‘Eggy bake’ is a common meal in our house and one of our all-time favorites – named by the kids.

Eggy bake – this version with grated cheese on top from local cheesery. Typically we eat it plain. Rarely we have leftovers.

 

Another household favourite is pumpkin soup (veggie soup really) using all freshly harvested vegetables – pumpkin, Choko, potato, herbs, turmeric, ginger, garlic chives, mustard spinach, and many other veggies and greens we find.

 

I think our 4yo will discover one day that usually pumpkin soup is orange, not green, but both these meals are great ways to get him to enjoy lots of freshly-plucked organic greens.

 

Weeping rosemary hanging over the terrace wall gets plucked for most meals.

Anyway, I started typing up a recipe for the book I am working on, The Good Life Guide and realized that this meal was far more than the recipe could communicate. A simplicity of just listing the recipe ingredients and steps seemed somehow to diminish the inherent qualities of the food.

 

Tulsi leaves and seeds also end up in most salads, soups, curries, and bakes.

 

 For me it is the rich tapestry of connections that are cultivated through this food that brings it’s true quality to light – the connections with the seasons, with our local environment, with the soil, with neighbors, with friends, with each other in our family, with our play, with our home education, and our workplace.

 

Garlic chives and their flowers have an amazingly powerful garlic flavour.

Here is my first attempt to describe the eggy-bake process…

 

1. Send the kids up to collect the eggs from the chook house we built using timber our neighbour harvested in his woodlot and a gift of reclaimed iron sheeting. We have an eclectic mix of rare breed chickens that the children look after. The eggs are all different shapes and sizes – but all have superbly orange yolks because they free-range often.

 

2. Wander around the garden with a handmade basket collecting a wonderful array of herbs, flowers, and leafy greens (and purples). I take a leaf from this and a leaf from that so I don’t harm the plant and can come back again day after day for more. It’s a peaceful way to garden and harvest.
   
   I collect things like soft pumpkin leaves and shoots, sweet potato leaves and shoots, mustard spinach, any brassica flowers, and soft flower stalks, many varieties of kale, welsh onion leaves, the bolting shoots from coriander/cilantro, tulsi leaves, garlic chives and garlic chive flowers, Brazilian spinach … there are so many things to collect, even pea leaves, bean leaves, beetroot leaves, young chia leaves, young amaranth leaves, weeds – chickweed, dandelion leaves. The more diverse the selection, the more diverse the nutrients in the food.

   The magnificent red mustard spinach is making its way into every meal in these cooler months.

   I love this time in the garden, watching the birds, noticing things – new shoots on trees, self-seeding veggies, subtle changes, and simple beauty. I think about what I can add to the garden to increase diversity or adapt to the changing season.

   Brassica flowers are a wonderful treat. I often snack on them in the garden.

   
   I notice where I need to add some more compost or mulch. The compost is made from the chicken bedding, and the Azolla we harvested by hand from the lake. The mulch is often chopped and drop materials, but we do also go and pick up some local bales of grass straw that another neighbour orders in bulk for us all to use. The kids love to ride in the trailer with the bales slowly back along the little internal road within the ecovillage with the wind in their hair, singing in the breeze,  watching for hawks and kangaroos.
   
   I could ask the kids to harvest the greens too because they know where all the great greens are at any moment – the garden is their playground – and sometimes I do, but I just love this time in the garden pottering for a few minutes.

 

There’s always a surprise somewhere in the garden.

 

3. Ask my children to whiz it all together in the food processor with a bit of fresh milk from the neighbour and handmade ricotta from another neighbour.

 

4. Cook it in a solar cooker (for a lunchtime meal) or a solar-powered electric oven (for dinner).

 

5. Duck out to the garden again just before the eggy bake is ready and collect some salad greens. I like to wrap little bits of eggy bake in a leaf.

   Fresh mixed salad with self-seeding tomatoes and lots of perennial greens, edible weeds and edible flowers.

