Permaculture Design for Homesteading with John Nelson

[Music] what study permaculture for a little bit this is so important design is really the basis of the whole permaculture system so anytime we can apply design to our problems then we're kind of front-loading our work I think most of or at least a good bit of our problems in this world or because we don't apply design so design really excites me you know I keep calling for a design revolution I think you know we can solve really most of the food problems most of the energy problems with good design and what I'd like to attempt to do is to you know make this kind of simple for you all and myself I think often times with permaculture it gets so involved you have to take a PDC to understand it and that's like a two-week process there's all this other side stuff that's not really it's important but it's not really the most important information so what I'm attempting to do here is kind of condense the information to what I think is the most important and I would call it the most important because this is basically where it all starts I mean it's water and orientation of the Sun it's simple stuff really but if we get any of this wrong then we have extra energy that has to go into our system constantly well they're heating cooling anything like that so how many people have built their own homestead or are building it yeah so we got like five people that's pretty good how many people have just a raw piece of land that they haven't started on thing anybody oh wow yeah yeah that's awesome that's great well the most important thing is to start with water it really is I mean water is is our number one element that we need and without water you know none of us can survive so this is basically just a list of the most important elements and kind of where to start this is kind of a it's called a scale of permanence and it's the most permanent things on your homestead or on your land so you know orientation to the Sun that's very basic but if you go around looking at most houses you know they don't take advantage of solar gain so basic stuff but we don't use it and basically we all know it but we still don't use it you know energy efficiency we're building a house thinking about low maintenance so really it's it's the water the orientation making it energy-efficient thinking about summer when summer wind can cooler house naturally and then winter when it's interesting there's there's patterns so to be on a piece of land you really have to be observant and to apply permaculture design you have to be observant so what you want to do and I think most you probably are but when you're on your piece of land you observe and the major things like I said are the water and the Sun orientation but also over a full year cycle you can you can start to map out your wind wind is super important you know you want to block that winter when you want to let the summer wind come in so it's just basic but it's like the basic stuff is where we really got to start and we can start thinking about like the mainframe like when you go to build your homestead it's all about the mainframe it's how you get every right from the beginning it's kind of like your structural being of your body your bones you know when you're a line and everything works together it's much easier yeah and that's that's really what it comes down to it's getting the mainframe right and then you kind of once you get the mainframe then you could like start plugging in all these cool little extras but what generally happens is we like to start plugging in the cool little extras and then trying to make our mainframe work with these cool little extra parts instead of getting our mainframe right getting the majority of the work done early in the homestead process the heavy lifting you know if you have to do any earth moving Road building and a lot of times you know we're coming on a piece of land and maybe the house is already there so we just have to work with what we have and and you know we can apply permaculture to that or the road is already there but it's in the wrong spot but we can apply permaculture to that and fix some of those problems access roads like you're reading there's there really one the major sources of erosion on the homestead if you don't get your access road right you're going to just pay pay pay for years and years and years with with extra maintenance the other thing is this living fertility machine to think about starting your your permaculture homestead and having a place on the land that generates fertility from the beginning so if you can generate fertility then you can kind of grow through biology fertility and spread it out on your land slope especially in the mountains here you know slope is a big big deal a lot of us don't have you know we've got to be really creative with the land we have it could be seriously steep you know we could only use parts of it the parts that we could use sometimes their terraces or small benches trees trees are a major design opportunity also whether it be blocking Summer Sun you know blocking the wind like we talked about earlier coming in from here it's usually like the wind comes from the northwest in the winter and that's really cool because we can use evergreens in the northwest and they don't block the Sun to the house in time time is our major resource that we have to work with and I tell this story often but you don't want to end up like me build a homestead once and then learn about permaculture and then it's been ten more years fixing and undoing what you did to begin with and trying to get it