Property Tour Of My Urban Permaculture Homestead

[Music] so what can you do on a small tenth acre property in the middle of town there's a lot of possibilities a lot of folks think they have to move to the country on several acres to homestead but there's a lot you can do right where you're at like I said we're on a tenth of an acre it's a little postage stamp lot in the middle of a city and it's pretty busy you can see a lot of houses behind the backside of our property here we have a fairly busy road it's one-way street but we're right off of a major street one one one block off a lot of traffic around here a lot of houses a lot of people and there's a lot of possibility still so I thought I'd just take you around show you a few of the things we're doing and talk about a few of the things we could still be doing we have a lot of other projects in the works for the future but we're doing quite a bit right now so let's take a look you will just start here at the front of our property as you can see nothing fancy just a simple little house in the middle of a town here in the front of our property we have some hostas by the way hostas are edible especially the shoots when when they first start coming up it's kind of like an asparagus in a way we have some tiger lilies day lilies things like that around the front a few flowers just some ornamental stuff like any other house in the city we come up to our front gate of our fence now just a couple years ago every bit of this right you're seeing this fence wasn't here there was a privacy fence in the back and this was all grass so this has come a long way got a little mess right here where we've been doing some cleanup so I got some broom and shovel here but we have a little bench it's kind of inviting as soon as you walk through we start off here with an old that's one of them resin barrel there's nothing fancy nothing expensive just a cheap thing but there is some food growing in there there is a butternut squash that's kind of prowling out across the the bench and under the bench as you can see and across the strawberry patch we had a lot of strawberries out of this past this year probably can't tell it from the video but this is about on a six-foot long patch of strawberries we have some roses in there as you can see we've been hit by the Japanese beetles quite a bit this year never had this issue before but this year we had some Japanese beetles that were just wreaking havoc and they got these roses but they really got my raspberries and my great mine especially in the back so we're dealing with that right now actually I've put a trap up I wasn't so into that at first because I've heard they attract the Japanese beetle but had to do something so yeah there's the raspberry patch we're off the bat when you first walk in here now I walk right by a tree this is actually a cherry tree and it's right here in a cornice it was the very first edible tree that we planted on the homestead so it's you know it's the most mature of all the tree well there's actually a mulberry tree that I planted after this but it's actually way bigger it's in the back but down below it here I have some more butternut growing there's a raspberry bush here marigolds there's some mint in there as well so there's a few things going on right here in this little corner thing and you can kind of see how I've created edge I'm really big on edge as you could probably tell since we walked in here edge is what's made all this possible when this was all this grass there's no edges so I created edges are created at outside border created an inside border and anytime you have an edge you just you're opening yourself up for some possibilities of something to plant along so I'm really big on creating ages you can see I put these boxes around the trees to kind of separate an area from the trees and a little growing area and some edge and keep clean lines for the sidewalk and there's a lot I can do here we can set up a lot more pots one of the plans is now that these trees here are starting to develop a little bit of a canopy I will prune them up to a certain height to get the limbs above the fence let it develop a canopy and then we'll put some lower shrubs bushes edible bushes between them down through here which will kind of give us some privacy in this area and we even provide more food so right now we're just using some pots to plant a few things but I do have some bigger plans for that I pointed out these three trees here I have three trees here in a row these are all three pear trees Bartlett pear trees and then down below we've created a little bit of a growing area as well in this area I have some cantaloupe and some comfrey growing and the plan here is just basically make a an area where it's providing cover for the area around the tree to help with water evaporation and also just a place to provide more food so that always is nice right have some pot setting out through here and each one of these pause right now we're just growing romaine lettuce you don't need a lot of space to grow some romaine lettuce you know I had some grown in the back that was a little older so I thought you know I want to keep some going I want to have it all year and I'll tell you this is uh this is a south-facing side of the house but there is enough shade provided by these trees and this fins and it creates a little micro environment over here that the romaine lettuce surprisingly here we are in July and had consistently temperatures in the 90s and this lettuce is doing great as you can see it's fine it's growing great it's I'll be thinning it out of course I just put a lot of seeds in there but you know it's doing really good we'll come to our next Bartlett pear tree here and again we have some comfrey growing and and and there's a reason for the company you don't see comfrey all through this video and the main reason is because I use it for chop and drop as a fertilizer and other ground cover so it's it's an excellent dynamic accumulator and so it makes a great fertilizer for whatever you're growing it around so I keep it everywhere just be able to drop it around my garden but also there is some more butternut squash growing here now more lettuce in that pot and we come over here and this garden has had some struggles and I'll point that out here in a second but we start right off with a cup of tomatoes I just pull trouble singing them and I'm just kind of tying them to this pole as they grow they're growing all right they're doing pretty good