Episodes

  • On the joy of gardening. Hannah Moloney with Morag Gamble

    On the joy of gardening. Hannah Moloney with Morag Gamble
    Apr 16 2026

    What draws us to the garden — even when we don't have to grow anything? Even when life is full, when grief is heavy, when we barely have a balcony to spare?

    In this conversation I speak with Hannah Moloney — presenter on ABC Gardening Australia, permaculture educator and designer, climate activist, cabaret performer, author and deliberate optimist. Her new book, Why We Garden: On the Joy and Wonder of Growing Things Even When We Don't Have To, has just been released and it made my heart sing.

    Hannah surveyed thousands of people about why they garden. The answer that came back from 94% of respondents? Joy. Not food security. Not saving money. Joy. That alone tells us something profound about our relationship with the living world.

    We talk about:

    • How Hannah came to ask the question "why do we garden?" — and what she discovered when she actually asked it of thousands of people, including Australian icons Bruce Pascoe, Tim Winton, Bob Brown, Costa Georgiadis, Claire Bowditch and Laura Tingle
    • Gardening as healing — how tending a garden moves grief, rage and heartbreak through the body in ways nothing else quite can
    • The language we don't yet have in English for that deep sense of knowing, belonging and safety that comes from being in relationship with place
    • Why 70–75% of green space in cities is lawn — and what else it could be
    • Cuba in the 1990s, guerrilla gardening in 1970s New York, and the Diggers of the 1640s — gardening as ancient and ongoing act of belonging and resistance
    • Hannah's climate justice cabaret Time Rebel, her upcoming walk across Tasmania dressed as an Azure Kingfisher, and why art cracks open hearts in ways expertise alone cannot
    • Her own arc from herb nursery kid who couldn't wait to leave gardening behind — to someone for whom gardening is life's central practice

    Hannah's call to action is simple and radical: get your hands in the earth, your feet on the ground. This knowledge is already in you. It doesn't need to be learned — only remembered.

    Find Hannah and her book:

    • Why We Garden — available now at bookstores across Australia and at your local library
    • ABC Gardening Australia — catch Hannah on

    I'd love to hear from you. Text me here.

    Support the show

    _____

    MORAG GAMBLE

    Founder, Permaculture Education Institute

    • Morag's Courses
    • Podcast Blog
    • Podcast YouTube:
    • Podcast Instagram
    • Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/moraggamble/

    I am a possibilitarian and I believe in HumanKINDness.

    In this podcast my guests and I explore How are we to live? Really live, as nature ourselves, tending the conditions where life can thrive. We ask How do we become the kind of humans this moment is asking us to be?

    This podcast is one of my acts of myceliation. Each conversation is a thread in a vast network of people speaking up for life with love and care.

    This podcast beams out from my hand-built solar-powered studio in the midst of a permaculture food forest in a permaculture ecovillage on Jinibara and Gubbi Gubbi country.

    If this episode lights something in you, pass it to one person who needs it. That is how myceliation works.
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    1 hr and 2 mins
  • Exploring the Permaculture Principles. Wilf Richards with Morag Gamble

    Exploring the Permaculture Principles. Wilf Richards with Morag Gamble
    Apr 8 2026

    What is permaculture design and how can you use it in your daily life?

    The permaculture design principles are at the heart of the answer to these questions, to understanding what permaculture is about, and how you can apply it to all kinds of contexts.

    My guest in this episode of Sense-Making in a Changing World, Wilf Richards, has spent the last three and a half years collaborating with 40 permaculture educators from across Britain and beyond to write The Power of Permaculture Principles - an honest and generous exploration of the permaculture principles. Not a revision. Not a simplification. An invitation to think more deeply about the tools we already hold.

    This book shares a history of each principle, its development since being formed and an analysis of how they are being used, understood and applied.

    In our conversation we explore where the principles actually came from, how the language around them has evolved (and where it still needs to), what's missing (resilience, anyone?), why the principles might best be understood as a living system — a tree still growing, still branching — and how they can help all of us, wherever we are, find our way back into right relationship with the rest of nature.


    Wilf is a permaculture designer and teacher based near Durham in the UK, co-managing a cooperative smallholding since 2001, and a Senior Tutor in the British permaculture diploma system. He came to permaculture through the road protest movement of the mid-1990s — that classic arc from anger at destruction to the desire to build something better — and has been living it on the land and in the community ever since.

