Category: Gardening

Permaculture in the Sub-tropics: Urban Food Forest in Gulfport, FL

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

My 25 Year Old Seed Collection: So Many Seeds, So Many Stories

Now is the time when in the dead of winter everyone is ordering seeds or just looking through their seed collection and deciding what to grow next season. Everyone’s champing at the bit for the cold to go away and the ground to green up so they can start a new season in the garden.

This video is really for the avid gardener and seed saver. I go through my 25 year old seed collection and tell the stories of how I can to be saving certain varieties.

I’d love to hear your seed stories too, so leave a comment in the comments section if you have a good one.

https://www.facebook.com/HardcoreSustainable/
http://hardcoresustainable.com

Post-season Permaculture: Volunteer Asparagus and Hardy Greens from Saved Seed

There’s always something to do after the garden is mostly put to bed for the season. I love having a reason to go out and work in the garden long after those first hard frosts. If you have a hoop house, you can work in the ground almost all winter long.

In this video I set up my warren for more perennial production in the future by transplanting asparagus crowns from a nursery bed in my vegetable garden. I’m looking forward to being able to harvest much more asparagus from the nooks of my warren that are currently not producing anything. I also take a trip out to the hoop house to see how my beds of winter greens are doing. Everything I’m growing in the hoop house came from saved seed.

My Permaculture Vineyard Produced A LOT More Than Grapes This Year

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.