Courses

Learn how to start a market garden from scratch, and take bare ground to thriving, intensive vegetable production in one season. Suitable for those keen to grow enough great vegetables to feed their surrounding community, in urban or rural areas.

This jam-packed 2 day course will teach you how you can establish a small, effective and profitable market garden using organic techniques and permaculture principles, just like we've done at Milkwood Farm. Course covers:

• Garden design, planning & layout
• Tools, resources and other considerations
• Propagating healthy seedlings
• Bed preparation
• Soil fertility and management
• Designing appropriate crop rotations
• Harvest & storage
• Integrated Pest Management (IPM)
• Irrigation strategies

This course covers the nuts and bolts of starting up a small market garden operation, from tools, seeds and planning through to what to expect from harvests in your first year.

Using the Milkwood Market Garden as our training ground, students will get a chance to learn how to plan their garden layout, make beds, plant a variety of crops, plan what goes where, strategise for integrated pest management and prepare for a bumper harvest.

Leading you through this 2 days of knowledge will be Michael Hewins, Milkwood Farm's market gardener. Michael has been a full-time market gardener for a number of years in northern NSW and has now taken on the challenge of Milkwood Farm's vegetable production.

In true Milkwood style we will feed you with delicious early spring produce from our organic market garden during the course and you will leave with a bunch of samples and seeds to take home.

Michael Hewins is an organic market gardener with a background in permaculture, organic agriculture and horticulture and has a wide knowledge of how to grow high quality, healthy food. He's run his own Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) scheme in the northern rivers of NSW and has a great working knowledge of organic vegetable growing in both temperate and subtropical environments.

Michael is in charge of Milkwood Farm's market garden production and education.