    The Book: https://www.permanentpublications.co.uk/port/the-power-of-permaculture-principles/

    Wilf's Linktree: https://linktr.ee/wilf.richards

    Wilf's email: wilf.abundantearth@gmail.com

    Wilf's Substack: https://wilfrichards1.substack.com/

    I'd love to hear from you. Text me here.

    Support the show

    _____

    MORAG GAMBLE

    Founder, Permaculture Education Institute

    • Morag's Courses
    • Podcast Blog
    • Podcast YouTube:
    • Podcast Instagram
    • Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/moraggamble/

    I am a possibilitarian and I believe in HumanKINDness.

    In this podcast my guests and I explore How are we to live? Really live, as nature ourselves, tending the conditions where life can thrive. We ask How do we become the kind of humans this moment is asking us to be?

    This podcast is one of my acts of myceliation. Each conversation is a thread in a vast network of people speaking up for life with love and care.

    This podcast beams out from my hand-built solar-powered studio in the midst of a permaculture food forest in a permaculture ecovillage on Jinibara and Gubbi Gubbi country.

    If this episode lights something in you, pass it to one person who needs it. That is how myceliation works.
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    55 mins
  • Where's the local food near you? Tianda Williams joins Morag Gamble

    Where's the local food near you? Tianda Williams joins Morag Gamble
    Mar 18 2026

    When supply chains wobble and prices jump, the most powerful thing we can do is reconnect locally. Tianda Williams, co founder of UForage, is helping make local food visible again, from backyard abundance to roadside stalls and small growers.

    On this episode of Sense-Making in a Changing World podcast we are diving into this super practical local food solution that you can all be part of.

    UForage is a free, map-based mobile app that connects local growers, makers, and foragers with consumers to share, swap, or sell fresh, local food, effectively acting as a digital "farmers market in your pocket"

    In 2022, Tianda's family lost their home in the Northern Rivers area to floods. It made them realise the significance of food security, community support and sustainability, and inspired her to find a way to help others, and began creating this app to connect people with local food near them.

    Uforage maps local food from backyard abundance and roadside stalls to small producers and foraging locations. We talk about how local food access is often shaped by who you happen to meet, and how a simple mapping tool like this can help communities connect, reduce waste, and strengthen resilience during disruptions like floods and supply shortages.

    In this episode we explore

    • How floods, shortages, and being cut off make local connection feel urgent and practical.
    • What this digital mapping tool works and how you can connect - supporting sharing, swapping, selling, and mapping, without taking transaction fees.
    • Food waste, hunger, and the quiet abundance already growing around us.
    • Why “local first” solutions can ripple outward without needing to scale in a centralised way.

    Links

    UForage
    UForage app
    TIanda's LinkedIn

    I'd love to hear from you. Text me here.

    Support the show

    _____

    MORAG GAMBLE

    Founder, Permaculture Education Institute

    • Morag's Courses
    • Podcast Blog
    • Podcast YouTube:
    • Podcast Instagram
    • Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/moraggamble/

    I am a possibilitarian and I believe in HumanKINDness.

    In this podcast my guests and I explore How are we to live? Really live, as nature ourselves, tending the conditions where life can thrive. We ask How do we become the kind of humans this moment is asking us to be?

    This podcast is one of my acts of myceliation. Each conversation is a thread in a vast network of people speaking up for life with love and care.

    This podcast beams out from my hand-built solar-powered studio in the midst of a permaculture food forest in a permaculture ecovillage on Jinibara and Gubbi Gubbi country.

    If this episode lights something in you, pass it to one person who needs it. That is how myceliation works.
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    36 mins
  • Go Gently! Jade Miles with Morag Gamble on Local Food, Barefoot Gatherings & Learning to Belong Where You Are

