Years ago I learned to make a tool that I’ve found indispensable in my organic garden. It only takes a few minutes to make one, and it costs next to nothing.
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This is a video I made earlier in the season about my gooseberry harvest. This fruit grows really well in our area so it’s a great addition to a permaculture planting as a low bush. These bushes produce abundantly and have virtually no disease or insect problems when grown organically. People often don’t realize the value of some of the more obscure or seemingly less palatable fruits.
In my experience, a fruit having this reputation usually means it can be used in many different and unexpected ways, you just have to know what you’re doing. Not every fruit can be perfect, sweet, and intended for eaten out of hand, and our ancestors knew that when they selected fruit for other uses than out of hand eating. Culinary fruits are just as useful, and add so much more to food culture and food security.
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Obviously key to any permaculture system is picking varieties of plants that are productive, and the sour cherry performs really well in our area. My pie cherry tree, a Montmorency, produced abundantly this season. The fruit is kind of tart to eat out of hand, though some don’t mind. I like to dehydrate the fruit so they can be stored for longer. They can be sweetened for an easy snack, trail food, or ingredient in salads. There’s nothing better than local fruit, and these cherries a loaded with flavor.
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At Dancing Rabbit we are always looking for new useful plants that will grow in our climate and soil since it can be challenging given the poor land we inherited. I’ve been trying out many in the last two seasons. Two of these plants are new to me and one I’ve grown for many years and find a vital part of my harvest every year. I was really surprised by how easy these were to start from direct seeding outdoors. I’d tried them indoors the previous year with minimal success. See my other video from last year of me starting a number of permaculture plants.
A lot of people don’t know that figs can grow in a lot more places than the tropics. You see them in California and Florida, but there are people that get fruit off their fig trees every year here in northern Missouri. Of course, the trees do die back to the ground every winter, but they still come back and produce a crop every season. If you have a greenhouse or hoop house in a temperate region, your figs won’t die back to the ground. I knew someone who had a full-sized fig tree in their passive solar greenhouse in central Wisconsin.
In this video I show you how you can easily propagate your own figs trees. It’s really easy to turn one fig shoot into several fig trees in a short time, and within a couple years you can be harvesting fresh figs even in northern regions.
Despite the benefits a city can offer, city life can be stressful and polluted with both noise and light, all of which means people are having more trouble sleeping than ever. I used to have insomnia all the time when I lived in the city, and even when over the counter sedatives wouldn’t work I found that the gentle effect of a homemade herbal tincture would do the trick.
I made a valerian, hops, and chamomile tincture blend that served as a great sleeping potion to relax me enough to help me drift off at night. This spring I found a bunch of volunteer valerian growing in my garden so I thought it was time to make some more sleeping potion. I sleep really soundly most nights at Dancing Rabbit, but I figure I can send some of this to friends who live in the city, and it’s always good to have some on hand just in case.