there they're starting to set some free but I'm a little behind on the tomatoes and I don't really know why they're growing slower this year but I didn't want to point out we've had some serious pest pressure this year I pointed out earlier that we had the Japanese beetle issues but we also got hit pretty hard with squash bugs and I have been out here just daily picking off eggs and baby squash bugs and all grown ones with smashing them this planet looks like it's actually bouncing back a little bit this is a butternut which generally aren't that prone to insect pressure but these squash bugs have been hitting this thing pretty hard and I was actually I almost just pulled the plant because it looked so bad but you can see it's setting some fruit so I'm leaving it alone I mean it's got some fruit coming on but actually had some that was bigger and it fell off and rotted away so you know maybe maybe it's gonna bounce back I don't know I've been in pretty diligent about getting the eggs and the baby squash bugs off though so hopefully also see we have some herbs growing in here there's dill there's I don't know there's a few things growing in here we'll have to sort through that have some rhubarb here that for some reason doesn't look great but like I said this garden right here it seemed like it was doing so good early in the season and then it's kind of just not looking as good now so I also keep a little birdbath here just for the bees and the birds and whatever have a little pond here a couple fish in there and a little solar furnace that will fountain that kind of squirts there's actually a little solar panel up on the side of my house so it actually powers that and it just it gets as the Sun comes up this is early morning so it's not real great right now but it'll actually get to where sprays gonna be twice as high as that's what it's doing right now and a little bit more consistently here we have another tomato that it's doing pretty good too it's got some fruit sitting on it I between what's out here on the side I know there's I know there's a bigboy I think that's the big boy right there there is a there is a beefsteak there is a couple hybrid varieties and I'm not sure which ones are which because that's just the way I garden I just plop things down and I don't worry too much about it I get it when I get it this is also a goji berry that I planted last year and this thing was like I don't know six seven inches tall when I planted it just early last spring and all that down through there is goji berry from that one plant this thing is went crazy now I had fruit last year at this time but you can see it's getting ready to we got some berries getting ready come on and it seems it's a little behind this year it's not it's not as I'm putting out as much as it did last year for some reason but boy last year we got tons of berries off this thing and it was actually the first time that I had ever experienced goji berry I was curious about the plant I heard it was kind of a superfood so I wanted it but I wasn't sure what to expect well it's to me it's flavorless but it is good to throw some into a smoothie or whatever just for some extra nutrients but I noticed that I didn't it doesn't really have a lot of flavor to me so I didn't really enjoy it all that much I also want to point out we always just I kind of put marigolds and other beneficial flowers along it attracts pollinators some of it does good to the tour the non beneficials so you know we try to plant certain flowers sporadically through the garden to kind of help out we have a nice little two plants of basil here that look really really healthy see some more Tomatoes coming on or here that's nice nice Tomatoes I think I missed this little one here I don't have any comfrey growing under this pear tree I just have a that's just a yellow squash plant and it's actually smaller than the others I come planted it later to kind of hopefully maybe offset the the crop a little bit because I seem to have an abundance of it right now and maybe that one will come on a little bit later but as you can tell the squash bugs have got it too so again still fighting that but that's about all we have going on on this part now like I said just just two years ago this was all grass and we've made something useful out of this space literally you just walked around my porch Walker all the way down here and you would come down to here and there was a privacy fence right here with a gate and so this was all just wasted space I mean this is nothing but a taker it took my energy it took my gas for the one homer it was just a taker you know and now it's a giver it gives us a lot of foods in this small area and once these mature trees all mature a little bit more we're gonna get a lot of food from them and you can see we've created kind of a being in the south side of the house this was a real Sun issue this was solid Sun all day long and I've created a splotchy Sun for this garden here because this garden was just beat to death with Sun at first I actually put this garden in on the side of the house before we put the trees in and and it was just such a hot area that it was so hard to keep watered and and and dirty you know things looking good so I decided to do something you know like this which was plant trees on the south side of garden that's crazy for some people but I've got spaced enough apart I mean it's hard to tell in the camera but there's a few feet between each one of these trees and the Sun as the Sun comes up you'll get just a spotty sporadic sunlight coming through these plants and it actually helps them because it's so hot it's so much Sun that they do better with a little less so that's just what we have there well let's move around to our main garden hopefully the Sun doesn't start this is early morning hopefully the Sun doesn't start to mess them with me too bad here now we just built let me back up a little bit here to show you something just put this gazebo up on the back of the house love this thing we had this deck was actually had a railing around it was just no Dec and we just weren't using it that much just because it was just so hot out here and yeah I've left hoses and extension cords out and kids play toys so you're gonna see it all let's just start here here's our back door to our house or kitchens lay out a laundry room then a kitchen but we like to keep some herbs right here close to the kitchen so even though we have herbs kind of scattered sporadically through the property