Author: Dan

Urban Permaculture Oasis at St Pete Ecovillage

This is a more in depth tour of the garden with better quality footage to follow up on my previous garden and food forest videos.  I’m amazed at how free off pests this garden is.  It also combines fruit and vegetables in some places, so the plants can work together in true permaculture fashion.  During winter the peach and nectarine trees have no leaves, so the winter greens and brassicas planted underneath can get plenty of sunlight.  This garden produces abundant food for both the ecovillage and the surrounding community.

Incredible Food Forest at St Pete Ecovillage

I already did a tour of the garden at the ecovillage here in St Petersburg, FL, but I left out the food forest, which takes up a section of the garden space and features a collection of tropical fruit trees. Examples of food production like this illustrate how easy it can be to grow your own fruit, but they also make me realize how disconnected people are from their food that they choose to buy fruit from a store that’s been shipped across the world instead of growing their own. These things seem to grow themselves with little effort, and the reward is a bounty of fresh fruit that tastes like nothing you could find at the store.

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Florida’s Newest (and only) Ecovillage: St Pete Ecovillage

This is a tour of the newly formed St Pete Ecovillage. The people here have been putting a lot of sweat into fixing up the space they are turning into an ecovillage. This is a little walking tour around the property to see what they’ve got going on and what improvements they’ve already made. It’s a work in progress and expect more sustainable systems to be implemented as they get their houses livable and have time and resources to devote to other projects.

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The Strangest Tree I’ve Ever Seen

St Pete is like a botanical garden. In certain yards and neighborhoods there is a diverse landscape of exotic tropical plants. For a gardener and horticulturalist like me, who hasn’t spent much time in the tropics it is an adventure just to ride my bike around. On this trip I happened across a very strange fruit on a strange tree.

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Harnessing Wind Power the Old Fashioned Way: Sailing in the Gulf

My aunt and uncle take me out sailing on a sailboat my uncle built himself. This is wind power technology that humans have been using for thousands of years. I love the feeling of speeding along knowing we are moving without the use of anything but natural power. Maybe next time I can get them to do the entire trip without the motor. I know they have the skills. I’ve only gone sailing sporadically in my life and most of those times were with my aunt and uncle.

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Getting High In St Petersburg

Although I haven’t flown in a plane in a while because I’m concerned about the impact of plane travel on the planet, my uncle happens to be an avid small plane flyer. He’s taken me up in his Mooney prop plane a couple times since I’ve come here to Florida, and this video is a little documentary of one of these adventures. We flew to his sailboat and went practice racing with a few other boats, but that part of the adventure will come in the next video. I wish I could say this was a solar powered plane, but it was just diesel. Although, I’m not crazy about the impact of flying, like many other activities that are destructive to the planet, I can understand the appeal in terms of fun and experience. I just had to share this experience because it was pretty awesome. This little video series will showcase the power of the wind.

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