right so that's like doubles your time so if we can apply good design from the beginning have a good solid plan take our time with that then we're gonna speed up the whole process really goals are about getting clear about what you want and I think all of us are going to be more potent with our homestead work if we're clear about what we want and really homesteading is about self-sufficiency it's about everybody who signs out to be a homesteader is is raising their hand and they're going out and they're saying I am going to take care of the earth my family in the future and that's what homesteading is about I mean it is the major political statement in the positive direction that we can make today I don't see anything else that makes more sense if we're taking responsibility so you know what are your goals on a homestead how can you get clear about that you know some people only want to live they want to live away from people and have a little you know spot that nobody will miss with them or some people may want to create like an education hub at their homestead or some people are doing it just for a lifestyle choice to be healthy or to eat healthy you know do you have a goal of producing income from the farm all that just starting to get clear about what your goals are are so important because usually its subconscious what we really want and often if we don't explore what we really want we don't really get it all so gardening doctor ordered dr. zarnow I've said this before but they're prescribing gardening for your health and it's been a lot of science to back that up as science to back up putting your hands in the soil and how there's antidepressant microbes in the soil and how that just increases your mood and makes you healthier so you know these are just some of the things you can kind of think about I think everybody should take like as long as they need but to get super clear about what your goals are gonna be on a on a homestead and that just goes with knowing thyself so ask yourself these questions you know these are some of the things you're going to need to be successful on a homestead you know are you skilled at farming and gardening are you skilled at building when my family we started our homestead the first thing me and my brother did is we went to Blue Ridge and we took a building construction class because if you're going to be a good farmer you've you're going to have to know how to build are you a problem-solver I say this off often also you know permaculture is about problem solving too often we get caught up and in all the problems and that's we can focus and identify the problems really easy in life I mean that's like 5% of our brain power or not our time or of a conversation you know but we might spend ninety five percent actually looking at the problem and may not even get to a solution where permaculture is a solution based system so we kind of want to flip that around in our head and start thinking about solutions you know identify the problem quickly but then like let's spend our energy working on the solutions this is a great one are you an eternal student that's what it's about it's about developing you know good habits being an eternal student keeping that joy for learning alive and knowing there's so much that we can do homesteading is all about the hard work so you got to know if you got if you're cut out for it you may not know right away but you need to start looking at that and that's something you can develop become a harder worker it's so easy not to be in this society multiple skills multiple income very important you can really get isolated on a homestead and sign up for life of poverty so it's like getting your plan kind of working towards it developing it you know having kind of its kind of like a financial plan that has three or four legs or more to stand on if one of those legs get knocked out you're you're still standing you're not just dependent upon one thing so building in that resiliency into your plan then can you call on people do you have people in your life that can help you super important here are just some off the top of my head some different ideas how to make money on the side on the homestead like I was saying earlier you don't want to put yourself in poverty by being on a homestead even though it's a wholesome lifestyle choice if you don't have constant income coming in in a way of making that then you're going to your homestead you your homestead is gonna pay for it because it's gonna take quite a bit of money and you've got to feed yourself and you got to pay the bills and you got to do everything else so it's like it's this balanced approach to everything we do so you know like I was saying using your time wisely this is so important that hour in the evening instead of and I'm not preaching anybody this is all like this is all everything that I live and learn and am a part of like I could easily just get on my phone or get on the computer you know I don't play video games but I can see you know you could waste a lot of time doing that and the homestead is a spot that you can literally with your time build up a bank account if you're wise with it and the other cool thing is you can use your time and nature natural systems Sun biology natural plant growth like all that is just like a win win win it works with us if you put a seed in the ground then the seed grows if you give it water and plant it and that's just exponential from the little effort you did yes you've got attended and you've got to take care of it and you've got to plant it and harvest it but really like we're just kind