home Harvest 2023: Host Call Out!

We’re happy to announce we’re working with Eat Well Tasmania and Sustainable Living Tasmania to hold our fourth annual “Home Harvest” garden tour in the nipaluna/Hobart region!  Special thanks to the City of Hobart for funding this great initiative. Home Harvest is going to be a one day event on Sunday March 19th, 2023 in and around nipaluna/Hobart where […]

Crowdsourcing Photos For My New Book!

Hi Friends, I’m in the process of writing my second book about how to grow food in any climate in Australia (due out late 2023 with Affirm Press). As it’s covering the whole, vast country I would so very dearly love to include photos of edible gardens in different climates to show folks what’s possible […]

Eat Those Weeds

I’m a big fan of eating weeds. But first, what even is a weed? A common description is that it’s simply a plant in the wrong place – meaning us humans don’t want it there as it may be compromising the ecological integrity of that place or crowding other plants we want to thrive. But […]

How To Grow Food From Scraps

As I have a large garden and the luxury of space, I don’t usually make time to experiment with growing food in tight spaces. But I’ve always been curious about growing food from scraps. So I made the time – thank you curiosity. I saved some scraps from going straight into the compost bin and […]

How To Make Nasturitum Capers

Nasturtium capers (aka poor man capers) is an easy (so easy) way for us folk in cool temperate climates to grow “pretend capers”, as the real ones need more heat than our climate can offer. Eating local is an effective approach to tackling a range of environmental issues including food miles. Food miles tracks how many miles (or kilometres) your food’s travelled to reach your plate. The more miles, the more energy (more fossil fuels) is required in transportation. So instead of buying capers from the other side of the country or world, we make these punchy nasturtium capers –…