10 Permaculture Projects For Your Backyard

hello chris here from coulter's good earth farm now we practice permaculture on a larger scale here on our commercial farm but today we're going to walk around the property and look at 10 different components that you might see in any scale of permaculture and these 10 would make great backyard projects for you to try at home when you're building your permaculture system one of the key components that you should probably start with is a medicinal herb bed they're very important for your health and they're not hard to do this was a very small area and i this one's set up in a keyhole shape so you can do an herb spiral you can just do a straight rectangular or square raised bed but it's important that you have some medicinal and some culinary herbs close to the house that you can use now this is full of 40 to 45 different species that cover a wide range so we have some things that are just here for culinary use we have some very important medicinal herbs and for teas and things like that as well so this is a small component in a bigger system but it's a very important component another component that's used in permaculture systems a lot is the soil and these can be a large scale you know half a half a kilometer or something like that but you can also do it on a small scale you don't have to have large area or large property in order to make use of soils this is just a short little mini swell here i have on contour that will stop and collect water as it comes off this slope and soaks it in i've actually burned up a little bit of soil but on top of that i've taken some old mushroom logs and sort of added to the mini swale so that sort of soaks in water slows down water and really allows that water to infiltrate the soil here i've got this berm planted this is some pawpaw and i've got some conference and different stuff in here that's a mock orange i think i've also just scattered some seeds these are looks like honey locust seeds that are coming up right here in this little mini swale that i just threw the seeds out it's nice moist area it's a fertile soil because it collects the stuff that's running down the hill and the wood rots that's going to add fertility as well so this is just a really small swale but it adds a lot to your permaculture system and this is something you can do in your backyard so this is a good idea as well another great permaculture project for certain people in certain environments is a hugel mound now this is more important for people that had forested areas on their property but you know we don't have a whole lot of woods here but we do have some spare wood in fact there was some trees that were taken out we had some spare wood so we just made a huge mound here now this is what i call an informal huge mound and this is just piled up wood with just a lot of a little bit of soil and debris on top if you really want to make a real huge mound you're going to need to bury wood in the ground and put soil on top and then you can plant that well you can also just pile up some wood and make a nice wood pile it's good it's a good place for over wintering of beneficial insects beetles things like that and then over time this wood will rot down i put this on a it's already doing a pretty good job of just breaking down uh naturally this was a fairly slopey clay site so this may take several years but i didn't need the space the wood was extra so i'll pile it up here if i have some extra brush or something i just throw it on top and then in three or four more years this is going to break down this wood's going to rot and it's going to make a really fertile soil here so this is something i'm not in any big hurry for i just pile it up let it rot let nature do its thing and then we're going to have some soil improvement without much work so a huge mound is something you might want to try if you have a lot of extra wood another permaculture project that's actually more like a planting pattern that you can do in your backyard is to plant in guilds rather than to plant in blocks or to plant individual plants now a guild is a community of plants that sort of have a symbiotic relationship and help each other out it normally involves some kind of perennial tree that's in the middle in this case we've got an apricot here you could do a pear chariot some other kind of fruit tree it doesn't even have to be a fruit bearing tree but primarily use something that you can get some yield on and then you're going to have your support species around that you can do perennials you can do some annuals but mostly stick with perennials here we've got some rhubarb some coffee here i've got some strawberries some sorrel planted you're going to have bushes and maybe fruiting things that are a little bit bigger this is some gooseberry in here some currants as far as the shrubby species you sort of want to do a mix of components and see which ones complement each other so a guild planning is just a community of plants that help each other rather than individuals that are stuck in different places of your yard so when you think about planting think about planting in groups and guilds rather than planting individual plants a very key component to many permaculture systems is the hedgerow this hedgerow here is made out of aronia berry so this is a native berry that takes very little maintenance it's five to six foot this is biking variety produces an edible berry high in antioxidants we love the berry does well here you want to kind of fit your your species with your environment so there's a variety of species you can use for hedgerows we use several different components and varieties here on the farm but this is one of our favorites five to six feet has a nice fall color so it looks good it's actually a visual barrier and we're getting a productive yield of a good quality berry from it as well with very little maintenance and once you get these hedgerows established they're a great component in a permaculture system not every component in a permaculture system has to produce an edible yield this is one of our butterfly gardens planted just for the enjoyment of pollinators butterflies and other beneficial insects bees love this as well we've got this planted with a lot of native perennial plants a few annuals stuck in there everything that butterflies love to draw them in here so you don't have to have a large area this is actually a fairly small area just a few plants tucked here and there or you can do a dedicated area like this put a bench put a bird bath maybe a hummingbird feeder all these things will draw in your beneficial insects and pollinators so this is a great component that's aesthetically pleasing and it actually does a great benefit to your native insects another classic component of most permaculture systems is some kind of raised bed