Category: Sustainable Living

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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Urban Homesteading Community: Self-Sufficient in the City

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.

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The Neighborhood Soil Making Movement

Josh Whiton from Makesoil.org came through St Petersburg, FL last winter teaching classes on community composting, or soil making, as he calls it. He’s organizing an effort to set up neighborhood scale composting worldwide and better connect people to the land and their community. He explains his plans and philosophy around creating a regenerative economy that will restore the planet instead of destroying it.

Join the movement!

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How are plastic rings back?

25 years ago or so beverage companies voluntarily did away with plastic can rings under pressure from concerned consumers and environmental groups. Now they are back, and provide a great example of how capitalism is relentless in its drive to destroy the planet, and how in order to keep it from destroying the planet even faster, we have to be constantly vigilant in keeping it in check. It’s exhausting and requires way too much mental, financial, and political resources.

Rebuilding and Improving a Rocket Mass Heater

The rocket mass heater in Skyhouse at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage was in need of some repairs and improvements. It was at least 15 years old and had always had some issues with efficiency in heating the space it was supposed to. Mark Mazziotti, of nearby Red Earth Farms, was hired to do a total rebuild of the stove because of his experience in building rocket stoves and mass heaters. I happened to find out he was doing the rebuild and asked him if he would help me make a video about the project. It’s a little longer than some of my usual videos, but it’s interesting to hear the thought and planning Mark put into the rebuild.

Mark wants me to add that he miscalculated his estimate of his experience in natural building. It’s more like 15, not 20 years of experience he has.

My New Tiny House Wood Stove: Breaking in the Jotul 602

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.