    
6. Sometimes I go the extra bit and drizzle a salad with homemade dressing – shaking together a little organic olive oil made just down the valley (sourced from the local organic food store), with some homemade kombucha vinegar (using a SKOBY dropped off by a neighbour, a chopped up garlic clove hand-delivered from a friend in Tasmania (traded for limes), and some herbs and spices from the garden like rosemary, oregano, thyme, or chilli, ginger and lemongrass. Even simpler, I grab a lime, lemon, or grapefruit and squeeze it over the salad. Delicious just like that!

    

   Fresh greens, snowpeas. tomatoes, citrus and garlic

    

7. Ask the children to set the table. Often they gather a little posy of edible flowers and lemon myrtle leaves and make a beautiful arrangement.
8. Sit down together and enjoy, discussing the particular flavours and textures that we like in today’s version. You see, they are always different – and that’s the beauty of it too. 

 

It sounds quite complicated, but really it’s ultimately simple. All the ingredients are all just here around us, it’s seasonal, it connects us with our neighbours and friends, and our local environment,  we all help to make it happen, we all enjoy it immensely because of the heart and soul that we know has gone into every part.  And, from start to finish, cooking from scratch, it usually takes us around 30 minutes to prepare and cook as long as we keep it thin in the glass cooking trays.

 

Brazilian Spinach has leaves all year round for harvest.

This is slow food, but it’s not slow, quite rapid actually. With three children – two of them boys with huge appetites – preparing good food quickly seems to be the best approach, as well as getting them involved in the process.

 

Keep in mind too that I typically garden for about 10 minutes a day to maintain this garden – not a huge commitment, but an enormous benefit to our health and to the education of my children.

 

Some other reasons I love this way of cooking:

• this is community food
• it’s package free – the natural packaging of the eggs goes back to the soil. The milk comes in re-used bottles.
• it’s part of nutrient cycles in the garden and is waste-free
• it is so satisfying and just makes me smile so deeply when I sit down to share this meal

What’s a simple meal you cook from scratch?  What does it mean to you?

The post Good Food: Good Life: My recipe for simple eggy bake straight from the garden. appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

Thank you and Merry Christmas to everyone who’s responded so positively to the writings and films I’ve been posting on Our Permaculture Life – on this Blog, on Youtube and Facebook,

After decades of ‘just doing it’, I was encouraged a year ago to start writing about our permaculture way of life and have received such amazing feedback both in person and online. It is so uplifting to know so many people are interested in living a simple &natural way of life.

I so enjoy receiving the comments you write, and participating in discussions about the various topics. I’d love your suggestions too (please fill in the v.quick survey below).

The ripple effect of our actions, our words, our thoughts – our work and the way we choose to live – is profound. It’s so important to be thinking about change – exploring the possibilities and taking positive, practical steps.

16 POPULAR POSTS FROM ‘OUR PERMACULTURE LIFE’

1. My Permaculture Garden – a 30 minute tour of my award-winning garden, plus list of species.
2. Morag’s Simple and Successful No Dig Garden Method – a step by step guide (film coming soon)
3. How to Make Comfrey Tea – a super easy natural homemade fertiliser
4. Worm Towers – a quick and easy way to turn food waste into garden fertiliser – without digging or turning. and Worm Tower Film Clip – a superbly simple way to put your foodsraps back in the soil
5. 7 Ways to Use All of Your Pumpkin Plant – simple abundance
6. City as Farm: City Dwellers Love to Grow Food – weaving food growing into the cities
7. Ingeniously Simple Idea to Harvest Compost Worms By 8 Year Old Boy – innovative thinking from my young home educated son.
8. Temporary permaculture for renters – 11 ideas for growing abundant food without owning land
9. Live simply: 14 Ways to Save Money and Avoid Debt – practical and common-sense advice
10. Save over $23,000 a Year and De-stress with a Few Simple Living Strategies
11. Five Easy Steps to Make Cheap Beeswax Wraps & Reduce Cling Wrap Use – make your own beeswax cloths in minutes for less than a dollar.
12. Five Simple Ways to Improve Your Soil – having great soil is the basis of healthy plants and food.
13. Did you know our clothes are poisoning us? More Reasons to Choose Simple Natural Fashion for Earth Care and People Care – it’s good to know the backstory to where many of our ‘things’ come from
14. 27,000 Trees A Day to Wipe Bottoms – What’s Your Wipe of Choice? – taking a closer look at a  very common household consumable
15. Why I Let My Young Children Leave School To Learn At Home… an introduction to the way I home educate my children
16. 9 Ways to Simply Use Chia: an easy ‘superfood’ to grow at home – great ways to grow and use chia, and some yummy recipes too.

