Sustainable Living Skills You Need to Survive
It might not seem so serious to the average consumer in the First World, but the future of the world as we know hangs in the balance. The media is full of bad news that can make changing things for the better seem hopeless, but there are simple and radical things you can do to reduce your impact and set an example for others. It's not just a choice, our survival depends on it.
Follow my YouTube Channel Hardcore Sustainable to find out how I've implemented sustainable technologies and techniques at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage to help me live more lightly on the Earth.
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Planting fall garlic and cartooning
I’m escaping to the garden in this video and planting my fall garlic. Garlic is one of my favorite crops because it grows well every year, it doesn’t get any disease, and it’s easy to maintain. You just drop the cloves in in the fall after most other stuff is done and it comes up first thing in the spring. By mid July it’s finished up and you can follow it with a second fall crop.
If you couldn’t tell, this footage was taken just after the election in November.
How does my house perform in a polar vortex?
It’s a good thing I have plans to get out of the cold if being swooped down on by the polar vortex is going to become a regular thing thanks to climate change. I’m getting the mudroom finished up and preparing to leave Dancing Rabbit for the winter, so maybe I don’t have to worry about how my house performs. But even so, it’s nice to know it does pretty well on a sunny day when it’s 5 degrees F. The problem is that we don’t get very many sunny days in winter, so I think I’m better living somewhere during wintertime where I don’t have to heat my house.
Making Wine From Homegrown Grapes: Racking
The next stage of winemaking for my homegrown grapes is racking, when you decant the wine must off the lees. The wine is getting clearing with each racking and this will get most of the leftover yeast out of the wine. I share a little trick for cleaning out your tubing that I’ve found useful.
Turning Pallets Into Walls: Mudroom Pt 6
I make a lot more progress on the mudroom in this video. It’s amazing how much of a difference giving form to walls can have on the impact of a structure. This video goes into more detail on how I turn reclaimed pallet wood into decorative siding.
Using Pallet Wood to Build My Walls: Mudroom Pt 4
At Dancing Rabbit we try to build our houses out of reclaimed and natural materials as much as we possibly can, so I’m siding my new mudroom with reclaimed pallet wood. We’re fortunate enough to have a guy nearby who reclaims good boards from deconstructed shipping pallets. I was able to get some of the better boards for doing the exterior siding on my new addition.
Making Feta Cheese on a Homestead Scale: Setting and Cutting the Curds
This is the next in the series on making feta cheese on a homestead scale from fresh raw cow’s milk. In this video we add the rennet and set and cut the curd. This is the fun chemistry part of the process where the milk transforms into something else. I also talk a little about raw milk products and why they are so hard to come by in our economy.