Category: Permaculture

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.

Do THIS to your Fruit Trees in the Spring for a HUGE Harvest

I’m posting this video a little ahead of the season but it will help you hit the ground running. In a time of pandemic, we need to do all we can to ensure our food security and get a bigger harvest, so it’s no time to neglect your fruit trees. If anything it’s a time to planting more of them in your yard. Every year I spend a little extra time doing a simple maintenance task for my fruit trees and it not only makes the fruit a lot bigger, it reduces insect pests and produces more perfect fruit. Some people scoff at thinning fruit trees because they think it’s too much work, but it can make a huge difference in the harvest and in controlling insect pests and disease.

Fall Permaculture Bounty: Hazelnuts, Pecans, Mushrooms, Persimmons

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

What Happened With My Homemade Onion Sets Experiment?

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.

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