Our ecovillage features many permaculture plantings that have been maintained over the years by many people. The village is kind of like one big permaculture project. Fall is a time when a lot of perennial fruit and nut trees produce abundantly and in this video I went around the village to see what kind of a harvest I could find. I ended up checking the hazelnuts on my warren (what we rabbits call our yards), did a trade of wine for shiitakes, picked some persimmons from the Dancing Rabbit orchard, and went outside the village to harvest some delicious hardy pecans (ours are still too small to produce fruit).
A lot of times you only see the planting of permaculture projects and not so much the actual production of them. But that’s where this video is different.
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It’s been a little while since I posted a video. I’ve been busy with early season tasks like getting the garden in and tending the vineyard, but I’ve got a lot of videos coming soon. This is a little early season vignette.
It was time to test the grapes and decide if I needed to start harvesting yet. I got out my trusty refractometer to see what the sugar levels were at.
There are a number of factors involved in deciding if it’s time to harvest grapes. It’s a balance between grape quality and suitability and readiness for winemaking. And it also all depends on the season–whether you got a lot of rain or very little. This was a great season for my grapes because we didn’t get any rain for the first three months of grape development, so the fruit got really sweet and the acid levels had the chance to lower somewhat.
In the last several years I’ve been experimenting with making use of the space between rows of grapes to grow produce. Nature abhors a monoculture, so if I can grow other crops in what would be normally be wasted space in the vineyard, without them negatively impacting the grapes, I can get a lot more food out of my space. It’s particularly important when you are establishing a vineyard and waiting for your grapes to produce. If you can grow a crop that can bring in money in year or two, you can use the harvest to pay for the cost of vineyard establishment.
When I was setting up my vineyard, I decided to space the rows 10′ apart instead of the standard 8′ so that I could improve the air flow between the vines, but also so that it would be easier to make use of the space for other crops. If you plant low growing crops, they won’t impede air flow and as long as they are out of the way by the time you harvest the grapes.
This is a later season tour of my vineyard, when many of the grapes are getting very close to harvest. It’s been a good season, without much rain, which, though bad for almost everything else on the farm, is good for the grapes.
This is a little video about my trip to Florida earlier this summer. It was the time I’ve always wanted to be in Florida–mango season. There was pounds and pounds of delicious free fruit to glean in the neighborhood. I also had some surprise fishing experiences in my brief time, including my personal best snook, that was also the biggest fish I ever caught (and only my second snook ever caught). I’m glad I got some fishing in before the red tide killed everything in Florida.
