I was recently invited by Dan Kelly to be a guest on his show, The Farm Report, on the local radio station WUWU-LPFM 100.1, a low power radio station based out of Elberta, Michigan. It was a fun chat in which we talked about the land I'm homesteading on, the...
![How to Start Homesteading with Permaculture – Understanding the Land [VIDEO]](https://realizehomestead.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Green-Photocentric-Bold-Masculine-How-to-Get-Profit-from-Trading-Youtube-Thumbnail-3.jpg)
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...
My parkour buddy, Brandon Douglas, invited me to appear on his Height Drop podcast. It was a fun chat, in which we discussed my parkour journey, getting into farming and sustainable living, existential threats, narratives, soil depletion, regenerative...
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.
![Introduction to Apple Tree Grafting with Trevor Newman [Video]](https://realizehomestead.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/IMG_4229-scaled.jpg)
INTRO TO APPLE TREE GRAFTING (BENCH GRAFTING) WITH TREVOR NEWMAN
![Clever Tricks for Planting and Propagating Gooseberry Bushes (and Currants) [Video]](https://realizehomestead.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/IMG_4232-scaled.jpg)
CLEVER TRICKS FOR PLANTING AND PROPAGATING GOOSEBERRY BUSHES (AND OTHER RIBES, LIKE CURRANTS) WITH TREVOR NEWMAN
![How to Establish Understory/Groundcover Plants in your Orchard or Forest Garden [Video]](https://realizehomestead.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/IMG_4223.jpg)
A really good way to integrate ground cover species is overseeding either into the existing vegetation or into the compost mulch pits. We typically use a combination of like legumes like clover and veg and all that stuff and then top rooted plants like daikon, turnip, chicory, things like that they have deep taproots.
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 guests Alec Gioseffi and Lauren Nagy run the CSA Farm Cooperative 518 in Princeton, New Jersey. They provide nourishing food to the local community using permaculture farming practices. The farm is home to chickens, cats, sheep, pigs, nine humans, veggies, herbs, flowers, a small upcycled greenhouse, a large seasonal hoop house, and two tiny homes.
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.
That’s a taste of some of the types of things you would learn by taking a Permaculture Design Course. Today I’m talking to Rhonda Baird about why you would want to take a PDC, what it covers, and what you get out of it. Rhonda has been a Permaculture teacher for 10 years and shares her journey from taking her first PDC, to today where she has a thriving homestead and teaches numerous PDCs a year. She will also be one of the guest teachers for the upcoming PDC here in Traverse City this spring.
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…
We put pigs together into a pen for the first time, and the mamma fights another pig for dominance while her piglet tries to nurse. Get out of the way piglet!
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.
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.
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!!
First we created winter pig pens using pallets that were freely available at many warehouses in town. Then we fed the pigs old vegetable waste from town throughout the winter, then covered the left overs with leaves. Many squash and tomato seeds from the food waste germinated in the spring and sprouted up through the mulch. The abundance of fertility in this location provided much plant food, and the leaves helped keep them from drying out during the summer.
For the last couple years we have been experimenting with movable pig pens (pig tractors) and cover crops in order to build the soil fertility, and plant diversity of our pasture.
The results have been overwhelmingly positive! In just two years, we’ve transformed patches of our knapweed and beach sand site, into a thick lush pasture with diverse forage crops.
This is one of our pig tractors at Realeyes Homestead. We built them out of salvaged lumber and pallets, on cedar skids so that we can drag them all around the pasture. This keeps the pigs healthy and happy because they always have fresh ground to root up and forage in, and it keeps them away from their feces accumulation.
Over the last few years we’ve been collecting unique and useful perennial plant species from all over the world. (except invasive species) Some we get from friends with farms and gardens, some are responsibly transplanted from the wild, and some we order from nurseries like Oikos Tree Crops. (http://oikostreecrops.com/)
Inspired by Karl Hammer’s Compost-Chicken Hybrid system in Vermont, we began creating a compost pile inside our portable bird pen using food scraps collected from local restaurants and grocery stores. The chickens not only get to eat the fresh veggie scraps we dump on top of the compost pile every other day, but once those are eaten, they dig into the pile to harvest all the insect decomposers and other goodies that the compost pile generates. For 70+ birds (chickens, ducks etc) we only had to supplement them with about a pound of feed daily, and could probably go grain free if we had to, using this system.
In our dream world, all animals on our farm would be free-range. They would just choose to stick around and provide for us because life is so good here. Well that’s how our egg-laying hens did reside here for over a year. But recently our hens began disappearing one by one. We determined it was an aerial predator, but lost most of our flock in the process. We finally resolved to confine them for their protection, but wanted them to still have access to abundant grass and bugs from the land. Based on a little research, a portable “Hoop Coop” chicken tractor looked like just the sort of domicile our birds deserve.
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…
Realeyes Homestead and Bay Area Recycling for Charities are teaming up to turn city waste streams; Old Produce, Food Waste, Pallets, …into marketable products; Nutrient Rich Compost for amending gardens and farm soils, Pastured Pork, Poultry and Eggs.
