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
On Hardcore Sustainable this week we travel to Gulfport, FL to visit Hummingbird Hideout, an urban homesteading community. It’s not easy to homestead out in the country without close neighbors and usually a family depends on a lot of technology to make their lives easier. Lots of stuff, like your own car, your own truck, your own tractor can cost a lot of money and make dependent on outside sources of income. With neighbors so distant, there is far less opportunity to share technology and resources. As well, a lot of people living in the city don’t how good they have it in terms of access to resources and the efficiencies that sharing with neighbors can bring. It might seem less likely, but there is a lot you can do in a city on a small piece of land to make your life more sustainable and self sufficient.
Folks at Hummingbird Hideout have set up systems to make even life in the city much more self sufficient by sharing with their neighbors and using permaculture systems to get more of their resources on site from the earth and the sky.
In this first of two videos, we get a tour of the systems they have set up at Hummingbird, and in the second video we’ll get a tour of their food forest and native plantings.
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.
It’s been a long time coming, but I finally got a new wood stove for my tiny house. The Jotul 602 isn’t exactly an unknown quantity. I’ve used it many times in other people’s houses and I love it. It’s pretty much the smallest wood stove on the market so it’s pretty popular for the small houses at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage. And I’m pretty sure the Norwegians can be counted on for their expertise in heating a space with wood. If you are heating a small house or single room this is a reliable and attractive stove. You do have to break them in before you can use them to their full capacity, and that’s what I’m up to in this video.
The hard frost ends the season for most garden crops where I live in Missouri. Sometimes I look forward to it just for the reprieve from garden work, but it does require a flurry of activity. In this video, I harvest some of my tropical crops and find a way to make use of dry beans that aren’t quite dry.
