View this post on Instagram A post shared by Levi (@levimeeuwenberg) 👇 Juicy Details Below 👇 Listen up if you care about WATER! These loose rock piles, also known as "check dams," when placed strategically within a watershed, can have powerfully transformative...
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Hey friends! In this video, I'm going to walk you through some of the first steps to getting started with homesteading and permaculture. In previous videos, I focused more on the "why" permaculture and homesteading are more than just cool hobbies but are...
This past winter I had the pleasure of visiting my friends Randy and Libby Buchler and their family at their farm, Shady Grove Farm in Michigans Upper Peninsula. In 2009, they recieved a notice for alleged zoning violations regarding their agricultural activity. Through a ton of research and collaborations, they were finally able to win back their Right to Farm in a 2012 court case. Today Randy Buchler joins us to share their story of how they achieved success.
This weeks episode is about how to start your own edible permaculture plant nursery with special guest, Sean Dembrosky of Edible Acres. Edible Acres is a small homestead and plant nursery that Sean runs in the Finger Lakes area of New York State. Today, he shares with us some great tips to getting started or improving our own plant nurseries.
Today’s guest is a good friend of mine who started up a bicycle powered community compost pickup business here in Northern Michigan. We discuss his experience with starting up the project, why this model has a ton of oppotunity for others to step up and replicate it, and tips on how you can start your own!
This episode is a follow up on episode 27. If you missed it I highly recommend you check it out. In that episode we did an analysis of what humans need to flourish. So now, using what we learned from the past episode, this week we’re going to go into kind of the goal setting part of the design process if you want to look at it that way, but basically just looking at how we can respond to the situation that we’re in. How we can adapt.
Today’s guest is Peter Bane who is the president of the Permaculture Insitute of North America, he wrote the Permaculture Handbook, literally, he has built and lived in eco-villages and self-sufficient homesteads for decades. and has taught dozens and dozens of courses and workshops all over the world. He’s the real deal, as you’ll soon learn.
Todays guest is Albert Bates who we spoke to last year because he attended the COP21 Paris Climate Conference so he gave us the inside story on that in Episode 16.
Albert also went to the latest Climate Conference, COP22 in Marakech and so he’ll be sharing with us what the so-called world leaders are doing about Climate Change and many other environmental issues.
There’ll be few main parts to this episode. I’m going to start out by doing a survey of kind of our basic biological human needs. So you know food, energy, shelter, connection, love that type of thing. (our global life support systems) And look at those within the context of how we go about meeting those needs and how that has changed over time especially from pre-agriculture revolution and then after the agriculture revolution and now into modern technological age.
Today’s guest is film producer, author and teacher Justin Rhodes who has been running his 75 acre permaculture farm near Asheville, NC for many years. He’s here to share with us some of the many lessons he’s learned along the way, and give some pointers to those getting started.
Today’s guest, Dan Kittrege has been an organic farmer since childhood, and has been developing a deep understanding of how a nutrient rich soil leads to healthier plants and healthier foods and ultimately healthier people and planet. He created the Bionutrient Food Association to promote this understanding of growing nutrient dense food. He also runs Kittredge farm in Brookfield, MA where he does his research and practices the science.
Two years ago, Brenda and I were renting an apartment and I would commute to the farm every day to take care of our pigs, chickens, gardens and plant nursery. This situation quickly made it clear to me how important it is to actually be LIVING on the land you’re farming. This is because farming is really a lifestyle more than it is a job that you can just leave when you’re done. It makes demands of you that no job every would. This was how the adventure of our strawbale passive solar greenhouse began.
Today’s guest is Jesse Tack based out of Ypsilanti, Michigan. Jesse founded and helps run the very active permaculture group; Abundant Michigan Permaculture Ypsilanti. Or AMPY for short. We get to hear about how AMPY got started and has evolved since then.
Today’s guest is Kate Heiber Cobb, who created and runs the Madison Area Permaculture Guild out of Madison Wisconsin. She is a Permaculture teacher and educator, and has done a lot with bringing Permaculture to urban regions. Today we talk about her story, how she created the guild, projects they’ve done and lessons learned along the way. It keeps getting better the deeper into the interview we go so make sure to listen to the end!