of managing and working with nature and nature is is giving us this basically free energy nursery I've started a nursery my wife and I have started nursery at our place it's a great place to use your time wisely you know there's plants available that you can take cuttings off of for free and go pot up how easy is that that's simple natural system do you want to create an education hub you know you can make money doing that what I don't want to see necessarily unless you're just an avid farmer gardener but it's just to go most homesteaders go right into vegetable production for their income and that's kind of like a hard road there is money to be made in growing vegetables you know but not a lot and it's a lot of effort and if that's the first thing we do we jump right into it then all our focus and energy is into that production system and we haven't got our our main frame and our roots in and then we're potentially struggling I see so many people quit homesteading because they tried to make money growing vegetables and they just ran it into the ground so if you're going to grow vegetables try to do something value-added with it you know hemp and CBD oil that's huge right now farm bill passed you know it's legal to grow hemp you have to get a license but I mean I think this is maybe going to be overblown like everybody is gonna be doing it but I think enough of us are going to get into it where it's gonna you know the price is gonna drop so I just do that on there anybody else have any good ideas about how they can make some side money consultation love it it's a huge one yep yeah you can really grow your consultation business yeah it's big any other ideas farm-to-table is love that god you're good farm the table I love that I think it makes so much sense to do that yeah yeah if you farm the table I mean if it's it's your farm and your table you got 100% of it basically and you're adding value to the process all the way along instead of just whole selling veggies any other ideas community supported agriculture love it yeah CSA it's a big one yeah people pay you to farm and they pay you in the beginning of season before you even plant the seeds how cool is that seriously microgreens I love the idea of microgreens you know they take such a small area to grow it doesn't really require a whole lot of startup money to grow microgreens and they're very expensive in the store you know mushrooms we talked about consultation you could do design work I do a lot of design work at home going back to knowing how to build becoming a skilled builder is so important having a workshop on your farm you know where you can repair stuff you can weld maybe you're into wood you can do carpentry you know you could build furniture for years every winter and I'm rien spired to do this again Rocco here on the farm he's he's getting into woodworking and he's really really every year around Christmas I would build my wife like a piece of furniture you know it's cool it's like when you can actually you have the skills and you're there again you're adding value you know if you have a piece of wood that you mill from your property you're not just milling that piece of wood selling that raw product you're adding value you know a lot of it is we can do out of season furniture building in the winter you know design work we can do that in the winter or in the evening anyways it's very important to think about having some side hustle and the cool thing is when you start to have more than one skill in one field then you have this cross-platform kind of thing that you start weaving together and then like because I'm a good builder and I know how the design and I know how to work with living systems like then I can apply that to permaculture design and that makes me a better designer okay it starts with the home it really starts with the home the home is zone zero the home is all about a healthy home is all about rhythm and ritual and the more you can get into a rhythm the easier things get around a homestead for you the ritual is figuring out seasonal appropriate kind of things you can do st. Patty's Day a lot of people plant potatoes you know it's it's everything seasonal like you ramp up everything winter you rest and you relax and you may do some of these side projects but then you start planning and you're ramping up and you're ramping up production and spring hits you're still ramping up summer you kind of hit your plateau and then you're going to harvest then it falls off so it's it's like it's a wave it's not you know it's not like a flat bar and that's why it's important because your your income is dependent upon that to having this kind of where you'll make generally we make more money in the summer and a little bit less in the winter so if we figure out how to balance that out then we could kind of like smooth smooth that out a little bit working with the seasons and it really starts health really starts with gut health it's your physical health your gut health I mean it's like basic simple stuff I don't want to bore you guys and you're like well I came here to learn about permaculture and you're telling me about gut health and stuff well yeah that's where it starts we're not healthy we don't take care of ourself you know then we really are not going to be able to be successful on our homestead building I love this this is from pattern language it's a book that talks about basic psychology and patterning of humans and there's all these innate patterns that we have it's a great book and I love this so often people when you get your homestead or you get a piece of land