PLEASE SEND YOUR SUGGESTIONS AND FEEDBACK

I’d love to get your feedback and suggestions about the topics you enjoy most and those you’d like me to write and film more about. Either leave a comment at the bottom of this post or click on this survey monkey link – it should take less than a minute to complete.

The post 16 Best Posts on Our Permaculture Life : Practical Simplicity for Everyday Life appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

Grab a cuppa and take a listen. Please leave comments on the Up For a Chat site (and also here on my blog) about the sorts of things you’d like me to speak about when I return to the Wellness Couch for a follow-up conversation about how to get your own simple garden set up.

UC196: Permaculture with Morag Gamble (73:03 mins)
http://thewellnesscouch.com/uc/uc-196-permaculture-with-morag-gamble

Some of the points of conversation include:

• How I came to live a permaculture life
• How to live a simpler, less stressful life and step away from the over-consumerism.
• How the healthier the earth is the healthier we all become
• How living in nature is like a natural meditation.
• How superfoods come from supersoils – the importance of keeping your soils healthy
• How everything has a context for learning – my approach to homeschooling.
• How seeing the world through children’s kids eyes opens up the world tenfold.
• How to reduce waste in our home – food waste and single-use plastics
• The value of growing as much as we can at home & how there’s is more food in most edible gardens than we typically imagine.
• How to think of your garden as one big ecosystem
• How we all have a voice – we can all be part of the change.

The post Permaculture & Healthy Living: Morag Gamble Speaks with Cyndi O’Meara & Friends on the Wellness Couch Podcast appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

image source: www.onegreenplanet.org

• Synthetic fibres shed and accumulate as toxicity in nature. 
• Natural fibres biodegrade and are recycled by nature. (Most of my old clothes end up as mulch, worm food and compost)

Those of you who have read my blog posts before know I focus on food and growing, but today I am moved to write from a different angle. Thanks to the many recent conversations I’ve had with people on this disastrous link between fast fashion, ecological systems disruption and toxicity in our food.

Please join me in thinking about this big issue and next time you are heading out to make a textile purchase. And please me spread the word by sharing this post with your friends and networks.

Think, buy, use, renew and make natural!

Might be time to get those alpacas …. image source: www.goodonyou.org.au

The post Did you know our clothes are poisoning us? More Reasons to Choose Simple Natural Fashion for Earth Care and People Care appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST: Morag Gamble on Permaculture Education: Living a full life, simply and in conjunction with nature’s principles. 

I teach practical permaculture to kids ….

…high school students…

… and adults.

At home in our garden.

I was inspired to live a simple abundant life after volunteering in Ladakh, in the Himalayas in 1992 and 1995. My experience there had a profound impact on me.

For 18 years I have lived in a permaculture ecovillage with a vibrant community and beautiful natural environment.

We designed and built our home in affordable, ‘buildable’ modules – before this, we’d built a coffee table!

Our edible landscape surrounds the house and provides an abundance of vegetables, fruits, herbs, flowers, medicinals, mulch and habitat for a diversity of species. It’s a super low maintenance system filled with self-seeding plants and perennials.

