Category: Local Food

Amazing Permaculture Garden at the St Pete Ecovillage

It’s been a little while since I uploaded a video because I’m working all the time here in Florida. But now I’ve got a backlog of videos to post about what I’ve been doing in St Petersburg. This is a little tour of one of my first visits to the St Pete Ecovillage, which is a very newly established ecovillage in Florida with ambitious goals.

I love that in January and February there is abundant produce coming from the garden. There are fruits and veggies that ripen only at this time of year, but year round there is something coming from the garden. It was in a subtropical region that the modern form of permaculture originated, and Florida is perfectly suited to it. In just a month I’ve seen romaine lettuce go from seedling to harvestable heads. It’s truly unbelievable.

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Planting fall garlic and cartooning

I’m escaping to the garden in this video and planting my fall garlic. Garlic is one of my favorite crops because it grows well every year, it doesn’t get any disease, and it’s easy to maintain. You just drop the cloves in in the fall after most other stuff is done and it comes up first thing in the spring. By mid July it’s finished up and you can follow it with a second fall crop.

If you couldn’t tell, this footage was taken just after the election in November.

Making Feta Cheese on a Homestead Scale: Setting and Cutting the Curds

This is the next in the series on making feta cheese on a homestead scale from fresh raw cow’s milk.  In this video we add the rennet and set and cut the curd.  This is the fun chemistry part of the process where the milk transforms into something else.  I also talk a little about raw milk products and why they are so hard to come by in our economy.

Making Feta Cheese on a Homestead Scale Pt 1

This is the first in a series of videos making feta cheese with raw milk from our local dairy farm.  If you want to make cheese on a larger scale, this is an easy way to do it without having to set up a warm water bath or having a heated jacketed stainless steel vat.  It’s all about the transfer of heat from one place to another and then keeping the heat where you want it.  There are easier ways to do it than what they tell you in the cheesemaking books.