Today’s guest is Nathan Ayers, who heads up Chiwara Permaculture out of Ann Arbor, Michigan and is currently focusing on Flint Water Crisis Permaculture Solutions. Nathan also does a lot of work integrating permaculture into traditional educational institutions from kindergarten all the way up through the university level.
Eric Toensmeier is the award-winning author of the books Perennial Vegetables and Paradise Lot, which describes how he converted his run-down city lot into a diverse plant sanctuary in Massachusets. He was also the co-author to Dave Jacke from episode 14 on the two volume set Edible Forest Gardens. Eric has a brand new book about to come out about Carbon Farming and the strategies that agriculture can use to sequester CO2 to help mitigate climate change.
Albert Bates is a longtime influential figure in environmental activism, and the ecovillage and permaculture movements. He’s a lawyer, an author and a teacher, who has been director of the Ecovillage Training Center at The Farm in Summertown, Tennessee since 1994.
Today’s guest, Cliff Davis was telling me that having all those pigs and plants to care for makes it hard to leave home and travel to experience new cultures and perspectives. And he values those experiences for personal growth and expansion, plus their a great source for new ideas. But fortunately there’s a continual flow of students and interns coming through his place, Spiral Ridge Permaculture…
Today’s guest is Dave Jacke who has been mentioned several times already in previous episodes. He was the co-author of the book that I’m no longer allowed to call the “bible” of designing edible forest garden ecosystems, which is Edible Forest Gardens Volumes 1 and 2.
Here’s our winter pig pen made out of old pallets. It’s about an acre of fencing enclosing a thick patch of blue spruce trees. The spruce helps provide shelter from the wind and snow for the pigs, and we give them straw to insulate from the ground.
Today’s guests, Paul and Sharron May, run a small farm called The May Farm in Frankfort, MI near us here in the northern part of the Lower Peninsula. They apply a permaculture approach to their homestead, and farm, and have been seeing some spectacular results.
Today’s guest is Deanne Bednar, who runs the Strawbale Studio, which is a education, and demonstration center for natural building, and natural living.
Early in the spring this year we began using Realeyes Homestead as the commercial scale composting site for Traverse City. It has been a great partnership with Bay Area Recycling for Charities, a non-profit that created and runs the composting operation.
Todays episode focuses on water. A broad topic for sure, but a pretty important one since basically all life forms depend on access to clean water to survive. As you probably know, our bodies are 60% water. Water is vital for lubricating our joints, flushing out toxins and waste, and transporting vital nutrients to all of our cells.
Our homestead started off with just two pigs, and we got hooked. We’re up to 13 now, and we’re even breeding our own piglets! Over the years we’ve experimented with many different types of pens, fencing and paddocks for them. By no means have we “arrived at” or discovered the perfect system. But we’ve made a portable pig pen system that meets three important design criteria for us:
This is an essential element of any sustainable homestead. Basically it’s where you store all the useful crap that you can get your hands on, before that future project comes along when you need it!!
Today’s guest is Samantha Graves of Healing Tree Farm at the historic DeYoungs farm in Northern Michigan. There, Samantha and her family are planting a Permaculture orchard and have had livestock like chickens, sheep and alpacas and are getting involved in fiber production. Their farm actually neighbors my families farm, and we’ve been working together for a few years now.
Today’s guest is one my good friends and mentors Peter Bane, who is one of the most experienced permaculture teachers in the midwest. He’s the author of the Permaculture Handbook; Garden Farming for Town and Country. He’s also been the publisher of Permaculture Activist magazine for 25 years, which recently changed to Permaculture Design Magazine.
After our pigs escaped the electric net fence AGAIN, we were seeking out better ways to fence them in. Andy Gale of Bay Area Recycling for Charities mentioned that they had an abundance of pallets and we could use them to build a perimeter fence. It seemed like a great idea to me, especially considering that most of the fencing I was pricing out…