you find the best piece of land the best spot to build your house it's like the most idyllic piece of pasture piece of grass like open like it's perfect and we build our house on it and then that perfect spot is the earth underneath your house as opposed to maybe building you know if you have that if you have that open pasture on your on your homestead you know something like that just say and you you build you build your house here then you've totally like screwed that up I mean maybe you love it and it's great but you know if possibly if you would have nestled that in maybe in here or something say this is north and south you know the Sun is here shining this way if you would have nestled that in then this is like a really and maybe this is a topo you know what a topo is right topo is basically a contour line on a map so we got to get really good at reading maps but most topos are designed with 10-foot increments so if this were a topo this would be this yeah this is 10 foot 10 foot height difference here something like that so if you build in this spot maybe this is lower or maybe the topo is higher but you could either excavate and nestled your house in there and then you you're saving all this other earth here all this great spot to develop later and if you really work on kind of like the edges developing the edges then you're still saving the middle and you basically you want to save the middle as long as you can till you know what to do with it you can really like stack the edges and work with the edges and it has a less of an impact on the overall kind of design and function of your land if you push things to the edges and leave the middle open so does that make sense it makes huge sense like if if you go onto a piece of land and you can Nestle that to where you're still adjacent to that beautiful spot and then you you're basically you know you keep that in you enhance you're enhancing that simple we already talked about this energy efficiency you know very few windows to the north this is almost north here and look how much glazing we have here you know so a lot of heat loss and sometimes you can't get around it just there's awkward sites and things have to sit in a certain way and sometimes you buy a house and it's like that and you can't do much to get away from that but you still can start to think about thanks and plied to design to it and perhaps you eliminate some of the windows or insulate more on the north ya know this could this could potentially work here but you're still all I'm saying is you're still losing a lot of energy no matter what you know with so much glass on that side so ya know there's more to it but that's like this we're starting you know when you're building something you can start with these very basic questions and then this is what's going to save you so much energy this is all about energy consumption so if we can save energy and it's a constant thing less energy to cool with in the summer less energy to heat with in the winter and that's you know we're on our homestead for 10 20 30 how many ever years you know and that piles up so it's like making those conscious decisions from the beginning are going to change your success rate quite a bit on a homestead less input you get more out of it you're working with nature you're harmonizing with the patterns pattern language again talks about a sunny spot you know that south-facing having this beautiful south-facing kind of opening to the Sun you know right outside your front door people like to congregate in the south if you look at most things that have architectural details facing north whether it be a balcony a terrace you'll see like sitting areas things like that on the north side rarely get used I mean just rarely get used maybe a little bit in the middle of summer but rarely get used deciduous trees to shade in the summer that's huge say we have our slope and this is Sun Sun is here basically and we build our house here right something like that we're getting full Sun basically all year round great in the winter terrible in the summer but with deciduous trees you know we could plant we could plan out front here we can plant a hybrid poplars that can shade this in less than 10 years you know the leaves fall off in the winter so we get most of that Sun in the winter so it's using good design again deciduous trees so we're still we're facing south but then we're trying to develop strategies to shade ourselves and to conserve energy but yeah develop our kitchen where we can make product in it is huge because that gives us like a two-fold advantage in our kitchen you know from the get-go so start thinking about all those things this is another one from pattern language and pattern language goes hand-in-hand with permaculture it's human psychology it's the way things work together better when we apply design to it so you know parking near the house is very important to pull stuff in and out not necessarily you know having a garage and having all that space for your car if I lived somewhere that had a garage you know that would be turned into probably like a workshop or processing area I mean the car is not that important to me to park in the house but pattern language it's just the way things feel there's this innate sense of beauty so that's the other thing I want you guys to start weaving in is like beauty in all this when you're not parking the cars right beside maybe there's a little hedge where you don't see them and you're only ten steps from the house or 20 steps still so it's not hard but it's out of the way adds a certain aesthetic value to what you're