In this 3 part video we visit with Jack Walter at Yarrow Hill Farms at neighboring Red Earth Farms, where we are given a tour of his livestock operation. Jack uses a mixed rotational grazing system to not only produce food, but to restore degraded farmland to fertility. Continue reading
For a long time I planted small plots of corn in my garden and was disappointed with the harvest. Often the ears wouldn’t fill out properly, missing kernels in spots or not filling out to the end of the ear. This trick helped me get full ears nearly every time and effectively doubled my harvest of food. There’s nothing better that sweet corn in summer, except maybe getting more of it out of the same space.
Why do I think I can have a channel called Hardcore Sustainable? This is more of a personal video talking about my story and my motivations for moving to an ecovillage and making a commitment to doing things the really hard, and hardcore sustainable way. Given all the ecological problems facing the planet, we need to go further in our lifestyle activism. Cooperation with others can be one of the best ways to make our lives richer while consuming less resources, and living in an ecovillage makes cooperation much easier.
I started an experimental vineyard 8 years ago at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage and have been developing a method of growing grapes organically in the Midwest. Nearly every commercial vineyard in the country outside of the West Coast and Southwest is highly dependent on chemical herbicides and pesticides. Continue reading
You can’t always rely on the starts you pick up at the garden center to be sustainably grown, and you never know what varieties are going to be available. One easy way to eliminate the uncertainty around garden starts is to grow your own. Continue reading
I designed my house with the sun in mind, and since I get so much sun inside the house in the middle of winter, why should put a solar cooker outside to cook? The GoSun, a relatively new design for solar cooking, is small, portable, and powerful enough to use in my house with just the sunlight coming in through the window. My DR neighbor Aaron and I tried it out last January to see how it would work even in the low intensity winter sunlight. The GoSun is just another tool we can use to reduce our dependence on fossil fuel and make use of the abundant solar energy that bathes our planet year round.
