Those bikes are very popular around here for running the kids to day care and getting groceries etc. I'd wager once you have 2 or 3 small kids loaded up on them and all the frame weight you'd need disc brakes to manage velocity. #onelesscar
Yeah I wouldn't want to ride a cargo bike without disc brakes!
First up it was his attitude towards market gardeners and his belief on how they treat soil. My grandfather was a market gardener and he saw his soil as his greatest asset and would never harm it. Without market gardens we simply can not feed the population. Permaculture simply can't produce the calories per hectare that market gardens and broadacre can.
I would not want him as a neighbour, his attitude towards weeds is laughable from an environmental perspective. Advocating leaving weeds because they add to biodiversity and maybe a critter can use them is outright irresponsible. He obviously doesn't get how invasive things like blackberry and gorse are. He may well be able to control blackberry with goats on his own property but when birds shit the seeds in local bushland he doesn't see the need to clear it or feel any sense of responsibility.
Not pruning fruit trees is just stupid. Pruning allows a greater yield per hectare and makes fruit infinitely easier to pick. The idea of trees being stronger when they have branches forming arches to the ground is just plain dumb.
The lecture I went to was at a Landcare birthday celebration out at Melbourne Uni's Creswick campus, this is where they teach a lot of ag science. Lots of people walked out and he cut his question time very short.
No, gardening shouldn't be hard work, much better to work smart than hard. Use crop rotation, don't be lazy and pull your weeds before they set seed and in no time there's no more weeds sprouting. Over summer I'd get more than half my veg and probably about a quarter in winter as well as giving away a lot.. I'd spend maybe an average of a couple hours a week working on it
Yeah, I get that. I've listened to quite a few videos of him on YouTube, but never heard him speak live, and videos can always be edited.
My grandfather was an orchardist. While he certainly spent a lot with Incitec Pivot, if he were still around I wouldn't be trying to teach him how to suck eggs. He was a keen gardener and grew a lot of the family's veggies. Like everything, I think you've got to take it with a grain of salt. There are certainly some good ideas in permaculture, just as there are some crappy ideas (hadn't read about not pruning fruit trees) and some stuff that is just putting a new spin on common sense design. Overall, I think it's a good place to start and while I recommend the book, I also recommend using your brain and working things out yourself for your own situation. Personally, I've got a lot from the principles, as well as from other approaches like regenerative agriculture, holistic management, biodynamic farming, etc (My folks are cattle farmers). Despite all my reading, I'm probably not going to turn my nose up at the advice offered by my 83 year old Italian next door neighbour, who's probably never heard of permaculture or regenerative ag, yet has a 50 year old veritable food forest in his backyard, a kick-ass worm farm and a cellar the preserving version of Dan Murphy's would be proud of.
You've made me realise I might be shutting out some ideas by having permaculture in the title of this thread, so I'll change it to a simpler title that includes all varieties.
No, gardening shouldn't be hard work, much better to work smart than hard. Use crop rotation, don't be lazy and pull your weeds before they set seed and in no time there's no more weeds sprouting. Over summer I'd get more than half my veg and probably about a quarter in winter as well as giving away a lot.. I'd spend maybe an average of a couple hours a week working on it
That's awesome. This is what I aim to get to, maybe even supply all my family's vege requirements, and it's always good to give away excess. I attribute the relationships we've built with our neighbours almost 100% to our zucchini's.
Nice, if it’s a Nectre then they are generally pretty good stats wise but some even the newest can have a wide variation.
What model have you got? I can get all the spares but you can also buy them direct from Nectre off their website. A full set of bricks would set you back roughly 80-100 including freight direct to you.
Shop.nectre.com.au
I'm glad you told me that! I was quoted $165 locally for the bricks, so decided to heatproof cement the broken ones for the time being. If we ever replace them with new I'll hit you up!
It's the Nectre Inbuilt, but not the most recent. So far it's done a great job, heats the thermal mass of the brick chimney and heat radiates all night. Our house is a modest 3 bedder, windows are rubbish for efficiency, but the plantation shutters seem to be the next best thing to double glazing at the moment. I'm surprised by how much they insulate from the cold when shut.