Out of the Box - Urban Homestead Tour

we are here today for the urban homestead tour an annual fundraising event where we partner with Loveland youth gardeners the homestead tour was started last year as a way to help people to learn about urban homesteading good ideas and be educational and offer six homesteads around the region three and Loveland and three and Fort Collins last year we had two hundred and twenty people that came through and so we're hoping to grow so we try to show the full scale of what urban homesteading is to inspire people to try it got involved because we're big gardeners and we know a lot of other gardeners and we're kind of you know right on that edge of the whole 60s 70s movement of sustainability and growing your own you know we've really seen a resurgence in the local food movement and growing your own food or raising your own animals I grew up with a family that garden we just always grew a lot of our own food we knew where it was coming from it's healthy we believe everybody can grow something I think one of the reasons why we were chosen to be a part of the tour's we represent two full-time working people that still have enough time to come up with a garden it's not overwhelming it's very doable when we first bought this house five years ago it was grasped in front to grass in back we pulled all the grass out and now we have food in front and food in back and we try really hard not to have to go to the grocery store we have what we call sunspot urban farm it is in its seventh year right now we run it as a CSA and CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture we offer subscriptions to provide food for 25 families for 21 weeks and we grow over 40 different crops so CFA's do need to get licensed through the city that's a free license available through the Planning Department folks who are allowed to have personal gardens that doesn't require any licensing at all your homeowners association you might want to check with them as far as what they allow with different Gardens so I've had a lot of questions today about different things people are especially interested in pepper varieties and tomato varieties because everybody grows peppers and tomatoes okay here we've got a lemon cucumber very nice fun crop to grow they do taste like a cucumber but they're unique as you can see here's a Cherokee purple one of our favorite heirloom tomatoes very juicy beefy tomato we're limited on space so we're constantly flipping beds this bed has seen three crops this is our back garden where we have horseradish dinosaur kale peppers broccoli cabbage we've used every square inch there's a rule in the garden too it's called the five-second rule if you eat something within five seconds it's never gonna be fresher than it is right now that might have been seven seconds but it was good so this is our compost pile it's the heart of our farm this is where everything gets eaten if it's not eaten by human beings so all of the biomass and there's a lot it all goes into this pile and it all gets digested really quite quickly by microbes so these are reclaimed bricks from the Fort Collins creamery building when it came down we were fortunate enough to convince the foreman to let us fill our car up and brought a couple of loads home another thing we repurposed are these old bicycle wheels and you just put welded wire around them and use the wheel as your frame and your guide while your them together in stake them with some wooden stakes and make a great tomato cage so most of the plants that we have in the backyard here are pollen sources for the bees that we have we have two beehives this is a rabbit brush it's a very good pollen source because there's a lot of food sources for bees that are better than others and this is a really great one I try to keep it so if something's blooming all year long basically if you have bees this is what they do most of the time they're in the hive at night they come out in the morning and they're gone almost all day and they do literally fly in a beeline that's why that saying is I'm gonna make a beeline because they go straight to where they want and then they go straight back to the hive once they've got there they collect water pollen and nectar the only thing that you'll notice is different was when all the babies are born they'll all come out of the hive and they'll fly in circles around the front of it because they're trying to get a picture of their house and they'll remember that forever they're a little bit protective they have their honey store in the fall and in the spring you can work back there and they'll be flying all around you they don't care last year we did extract about 60 pounds of honey we gave to friends we we still have a little bit left from from them so we enjoy that there is not a license that's required to raise bees within the city of Fort Collins there's just specific requirements around setbacks from your neighbor the number of hives you can have based on your lot size and all of that's covered in the FAQ document that's available on our website hello girls company we got them as chicks we've had the borrowed rocks before but it's our first year with a speckled Sussex we've got two bucks to buff Orpingtons and no roosters do noisy for us two Americanos I love the Americanos they lay the blue and the green eggs if we come around the back I can show you where we get the eggs and we have the Americana lays the blueish green so it's like automatic Easter eggs I know a lot of folks are asking about if I want to raise chickens or ducks or goats how do I go about that that is licensed by the larren Humane Society so you can go directly to them to obtain the licenses you know we're not hardcore but it's a lifestyle that we enjoy and appreciate and I highly recommend that to raise bad things cuz as we get older sitting down and pulling weeds is a good thing I think the biggest thing is start do it don't worry about making mistakes why have a bunch of lawn when you can have something like this that provides food for the table it's a great way to spread the word about sustainability and showing people that even in the city with a small amount of room there's really a lot that you can actually do not just for yourselves but for your neighbors and everybody else from the community

Channel: City of Fort Collins

Views: 13,713

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: wg-0hodD5GU

Length: 7min 1sec (421 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 07 2015