Fire Mountain Permaculture

A permaculture practice, centred around our constantly evolving permaculture demonstration garden and nursery

Fire Mountain Farm is embedded in vibrant rainforest on the side of Cambewarra Mountain, on Dharawal Country, two hours south of Sydney. 22ha in size, the farm looks down on Nowra and the coast, while Kangaroo Valley is on just the other side of the mountain.

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Local wildlife, rich stories

Fire Mountain Farm is situated on sits on Dharawal Country, land never ceded. The name comes from the meaning of Cambewarra in the Dharawal language, which is “fire mountain” or “mountain fire”. The symbol of the farm is the Yellow-Tailed Black Cockatoo, which in traditional stories is intimately tied up with the mountain.

We share the mountain with many other local inhabitants, including wombats, wallabies, echidna, snakes; plus many, many birds.

Many garden rooms, many ideas

Our mission is to challenge the status quo, embrace innovation, and create meaningful, lasting impact through everything we do. Driven by a vision to inspire change, push boundaries, we deliver work that truly makes a difference.

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Our Instagram account is where we post regularly on our activities and ideas, encompassing permaculture, preserving, native plants and much more…

Back into the world of #irrigation, which is made up of many many parts all connected together! I’m finally getting around to doing the automated watering for the nursery, and what you can see here is a mix of Netta misting parts for the polytunnel and 25 mm irrigation parts to connect everything together. I’ll share photos as I work my way through the set up over the coming week… #nursery

A key part of the future plans for Fire Mountain Farm is the on-site nursery. In it I’m propagating many different plants, but most importantly, grafted citrus. I’m starting to graft on unusual citrus varieties from my extensive Permaculture Gardens. The starting point for crafted citrus is a vigourous root stock and I’m growing a bunch of different varieties.

I will be down at the #KangarooValley markets this Sunday, and my stall will be the only one not surrounded by flies! Why? Because of this plant: “Bush basil”. The strong fragrance keeps away the flies, and it’s one of my favourite plants for so many reasons! It provides a lovely minty hit in a salad, it’s incredibly tough and fast growing, its purple flowers are loved by bees, it grows in almost any condition and best of all it outgrows kikuyu. I’ll have this, as well as many other plants for sale down at the markets, see you on Sunday. #permaculture #foodforest

We’ve had a super dry spring with several heatwaves already in summer 🥵🥵 By now my “pumpkin arch” should be covered with, well, pumpkins! And I’ve got a few, but they’re certainly struggling.

With three days of 40° C about to hit us, I’m very pleased to have extended the shade cloth covered area in the nursery! I’ve used recycled hardwood rafters from my stash to allow me a clear span of up to 5.5 m. I’ve used 30% shade cloth on top, to cut the worst of the sun while allowing the plants to harden off. Another piece of farm infrastructure done ✅ #permaculture #foodforest #plantpropagation prop

Kangaroo Apple (Solanum aviculare) is easy to take for granted. It’s an endemic pioneer species that pops up practically everywhere, as birds eat the fruit and then distribute the seeds.

I’m growing three varieties of native saltbush on the farm at the moment: old man saltbush (Atriplex nummularia), silver saltbush (Atriplex bunburyana) and coastal saltbush (Atriplex cinerea). Of these, the coastal variety is growing the strongest and it has lovely fleshy grey stems and an attractive semi prostrate shape. It’s my current favourite! #permaculture #Australiannativeplants #bushtucker

There’s no “dial-before-you-dig” service for agricultural fields in the countryside! When you’re working on an existing field on a farm then expect to find all sorts of things buried in the ground 😬 Thankfully this water pipe was no longer being used, so no harm done. The real world fun of digging #swales! Neat work by @geco.gardens working around it #permaculture #foodforest

Sad to say that despite all of my protections, rats were starting to feast on my nearly-ripe nectarines 😭😭 So I harvested all of the fruit off the tree, ready or not, stored them in the coolroom. That left me with quite a few unripe nectarines to deal with, and inspired by @kenjcooks‘s wonderful new book “Ferment” I decided to create a fruit cheong.