    Go Gently! Jade Miles with Morag Gamble on Local Food, Barefoot Gatherings & Learning to Belong Where You Are
    Feb 27 2026
    What if the most radical thing you could do right now is go gently?That is what this conversation left me with. Not a strategy, not a framework, not a list of actions — but this nugget of advice — an invitation. Go gently. Tend what is in front of you. Trust that your bones already know more than your head gives them credit for. Root yourself so deeply in the place you are that you can feel the seasons change in your body before the calendar tells you.Jade Miles lives this — her philosophy and daily practice — in the soil, in the shadows, in the quality of light on a cold north east Victorian morning, in the women's circles by the dam and the school groups sitting barefoot around fires and the 100 varieties of apple that fruit across six different months because someone paid close enough attention to plant them that way.She is the kind of person who makes you feel, within minutes, that rootedness is not a retreat from the world. It is the most generative place from which to tend it.Jade is a local food advocate and educator, author, podcaster, and regenerative heritage fruit farmer at Black Barn Farm in north east Victoria on Palanggang Medang country. She is the CEO of Sustainable Table — supporting the regeneration of food and farming systems across Australia — and the author of Futuresteading and the newly released Huddle, a book about the quiet, necessary art of coming together in the places where we live.We recorded this conversation late last year, not long after Jade had returned from a vision quest — raw, liminal, and freshly cracked open, as she put it. What came through was some of the most honest thinking I have heard about what it actually means to belong to a place, what local food systems can and cannot do alone, and why the tools in our back pocket will never be enough unless we also learn to collectivise them.We talked about Black Barn Farm — 100 varieties of apple, kilometres of berries, school groups arriving weirded out and leaving calm, women's circles by the dam, potluck dinners in the woolshed. We talked about growing up in Gippsland as a permaculture kid, about being locked outside by an eccentric artist father and eating chook pellets during the hungry months and not knowing until much later that this was actually an extraordinary gift. We talked about what it means to land in a place that is not your ancestral homeland and slowly, through community and seasons and the length of the shadows, come to belong there anyway.We talked about the vision quest — the ritualised death of the maiden, the emergence of what comes next. About the part of Jade's life that had been keeping her in her head when her bones knew something different. About the moment she stepped into the sacred circle, took her clothes off, and said out loud: take me home, mama.And we talked about urgency — the question I carry and I suspect you carry too: is what we're doing enough? Jade's answer is one I want to keep close. She goes to the bush. She has two sit spots — one by still water, one by running water — and she lets the noise become quiet. She redefines what enough looks like. She has compassion for herself. Because without that, she says, you are not in a generative way of being. You render yourself useless. You cannot do even what you are already doing.Go gently. Even if only for the next hour. Take a deep breath.This conversation is for anyone tending something — a garden, a community, a food system, a family, a vision — and wondering how far the seeds are actually travelling.About Jade MilesJade Miles is a local food advocate, educator, author, and regenerative heritage fruit farmer at Black Barn Farm in north east Victoria on Palanggang Medang country. She has spent 25 years watching the agricultural heartbeat of her region slow — and has been quietly, persistently rebuilding it through food coopeI'd love to hear from you. Text me here.Support the show_____MORAG GAMBLEFounder, Permaculture Education InstituteMorag's CoursesPodcast BlogPodcast YouTube: Podcast InstagramLinkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/moraggamble/I am a possibilitarian and I believe in HumanKINDness.In this podcast my guests and I explore How are we to live? Really live, as nature ourselves, tending the conditions where life can thrive. We ask How do we become the kind of humans this moment is asking us to be?This podcast is one of my acts of myceliation. Each conversation is a thread in a vast network of people speaking up for life with love and care. This podcast beams out from my hand-built solar-powered studio in the midst of a permaculture food forest in a permaculture ecovillage on Jinibara and Gubbi Gubbi country.If this episode lights something in you, pass it to one person who needs it. That is how myceliation works.
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    1 hr and 3 mins
  • Growing Coral with Sam Teicher and Morag Gamble

    Growing Coral with Sam Teicher and Morag Gamble
    Feb 12 2026

    Coral reefs are often spoken about as beautiful places we visit. In this episode, Sam Teicher brings us into a much bigger understanding, reefs as living systems that support marine biodiversity, sustain livelihoods, protect coasts from storms and erosion, and hold deep cultural meaning for many communities.

    Coral reefs cover less than 1% of the sea floor, yet support around 25% of marine life. Already 50% have been lost, and 90% may be gone forever in 25 years.

    Sam is the co founder of Coral Vita, an Earthshot Prize winning reef restoration company that grows corals on land and replants them onto damaged reefs. We talk about what is driving coral decline, including heat stress and bleaching, and why restoring reefs is both an ecological and human imperative.

    We then explore the practicalities of restoration. Sam explains how Coral Vita uses land based coral farming to control conditions, accelerate growth through microfragmentation, and improve survivorship by identifying and propagating more heat tolerant genotypes, all while working with local communities and building education and employment pathways.

    We also unpack the idea of a restoration economy. Who pays for reef restoration, how restoration as a service works, what nature positive brands are doing, and why policy, insurance, public health, and security conversations all converge when we talk about ecosystems.

