food

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productivity

2016/01/08 Danielle 0

One of ethics of permaculture is ‘right livelihood’, which is a boiled down abstraction of the idea that people should be able to make a living – being environmentally conscious doesn’t necessarily mean giving up on commerce. Which is good news for those of us with a mortgage. I want to be ethical in my interactions with the rest of the world, even the financial ones, but I also want my bills to get paid. On that front, although this property is home now, and a test bed for a great many ideas and experiments (such as my dino-chook project […]

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urban agriculture and space habitats

2015/12/09 Danielle 0

I’ve been thinking a lot about space, recently. As in, spaceships and stars and planets. I know, I know, that sounds like it has nothing to do with our fledgling smallholding – but in reality it has quite a lot to do with it. When I say I’m thinking about space, I mean I’m thinking about humans going to space. Space habitats and the ecosystems we’ll need to support them, producing enough food not just for a few scientists but for entire villages of people living in colonies on the moon, or Mars, or Venus, or even in permanent space station […]

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supper club

2015/08/04 Danielle 0

I haven’t posted much about plants or animals recently, which is mostly because it’s winter and cold and nothing much is growing. And most of my attention is on the house-building project. The chickens are moulting, and so laying fairly sporadically. The quail are still laying, although one of them got sick and we had to euthanise her. We ate her afterwards because (a) I feel that eating the carcase shows respect tot he animal, and not eating it is wasteful and disrespectful, and (b) the illness was a beak disorder, so there was no health risk to us. We […]

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Plant Profiles: Pineapple

2012/05/08 Danielle 0

When people think of good permaculture plants – or even good garden plants – for Perth’s Mediterranean climate, pineapples don’t generally leap to mind. At a guess, I would say that most people have never considered that they could grow pineapples. It’s a shame, because pineapples actually love the heat and the sun here, and will grow in marginal areas and thrive on very little water. Pineapples will also grow quite happily in pots, so they can be moved if necessary. The pineapple plant, Ananas comosus, is a tropical herbaceous perennial. It grows up to 1.5m tall, and the same […]