doing you know the runoff it's huge I mean anytime we build anything we're taking ground that can infiltrate water and we're putting a hard structure on it and then we have runoff so we're creating a problem so you know problem solution we need water water is huge collecting water you know the runoff especially from roads it can be directed to the side it can be directed to the edge to planting beds things like that any questions comments yes [Music] that's mostly what we deal with yeah yeah I mean it's yeah yeah yeah yeah so you're still gonna apply the same principles but you're gonna have to adjust your strategy so the north you still want to insulate maybe you do you know more insulation on the north maybe you get better windows in the north maybe you plant some of the deciduous trees in the front you know maybe you clear something you're just gonna have you're still going to apply the same design principles to it but you're then you're really gonna have to get crafty you know because yeah you are kind of pegged into the way it already is but you can you can definitely improve it you may not get like 100% you know lead efficiency standards and all this but you can improve your efficiency because I do a lot of construction and Earth grading and earth moving and stuff like that I get phone calls from engineers all the time to come look at this and can you fix this and this is a huge problem in this area and it's really not about energy efficiency but I just want to let you know like when you build a house this is our house this happens all the time especially if we have a basement this is even worse here's your grade basically the ray needs to be like this away from the house or maybe not that steep but to slope slope away from the house a little bit and then it could kind of flatten out but it's still at this point it's like two percent away from the house in each way but that first little bit you want like three or four percent this I see this over and over and over and anybody who lives in a house with a block foundation or concrete foundation what happens is most of the time this is flat and water comes down and a lot of times it's even worse than flat it's because this has been excavated soil settles so you'll actually have a sink here and what happens is when it gets super cold is the soil freezes and exerts hydraulic pressure up against the foundation and there's huge amounts of damage done every year from that and it's just a basic simple grading problem it's just getting the water away from your house you know water is a huge deal anybody have any questions on that I'm serious like go look at your foundation to make sure your water is running away I know you're like how's that permaculture but it is it's good design as opposed to straight down so guess kind of says so the heart is running from front to back down the side on either side of the foundation does that cause the same issue yeah yeah you want that positive drainage away from it even if it's just a little bit it's still running front to back side but just slope it a little bit and then let it run yeah the houses I'm kind of responsible for us is they built the road to go around the house after the house we've been already built and designed and what they did is they built the road on part of the drainage so it's like it actually created this huh where the water supposed to be going but they didn't weren't aware of that yeah and then driving cars on that they broke the drainage pipe yeah they smashed into actually the house that's wondering please don't ever raise that now we're gonna go home a guy like McGlinchey water in the basement yeah yeah yeah you got to fix it and what happens is we get the major freezes and that's when you get damage and you get you know your whole basement wall will bow in and big cracks in it well when you're ya know you can build you can you need to compact you can put soil but you can compact it in small layers you know even with a hand tamper if you have to yeah yeah just shovel it two-inch layers 3-inch layers clay is really good around the house because clay will shut it another thing is you know kind of like this zero escaping right around the house where maybe you do some decorative stone or something like that sometimes people put plastic under the stone and that's just just sheds the water away but yeah positive drainage around the house is so important you know we like to collect water off the roofs but you need to be careful with the roofing materials they could have lead zinc a lot of the kind of the shingles on a roof now have fungicides in them so you just need to be careful and aware of that if you're gonna collect the water you just have to start thinking water every time like in your mind as a permaculture designer as a designer of your homestead you're gonna end up being like a supercomputer you're looking at me like that's crazy but what you're gonna do is you're gonna start over laying in your brain all these different maps and information so anywhere you go you're gonna start to recognize patterns and you're gonna start to look at things you'll never see things the same again so just overlaying the water the water is basically where to start [Music] you

Channel: Living Web Farms

Views: 109,789

Keywords: John Nelson, Living Web Farms, permaculture design, homestead design, permaculture, how to design a homestead, expert homestead design, planning a farm for your family, family farm, plan with nature, living with nature

Id: TM9UnwZ9Ed4

Length: 40min 42sec (2442 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 03 2019