• Her path to get to where she is at based on strong ethics, environmental activism and natural health upbringing from her parents.
• Her early teenage year with activism and being connected to nature
• How growing up with the awareness of nuclear war potentials and oils shortages influenced her messages
• Her father’s teachings to look for positive solutions
• Being influenced by Fritjof Capra, author of TAO of Physics,
• Her adventures in England that introduced her to permaculture foundations and teachings
• Her head and heart filling up with possibilities
• How she transformed her ideas and inspiration into the reality of her life in Australia
• Her life on the amazing Crystal Waters village community (you need to hear all of this to believe it) with 83 households working together in a true permaculture community
• WWOOFers that come to the village and the WWOOFing that helps teach her kids so much about the world
• When your green you grow, when your ripe you rot
• Her son’s homeschool project of solar powered transportation for their community
• How she learned so much more about successful permaculture after she left the university
• What she feels is needed to start successful polycultural systems
• Her connected pods that create her home which expanded as her family did
• The story of how their home was built by themselves and what that means to them
• How she can forage for food just outside her door
• Why she considers her home an ecological system that looks after itself 

• Some real treats in her garden that demonstrate how many edible parts there are in any garden
• What the biggest products that come from her garden are besides food for her family
• What she does with the recycling depository in her carport
• How her children are already living and speaking permaculture
• How she is un-schooling her kids and the benefits of this method

As well as:

• How she is learning to accept that some of her ideas have not reached their time yet
• Why she thinks her project of Northey Street City Farm is her biggest success
• Why feeling the pain and injustice of the earth being destroyed and cultures being dismantled actually drives her to seek out better solutions
• Her final piece of advice is to be open and listen to learn

The post Why Do I Live A Permaculture Life… appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

Seedballing is an ancient technique from Egypt, China and the Romans and renewed in the 1940’s by the late, Masanobu Fukuoka, who is considered the founder of Natural Farming, and an inspiration for permaculture Fukuoka used seedballs extensively to rehabilitate damaged lands and practice no-till farming. 

The mix we use is:
5 parts clay
1 part compost
big handful of seed

We mix the clay and compost together with the seeds until a firm ball can be made. I try to keep the balls just bigger than a 10c piece and allow them to dry before distributing them.

The idea is that the seeds are protected inside the seedball from birds, rats and other seed-eating creatures until the rain comes and moistens the clay. The seed makes the most of this moisture and then the compost nutrients help it to continue to grow.

You can read more about seedballs on a previous posts: Muddy hands, happy hearts: seedballs for healthy soils and diversity and A Wonderfully Easy and Fun Way to Seed a Garden: Seedballing with Nature Kids

You might want to explore more about this no-till approach to farming. A good place to start are the books by Masanobu Fukuoka: 
– One Straw Revolution
– The Natural Way of Farming
– Sowing Seeds in the Desert: Natural Farming, Global Restoration, and Ultimate Food Security

The post Film #9: How to Make Seedballs – Create a Self-Seeding Garden and Regenerate Landscapes appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

After my family headed out, I quickly washed up, fed the animals then launched into it – researching, planning, mind-mapping … I was working but I wasn’t focussed or effective. To be honest it felt somewhat awkward without the usual hubbub of a household with a 3 year old and two boisterous homeschoolers (8 yo & 10 yo).  I love the homeschool/unschool dynamic of active learning, following interests, getting into projects, discussions about fascinating questions that always arise.

I have been getting a bit frustrated that my work is beginning to leak into my time with the kids, and my evenings are getting later (quite a few 4 ams last week!). After my initial attempt at frantic typing and note-taking, I slowed down and found myself reflecting on the pace and fullness of my ‘simple life’ and how too much time is spent sitting at my computer. I decided that perhaps today would be better spent rediscovering my balance and inner calm – a wellbeing day.

I headed straight out into my garden to graze on the salad greens and have a chat with the birds and wildlife.

This mummy wallaby has a gorgeous little joey who has just lunged into the pouch when I took out my camera. They live mostly around garden. I see them every day.

