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...
View this post on Instagram A post shared by Levi (@levimeeuwenberg) Firstly, please enjoy the incredible flowers grown by the amazing @pennyok ! (The pollinators certainly are!) She's a garden painter and a painter of gardens. Now, heres a cool fact about butterflies...
Today we’re talking to Nathan Ayers who teaches Permaculture to students of all ages in Michigan. This is Nathans second time on the show, and it’s always a great time having him. If you like this one, be sure to check out Episode 18 as well where we discussed water solutions to the Flint, MI Water Crisis.
Today we talk about Nathan and his brother Nick’s exciting new project; We Are the Forest. In addition to their work in the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti area, they are also involved on Beaver Island.
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 Ben Falk who created and runs Whole Systems Design out of Vermont, and is also the author of the book The Resilient Farm and Homestead. Today we discuss how to go about finding the right homestead property for natural living and some of key decisions like siting your house.
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 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.
An old-growth forest is a forest that has lived for many centuries, sometimes even millenia without significant disturbance and so they possess unique ecological features found no-where else on earth.
Today’s episode is a little unique because there is no guest to interview. Instead I’ll be sharing some of the many take-aways from a recent Advanced Permaculture Design Course I took in Akron, Ohio.
This will be a way to help share and spread good ideas, as well as a good process for me to review my own notes and become more familiar with the material.
Todays guest is Mark Angelini, the other half of Roots 2 Fruits Ecological Design in Southern Michigan. We had his business partner, Trevor Newman, on here on episode 3. Mark is a generalized specialist. His work spans from art and design, to craft and woodwork, farming, gardening, forestry and of course, apple growing and cider making. Today we get to hear some updates on several of his projects, and his journies along the way.
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.
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 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.
In short, life will be very very different in the future than the relative stability we’ve seen for most of our lives up to this point. Some geologists have described the current epoch as the “Anthropocene.” This is a period when almost every ecosystem on earth bares the mark of human presence. How we go about meeting our basic needs…
Why bother with all the extra chores of trying to produce your own food, fuel, and other products when you can simply buy them at the store for cheap?
Well this is actually a daunting question to answer since it sort of crystallized into a clear picture after a lot of reading and reflecting on the multitude of challenges we face and how they’re all interconnected. Then also critically analyzing the lifestyle choices I make every day without thinking. This requires a systemic understanding of the industrialized modern world, as well as knowledge of the historical context in which we live. But I’ll attempt to summarize and hit the key points here, leaving all the juicy details for later posts. BTW, this
