Realize Homestead Videos
What’s Happening at Realize Homestead – Local Radio Interview WUWU-LPFM 100.1
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...
![A Lost and Found Life [Story-Poem] June 2024](https://realizehomestead.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Screenshot_1.jpg)
A Lost and Found Life [Story-Poem] June 2024
[Music: Edge Hill by Groove Armada] You awaken, a child, as though for the first time, and wonder at the infinite living rainbow dancing...
The Potato Appeal
View this post on Instagram A post shared by Levi (@levimeeuwenberg) 💪 🥔 Potato Power! 🥔 💪 I found this story interesting and inspiring! I'd never heard about the Potato Uprising in Sweden before. (And you gotta love those cheeky billboards 😆) Potatoes are one of the...
Check Dams – Fixing Drought & Mitigating Climate Change
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...
Pollinator Paradise & Butterfly Goo
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...
Garter Snakes for Your Garden!
View this post on Instagram A post shared by Levi (@levimeeuwenberg) Garter snakes help out in the garden by eating common pests like rodents and slugs. (and are non-poisonous!) 😎 You can attract them by creating snake habitat with a loose pile of stones. This...
Shiitake Mushroom Log Flush
View this post on Instagram A post shared by Levi (@levimeeuwenberg) Shiitake mushrooms are one of the tastiest and easiest to grow. 🍄 🍄 🍄 🍄This was the biggest flush of the season so far! They'll do this once or twice a year, but sometimes also produce smaller...
Pig Zoomies!
View this post on Instagram A post shared by Levi (@levimeeuwenberg) It makes me smile when the pigs get so happy and zoomy in their new pen! ☺️Meet Steve Buscemi, Dot and Poppy. 🐖 🐷 🐽
Full-Circle Chickens!
View this post on Instagram A post shared by Levi (@levimeeuwenberg) 👇 What are Full-Circle Chickens? 👇 Livestock, like chickens, aren't inherently bad for the environment. They can actually be beneficial if managed properly. 🌱 🌿 🌳 'Full-circle Chickens' is the fun...
![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)
How to Start Homesteading with Permaculture – Understanding the Land [VIDEO]
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...
Levi’s Guest Appearance on the Height Drop Parkour Podcast
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...
![Introduction to Apple Tree Grafting with Trevor Newman [Video]](https://realizehomestead.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/IMG_4229-scaled.jpg)
Introduction to Apple Tree Grafting with Trevor Newman [Video]
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 Currants) [Video]
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)
How to Establish Understory/Groundcover Plants in your Orchard or Forest Garden [Video]
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.
Pastured Pig Dueling / Dominance Fighting
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!
Winter Pig Pen with Pallets and Pine Trees
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.
How to Make a Portable Pig Pen
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:
Spontaneous Gardens Planted by Our Pigs
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.
Building Soil from Scratch Using Pigs and Cover Crops!
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.
How to Use a Pig Tractor, Portable Pig Pen
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.
How We Made a Permaculture Plant Nursery
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/)
How to Feed Chickens Using Compost (Food Waste)
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.
Compost + Pigs + Chickens = Stacking Functions!
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.