    Find out more about Coral Vita.

    Coral Vita
    Coral Restoration Consortium
    Instagram
    Facebook

    Watch this conversation on youtube

    I'd love to hear from you. Text me here.

    Support the show

    _____

    MORAG GAMBLE

    Founder, Permaculture Education Institute

    • Morag's Courses
    • Podcast Blog
    • Podcast YouTube:
    • Podcast Instagram
    • Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/moraggamble/

    I am a possibilitarian and I believe in HumanKINDness.

    In this podcast my guests and I explore How are we to live? Really live, as nature ourselves, tending the conditions where life can thrive. We ask How do we become the kind of humans this moment is asking us to be?

    This podcast is one of my acts of myceliation. Each conversation is a thread in a vast network of people speaking up for life with love and care.

    This podcast beams out from my hand-built solar-powered studio in the midst of a permaculture food forest in a permaculture ecovillage on Jinibara and Gubbi Gubbi country.

    If this episode lights something in you, pass it to one person who needs it. That is how myceliation works.
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    58 mins
  • Nutrient Dense Food with Dan Kittredge: Growing for the Microbiome

    Nutrient Dense Food with Dan Kittredge: Growing for the Microbiome
    Dec 11 2025

    In this episode of Sense Making in a Changing World, I speak with regenerative farmer and Bionutrient Food Association founder Dan Kittredge from the United States.

    Together we explore what it really means to grow nutrient dense food and nourish the microbiome, in the soil and in our own bodies.

    Dan shares decades of experience and research that reveal just how wide the gap is between food that truly nourishes and food that simply fills us up. We talk about the huge variation in nutrient levels between different samples of the same crop, why this happens and what it means for human health and climate.

    We touch on:

    • How two carrots from different farms can have four to ten times difference in key nutrients
    • Why labels like organic or local only tell part of the story of food quality
    • What happens when we take soil out of the equation and grow food in hydroponic systems
    • Why Dan says we should be growing for the microbiome in the soil and in our own bodies
    • Practical ways gardeners and farmers can start shifting their practice toward truly nutrient dense food

    My hope is that this conversation helps you look at the food on your plate and the soil under your feet in a new way, and encourages you to keep experimenting in your own gardens, farms, kitchens and communities.

    I'd love to hear from you. Text me here.

    Support the show

    _____

    MORAG GAMBLE

    Founder, Permaculture Education Institute

    • Morag's Courses
    • Podcast Blog
    • Podcast YouTube:
    • Podcast Instagram
    • Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/moraggamble/

    I am a possibilitarian and I believe in HumanKINDness.

    In this podcast my guests and I explore How are we to live? Really live, as nature ourselves, tending the conditions where life can thrive. We ask How do we become the kind of humans this moment is asking us to be?

    This podcast is one of my acts of myceliation. Each conversation is a thread in a vast network of people speaking up for life with love and care.

    This podcast beams out from my hand-built solar-powered studio in the midst of a permaculture food forest in a permaculture ecovillage on Jinibara and Gubbi Gubbi country.

    If this episode lights something in you, pass it to one person who needs it. That is how myceliation works.
    Show more Show less
    46 mins
  • Farm as Community: Growing Belonging with Abel Pearson and Morag Gamble

    Farm as Community: Growing Belonging with Abel Pearson and Morag Gamble
    Dec 4 2025

    In this episode of Sense-Making in a Changing World, I sit down with Abel Pearson – permaculture educator, community food grower and co founder of Glasbren, an award winning community-supported agriculture project in rural Wales.

    Glasbren began as a three acre permaculture designed market garden and has now moved to Lord’s Park Farm, a 134 acre National Trust property on the cliffs where the Taf and Tywi rivers meet the sea in Carmarthenshire.

    Abel and his family are the first permaculture based tenants on a National Trust farm, creating a flagship project for nature friendly, community facing farming.

