Category: Sustainable Agriculture

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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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.

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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.

How to Know When to Harvest ORGANIC Grapes for Wine

It was time to test the grapes and decide if I needed to start harvesting yet. I got out my trusty refractometer to see what the sugar levels were at.

There are a number of factors involved in deciding if it’s time to harvest grapes. It’s a balance between grape quality and suitability and readiness for winemaking. And it also all depends on the season–whether you got a lot of rain or very little. This was a great season for my grapes because we didn’t get any rain for the first three months of grape development, so the fruit got really sweet and the acid levels had the chance to lower somewhat.

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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.