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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Trellising tomatoes can be a lot of work, and the typical tomato cage you can buy from the store is always inadequate for holding up a tomato vine. Long ago I learned about this tomato cage that is built to last and is sturdy enough to hold up the biggest fruit laden tomato plant. You should try it yourself.
Permaculture is all about stacking functions and creating symbiotic systems, and I try to follow these tenets in how I keep my vineyard. I intercrop my vineyard with vegetables, flowers, and green manures, not only to make use of what would otherwise be empty space, but to reduce competition with the grape vines and to cut back on the need for mowing and other maintenance.
I’ve been doing some experimenting with my low tunnel this season, not only planting crops under it, but adding wheels so that I can easily move it on and off the bed. It’s great for season extension and for protecting the crops from rabbits and deer, and it fits and moves perfectly between the rows of grapes in my vineyard.
In the past, I’ve planted onion starts from seed every spring with mixed results. I got kind of sick of dealing with cold early spring temps, damping off, and waiting forever to get plants big enough for planting out. I wanted the convenience and reliability of onion sets, but didn”t want conventionally grown sets from the store, which are often sweet onion varieties instead of the long storage ones I like to grow.
So last year I made a video about making my own organic onion sets, and this season I planted them out. This video takes you through the the season of growth and we get to see how they did.
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.
This is the second video about the urban homesteading community Hummingbird Hideout in Gulfport, FL near Tampa Bay. In just a few years they have established a food forest of tropical fruit trees and other useful and native plants on an urban lot. Things grow so fast in the sub-tropics that it only to takes a few years to have bountifully producing fruit trees and a lush forest. Malory gives us a tour of the food forest and all the many different kinds of plants they are growing, and Stefan tells us about native plants.
Even if you live in a city you can produce a lot of food on an urban lot. And you don’t have to live in the tropics, although it takes a lot less time in the tropics and there are a lot more useful plant choices. I personally find a productive food forest to be much more aesthetically pleasing than your typical urban yard, with a lawn monoculture and maybe some ornamental shrubs. And just imagine how much more beautiful and productive our neighborhoods would be if everyone turned their yard into a food forest.
Check out Stefan Babyak’s Youtube channel at:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoOpJ8BpZayCoJkLqkl07GQ