    In our conversation we explore:

    • Abel’s journey from woofing and natural building to discovering permaculture as “the origin” of everything he now does
    • How Glasbren grew from a three acre CSA into a whole farm vision at Lord’s Park
    • Designing a landscape and an organisation with permaculture ethics: earth care, people care, fair share
    • Indigenous and historic food systems as deeply “permacultural” ways of living in reciprocity with land
    • Beingof a place when you may not be from there – and how growing food together becomes daily practice in belonging
    • Welsh language, culture and land
    • Community supported agriculture, food security and the fragility of our current food system
    • Wales’ shift toward agroecology, social value payments for farms, and support for small scale growers
    • The practicalities of funding and holding a diversified social enterprise farm
    • Volunteering at Glasbren as a pathway into community, wellbeing and climate action
    • Family life in the middle of a farm that is also a community hub

    Abel’s reflections weave beautifully with the core of permaculture education – that we are learning a way of seeing and relating, not just a collection of techniques. This episode is an invitation to slow down, listen to place, and see farms and gardens as sites of cultural and ecological repair.

    Glasbren website: https://www.glasbren.org.uk

    _________________________________

    I'd love to hear from you. Text me here.

    Support the show

    _____

    MORAG GAMBLE

    Founder, Permaculture Education Institute

    • Morag's Courses
    • Podcast Blog
    • Podcast YouTube:
    • Podcast Instagram
    • Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/moraggamble/

    I am a possibilitarian and I believe in HumanKINDness.

    In this podcast my guests and I explore How are we to live? Really live, as nature ourselves, tending the conditions where life can thrive. We ask How do we become the kind of humans this moment is asking us to be?

    This podcast is one of my acts of myceliation. Each conversation is a thread in a vast network of people speaking up for life with love and care.

    This podcast beams out from my hand-built solar-powered studio in the midst of a permaculture food forest in a permaculture ecovillage on Jinibara and Gubbi Gubbi country.

    If this episode lights something in you, pass it to one person who needs it. That is how myceliation works.
    Show more Show less
    51 mins
  • Feed us with trees. Elspeth Hay and Morag Gamble

    Feed us with trees. Elspeth Hay and Morag Gamble
    Nov 23 2025

    What if the forest you walk through is already a food garden, and the real work is remembering how to see it that way?

    In this episode of Sense Making in a Changing World I am in conversation with writer and public radio host Elspeth Hay about her beautiful new book Feed Us with Trees: Nuts and the Future of Food. Elspeth calls in from her home on Cape Cod and shares how one simple realisation changed everything for her: acorns ARE food.

    From that moment she began following nut trees back through time and across continents, uncovering oak, chestnut and hazel commons, stories of enclosure and colonisation, and the quiet resilience of people who never stopped tending tree foods. Together we explore how this different way of seeing opens a path toward food systems that feed people and whole ecosystems at the same time.

    We talk about:

    • How nut trees like oak, chestnut and hazel can sit at the centre of generous food systems
    • Why perennial tree based polycultures can out produce industrial monocultures once we count the full costs
    • Humans as potential keystone species rather than ecological mistakes
    • Cultural burning, oak woodlands and remembering that our presence can be beneficial
    • Commons, local economies and finding belonging by staying rooted in a place

    Elspeth invites us to see ourselves as “radical regenerators” who are not just analysing the old story of agriculture, but actively weaving new ones in our own communities.

    ABOUT ELSPETH HAY
    Elspeth Hay is a writer and public radio host based on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. She created The Local Food Report, a weekly program on CAI, the Cape and Islands NPR station, and her work on food and ecology has appeared in places such as the Boston Globe, NPR and Heated with Mark Bittman. Her book Feed Us with Trees: Nuts and the Future of Food explores how nut trees and tree centred cultures can help us reimagine food, history and our ecological role as humans. You can learn more about Elspeth and her work at: elspethhay.com

    I hope this episode encourages you to look again at the trees around you, the stories you have inherited about food and farming, and the quiet possibilities for belonging that are already rooted in your own place.

    I'd love to hear from you. Text me here.

    Support the show

    _____

    MORAG GAMBLE

    Founder, Permaculture Education Institute

    • Morag's Courses
    • Podcast Blog
    • Podcast YouTube:
    • Podcast Instagram
    • Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/moraggamble/

    I am a possibilitarian and I believe in HumanKINDness.

    In this podcast my guests and I explore How are we to live? Really live, as nature ourselves, tending the conditions where life can thrive. We ask How do we become the kind of humans this moment is asking us to be?

    This podcast is one of my acts of myceliation. Each conversation is a thread in a vast network of people speaking up for life with love and care.

    This podcast beams out from my hand-built solar-powered studio in the midst of a permaculture food forest in a permaculture ecovillage on Jinibara and Gubbi Gubbi country.

    If this episode lights something in you, pass it to one person who needs it. That is how myceliation works.
    Show more Show less
    55 mins