Earth Garden

Dear Earth Garden, I’ve just opened EG 175 to see an advertisement that you found five near-full sets of your magazine you were selling. I couldn’t resist letting you know that EG 175 I’m reading I actually picked up yesterday from a lady at Wattle C

Dear readers, Welcome to the spring issue of Earth Garden. I can sense thousands of EG readers all around the country straining at their ‘leads’ waiting to get into the garden and get stuck into wonderful outdoor projects. It’s still cool in many par

A sea turtle which died after ingesting huge amounts of plastic has been the genesis for an invention to help remove plastics from the world’s oceans. The ‘Shruder’ machine is the brainchild of Coffs Harbour-based environmental scientist and zoologis

BY THE TIME you read this I will have new knees (I hope). And they will work far better than my old ones have (I hope.) Basically, I wore my knees out, till repeated injuries meant they no longer reliably supported me. “Climb every mountain,” is all

SELF-WATERING POTS are a wonderful idea. They reduce the amount of work you have to do to keep your precious plants watered and they’re water efficient, providing a reservoir so the plant stays hydrated but with a minimum of evaporation. Unfortunatel

QI have 15 hens and one is broody and I’m thinking about getting some fertile eggs for her to sit on. Do I have to put her in another coop? Michael Cainero. A I would keep her separate otherwise the other hens will lay in her nest and you won’t know

"WE ACTUALLY got honey and we haven’t lost a hive,” Lockie exclaims, delighting in a successful first harvest. Earth Gardeners met Lockie Kerney and his beekeeping companions, Chris Martin and Ed Sloane, last issue. The three surfers-cum-apiarists, r

OUR bush block came with an old cast iron bath set up a short distance downhill from the house. It was propped up on a few bricks so there was room to light a fire underneath, and one end was steadied by a dodgy looking chock of wood. The previous ow

IN RECENT years you may have heard mention of a gut/ brain connection. Apologies in advance to any scientists and purists for my wildly oversimplified explanation but it seems we are coming to understand that a gut with poor bacterial balance tends t

SOPHIA looked at me and said: “I like these . . . can we try them?” Our latest guest was a rather adventurous 20 year old German woman in Australia for a gap year. She’d bought a car and was in the second month of venturing around this strange countr

THE FIRST TIME I meet Rod May he has sauntered into our café and bellied up to the bar for a coffee. Wickedly aged leather jacket, old Ducati out the front, Frank Zappa moustache, the longest head of hair ever seen on a farmer. He jokes and laughs wi

REPAIRING our own clothes is another lost art that’s being rediscovered. It was a basic life skill in generations past, but then the fashion industry and Capitalism stepped in. Some of us wear patched clothes with pride. They are a visible statement

FOR MORE years than I can remember I’ve had an evolving idea that — over time — has been gently tended to and later, grown. A simple idea of likeminded people coming together as a small group, sharing good food, with an abundance of produce redirecte

MID LAST YEAR we began our journey into the world of tiny houses on wheels. You may have seen some examples of them from the US but while the industry there is now well-established, they’re relatively new to Australia. They’re small dwellings built o

AT THE BACK of our house is a verandah. It’s not the most useful verandah around. It’s a little too narrow to comfortably fit a table setting, and sometimes it doesn’t quite serve the purpose of keeping the rain out of the windows during summer storm

I’M drinking a cup of freshly brewed green tea from a free sample Irene and I received while visiting the Gurinpia ‘tea factory and farm’ at Makinohara in Shizuoka Prefecture on our recent trip to Japan. The landscape of rolling hills in this area is

WITH the growing influence of Asian-inspired culinary delights we are consuming more and more Asian greens in our everyday meals. Many Asian dishes are quick to prepare, while being nutritious and suitable for anyone watching their weight. Bok choy i

SOMETIMES in life an opportunity presents itself and you just have to jump right in. That happened to me one ordinary day in 2008. My husband-to-be David Potter, casually pointed up a hill on his sheep, grain and cattle farm and said: “I’d like to bu

German battery storage developer, sonen, has described July’s near 20 per cent jump in the cost of grid power around Australia as “perfect” timing for the rollout of its new battery storage retail power plan. “It was perfect. We said: ‘Thank you very