Around lunchtime I took another break and headed off for a mind-fog-clearing ride up the valley. I love my bike. I always find clarity out riding and feel energised for the rest of the day. I don’t go too far – perhaps 10-15 kms with a few good hills. Like always, when I go out with a specific question, I found a sense of clarity again in purpose and direction.

Later in the afternoon, I headed 2kms up the road to a fabulous local organic farm – Baranbali. We play tennis together each week, but it seems ages since we had a chance to sit down, catch up and share our ideas. I put my computer to sleep again and headed over for a cuppa.  A big cuddle with an orphaned lamb was a huge bonus!!! So cute – the kids had it on a little lead and walking it around the garden.

So today, instead of a writing blitz – I mostly wondered, wandered, gardened, cycled, visited.  In the end I only spend 3 hours at my computer but to my amazement, I managed in that time to clearly lay out the chapters of my book and outline the framework for the next two.  I have rethought my schedule for the next six months and clarified the direction for my next series of educational programs.

One of the little things I started today is a quick guide for simple living… and in an initial search for other similar guides, I uncovered this ‘Simple Living Manifesto’. I like it – the bit about ‘leaving out the unnecessary’ was a good reminder for me today. I’ll post my simple living guide soon when it’s finished.

The post Simple Living Guide appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

The post Finding Family Time appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

Take a look at these pictures drawn recently by my little boy who turned three in April. He only recently started taking an interest in drawing and now he loves it –  I mean page after page after page.

This series of drawings was done in one sitting. Each picture has an amazingly in-depth story. I understand what they all mean because I sat with him and listened to his active commentary while he was drawing, or sometimes I asked him extra questions when he’d finished. I was astounded at the depth of detail he was describing, and the absolute focus he had on places in nature and the wildlife that surrounds him (real and imaginary!).

Birds feature a lot – here Mr Bossy Boots the seagull (who Monty met on a beach outing) and a bush turkey from our garden. There are over 160 species of birds at Crystal Waters.

Monty loves playing in mud and watching other animals play in the lake below our house. The sticks and mudzone are an obvious feature for him.

He has grown up in an ecovillage spending a lot of time outdoors, in natural spaces, down at the river, around lakes, in the permaculture garden, at community gardens, playing in muddy puddles, watching wildlife  – that is his daily reality. These pictures represent some of what he thinks about.

Rocks for rock hopping in the little river near our place.     One of the sections of river I think he had in mind…

This drawing Monty did as he told the story of a large creature called Jaca who met a little beetle and a snake (his story).

A Sea Urchin. Monty loves going to the beach to fossick in rock pools. (He also loves David Attenborough shows and the Octonauts).

The baby sea urchin looking for it’s mummy.

An underwater creature – perhaps in the lake below our house.

Monty is super excited about Grandad’s boat – a wooden trailer sailer he is restoring. We hope to go sailing in it later this year in the Gippsland Lakes.

 

The night sky out here is INCREDIBLE. Monty loves going out to see what we can see, and to say ‘Hello Moon’. He sings to it.

My little nature boy (it’s actually hard to find a picture with his clothes on that I can share here!) – the river is his favourite place.

He loves the beach and ocean too.

The post An Insight Into the Mind of a 3yo Nature Kid Through Art appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.

The kids and I found a treasure trove of hidden pumpkins the other day – we thought we’d finished our crop for the season.

I love self-seeding vegetables. They add so much to my garden – food for free!  I think for the past decade I have not planted pumpkin, tomato or mustard spinach – they seem to keep getting stronger each season. The pumpkins are getting sweeter and the cherry tomatoes bigger.

Monty (when he was younger), helping Costa with his pumpkin during a presentation at the World Environment Day Festival, University of the Sunshine Coast (opening the Moving Feast Community Garden).

The post Food for free: the joyful abundance of self-seeding vegetables appeared first on Our Permaculture Life.