Category: Gardening

Permaculture in an Organic Vineyard at a Radical Ecovillage

I live in what is probably North America’s most radical ecovillage, Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage. I moved here over 15 years ago to live in the country closer to the land, and to devote my life to reducing my impact on the planet.

Spring is the time for getting the garden in. Part of my garden is in my organic vineyard. I don’t just grow grapes. I grow cucumbers, squash, tomatoes, and melons between my grape vines. And in the past few years I’ve also been growing perennial flowers to provide an additional cash crop from the space. I use comfrey within the rows of grapes to smother the grasses and other weeds that would otherwise rob the grapevines of water and nutrients. Most vineyards would just spray herbicide to control the weeds. Permaculture is possible even in a vineyard.

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Early Spring Self Sufficiency On an Ecovillage Homestead

Living sustainably and self sufficiently is a lot of hard work. You have to take the opportunities to get work done when the weather allows, but you also have to take time to appreciate the natural world around you when you have the chance. This is early spring for me in the ecovillage where I live.

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Where Do Lettuce Seeds Come From? And How to Save Them

Some vegetables can be baffling when we think about where their seeds come from because we only see the part we eat. Sometimes that part is a seed and but most of the time it’s a completely different part of the plant. But the seeds are the key to the existence of the vegetable we are eating, so every vegetable must have seeds somewhere. But where are the seeds on a head of lettuce?

This video will not only show where the seeds are, but how to grow them and save them so you can grow your own lettuce year to year without buying seed.

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Starting Jackfruit from Seed the Super Easy Way

While in Florida this time I started some jackfruit from seed and planted a few trees before I left. In this video, I demonstrate the super simple process and reveal some tidbits about this delicious tropical fruit. In only 2-3 years you can have a jackfruit tree that produces fruit if conditions are right.

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5 Best Tips From a 1908 Gardening Book: Old Timey Organic Wisdom

There have been many universe-jarring advances in agricultural technology over the past 100 years, but sometimes being more sustainable means going back to the way things used to be. A lot of those advances in technology rely HEAVILY on fossil fuel, a finite resource whose limited supply we are arguably still in the sweet spot of, but which is causing climate change on a scale rarely witnessed in the history of the planet.

In this video, I find some of the gems from the Biggle Garden Book. This was before the advent of hybrid crops, biotech, and chemical pesticides and fertilizers.

But the history of agriculture is not all peaches and cream. Many useful technologies and a lot of useful information about how everything works has been discovered since this book was published. This is back when people were ingesting lead, mercury, and arsenic like it was skittles. But it was also before DDT, agent orange, and glyphosate. In the next Biggle Garden Book video, I’ll be talking about the 5 scariest tips.

Finding Out What Corn Smut Tastes Like

It’s mid season summer and the corn is going nuts! I was determined not to let the raccoons eat all my corn this season like they did last. I was sick of messing around and it was time to install an electric fence. So I set up a three wire fence. It was much simpler and cheaper to do that I ever thought it would be. It remains to be seen if I’ll get a full crop of corn. Raccoons are wily and determined little creatures. But while I was waiting for the corn to get sweet, some of the ears started busting open with wild deformed kernals–an infection of huitlacoche, or corn smut. But not wanting anything to go to waste I decided to see what it would taste like to eat corn smut. It definitely has an earthy taste and it was slightly bitter. But since I didn’t have any corn to harvest yet, it was worthwhile making use of it. And it might even be more nutritious than just eating corn.