or bed for vegetable production now we are a vegetable farm so we have four acres of vegetable production but often that's in a place that's not close to our house not in zone one so we do actually have zone one vegetable production and we did that in raised beds here so a raised bed is a good project that a lot of people start with you don't have to have a raised bed if you have good soil but if you're on a rocky slopey area like this sometimes a raised bed fits in well this was done from repurposed block and we fill it with compost from the farm here and i use this for some herbs and some vegetables some sweet potatoes or some cucumbers lettuce and stuff so i don't have to walk back to another part of the farm in order to pick up fresh tomato or a cucumber or a pepper if i need it for a meal so raised beds are a classic component of a permaculture system and if you have the site for them they're a good one to try one of the first permaculture projects that you should install is water catchment water is life and it's very critical and that's easy to do most structures can be guttered if they already have gutters and that those gutters can be diverted into catchment tanks instead of that a lot of times that water is just being run off or wasted this is good fresh clean water that can be safe for irrigation if not for drinking after it's been purified or filtered so we catch water on our greenhouses on our buildings and our house and you can use large tanks like this this is a thousand gallon idc or you can use a smaller scale just a 50 gallon 55 gallon rain barrel are popular those blue barrels are very popular we can use those as well you can use something smaller or something larger than this so as long as you're catching water and something it's easy to do it's a project that you'll want to install on your property once you get that water it'll store and you can use it for anything [Music] including hooking up a drip system to it and using it to irrigate an essential permaculture project every homestead should have is a way to make compost this can be a formal area that you have enclosed you can have a compost bin a compost barrel or you could just compost in a pile on the ground with no structure whatsoever we just compost in these semi-open bins the coal compost so we fill one side up and when that's full we move to the other side after about a year or so we have good compost it may have some weed seeds in it so we take that into account but we are recycling nutrients from the farm and we are producing fertility here in our compost pile we also have this is our main composting area but we do have another compost then closer to the house which makes it more convenient to use so we'll use it more often and we also use vermicomposting which is a different form of vermicompost which is a different form of composting and we'll take a look at that next another type of composting is using compost worms to break down organic matter and we do that as well it's called vermicomposting you can use a small household bin like this that we you can stick in your basement underneath your kitchen sink or you could vermicompost on a larger scale using an old bathtub like we have here set up and the good thing about vermicompost is the weed seeds do not exist in this because we don't put them in there we only use this for kitchen scraps weed free organic matter so we know at the end of the cycle after the worms have broken this down that there's going to be no weed seeds in this so we use this for seed starting and things like that we don't want any weed seeds the the worms will break down almost anything they'll recycle all this material we actually have this set up you want to come over here and take a look so we have this bin sealed off from uh flies that may come into it soldier fives especially that like to eat organic matter so as long as it's sealed we do also have a sealed drain in the bottom so all the liquid that comes in the top or the extra liquid drains off and we catch that here and it actually makes a really nice liquid fertilizer that can be used directly on plants as well so once you get the vermicompost finish you can take it out and use it as well may have eggshells or any other kind of stuff in it but this is good finished vermicompost that we can put directly on our plants it's all recycled material maybe one of the larger permaculture projects that you can install is a greenhouse but it is one that is very critical to any permaculture homestead and one that i would recommend it doesn't have to be this big it can be a smaller greenhouse this one's about 30 by 14 something like that but you do have to have a way to start transplants and it's also a multi-purpose house we use it for drying for season extension for storage for lots of things so it's going to show have a lot of purpose and a lot of usefulness on the homestead but it is a project that maybe a little bit bigger but one that i would definitely recommend putting in early as early as possible so you can have a lot of production from it to be truly sustainable and self-sufficient livestock really have to be integrated into the property but that's easy to do on a small scale with animals like rabbits they make a really great backyard animal they can eat things like weeds like lamb's quarters that you're not necessarily going to eat and then they produce fertility with their manure that you can use on your vegetable plots and then they also produce meat so rabbits are multi-purpose animals that are good for that and they fit into a small backyard permaculture project really well for true sustainability you sort of have to think outside the box sometimes and there may be a component that may seem strange to you but actually fits the niche really well and one of them is the pastured pan which we normally see for rabbits for chickens but you can pasture a lot of animals and one that's often overlooked but not in south america is the guinea pig so the guinea pigs are vegetarians they love to graze and eat grass and they're an important food source in a lot of parts of south america so it's one of those things that it's it works well in a backyard in a small permaculture setting and if you can bear it you can actually use these for food so i hope you've enjoyed today's video and maybe picked up some ideas about projects that you want to do on your own property if you like this video give us a thumbs up subscribe to our channel for more content like this and hit the notification bell so when we do post new videos you will be aware of that we appreciate your time and thanks for watching today [Music] [Music] you

Channel: The Good Earth Farm Channel

Views: 327,549

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Id: c1P666wDfsc

Length: 14min 5sec (845 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 05 2022