we have a few boxes here with just some of our favorites to cook with you can see that there there's just quite a variety I think we have like seven or eight different herbs here we got sage marjoram there's some there's some mint of course and I don't know we have a few different ones Basil's so uh well saunters back there it's actually all back a little bit but we have a few different things here time we have some thyme in there there's the mint try to think of what all's in here but there's a few but we like to cook with a few things so we keep them in pots right here right off the deck we just walk right out our back door and guess what we have we have some herbs right here also of something I'm doing this kind of unique now this is an apple tree again you'll see a lot of times around trees people will plant things like hostas or some decorative plant well here I've trying something kind of different I don't know if you can identify this plant we'll call it a weed because that's what everybody else would call it but this is plantain and I'm actually propagating this prank plantain and letting it seed and kind of walk around this tree it's providing a couple things it's a living mulch of course it's gonna shade the ground but it's it's something we use around here it's medicinal it's actually edible to humans but it's also edible in my rabbits if I want to feed it to the rabbits but mostly for the medicinal purposes is why we want to I want to cultivate it right here so I'm just gonna try to completely feel this billa's patch up with plantain around this apple tree I think that's kind of cool this box has actually had lettuce has some lettuce in it and I've pretty much cleaned it out so now some grass is growing in it so it's not really I need to clean that out and plant something else in that and these are sugar snap peas and they're about done you can start to see they're starting to sort of brown up but I'm actually just totally surprised they've lasted this long I mean like I said we're into July it's been consistently 90s for weeks and they've still been producing which has been blowing me away I don't even really know how and my grandson's a little sandbox here we have a blackberry now last year I let this blackberry run all the way down this fence both ways and it was just loaded and I didn't properly prune it really this year so it's not been super productive or growing super great you can see we were getting some blackberries off of it now I'll just tell you raspberries and blackberries my grandson keeps them pretty well picked clean here you see the more of that Japanese beetle pressure I was talking about just crazy I've never and you know this is the first year this is the first year we've experienced the Japanese beetle problem so it was kind of a shocker to me that we even got him but yeah they really hit us hard for just a few days now they've seemed to started going away I'm not seeing that many now I've drowned it about I don't know a thousand of them and soapy water so you know I'm gonna turn around here and yet this is another apple tree that is actually planted right in to my deck I thought it'd just be any little incorporation of the deck where the sun's gonna start affecting I think the the camera I may have to take a break from letting finish this after the Sun comes up the rest of the way but I just incorporated it right into the deck and I think it'll be a really nice addition as it grows bigger I'll I'll prune that up get the the limbs higher up on after a while if it grows good I thought we lost this tree through the winter I actually had some stuff set in here and it fell over on it and laid this tree flat in the winter and I kind of straighten it out you can see I have some cordage holding it up just to restrain thin it and it grew and it's actually pretty solid I could probably take that off now here is the another bed that was hit really hard this is squash I have zucchini up to zucchinis and a couple yellow squash in here yellow crookneck and you can see these leaves I mean the the pressure of these squash bugs was unbelievable and I'll probably find some eggs if I looked around I've been out here like I said every day I haven't been out this morning yet checking but I found a lot they haven't really been bothering the zucchini which is just surprising so I came out yesterday I don't know if I have any in here or not and I have one that I like get too far I can see that starting to turn yellow but I've been cleaning off a lot of the before they start ruining the actual produce I've been picking a lot of stuff and getting it out of here even a little bit premature but you see we have a nice yellow squash right there or something that's not looking so good also have a few cherry tomatoes scattered in here and that's kind of by design not because I think that they do roll together but I also in my experience the zucchini and the yellow squash will have to come out here soon they'll be done and then I'll just kind of move this bed over transition this bed over to other things so I kind of have I think I have four cherry tomato plants in there and I will probably just plop maybe four or six other things in there with them just to just to give it some variety in that bed and be able to use that bed to its max and I also want to point out these beds I have a blog post on my website I built these beds five years ago using pallets they are lined on the inside with tarps so there's no connection but they were clean there's no chemical they were they're not treated pallets and they count pretty nice I mean they've been really useful a lot of people said oh you'll never those won't last that palette was too thin now five years later and they're solid as a rock still so they're doing pretty good let me get out of the Sun so you can see better you'll both see it better as we go down here we have at the end of each bed as you can see there are actually two comfrey plants and a blueberry now these blueberries aren't looking so hot they do give us a few blueberries but they're they've never really grown much so I need to start changing the soil a little bit on how I'm doing these raspberries and eats are adding some things to try to make the soil a little more acidic form so they'll grow a little bit better and I haven't really been doing anything some of the things up I want to start maybe putting some some used coffee some some old coffee around them I want to start with maybe mulching them with separating some of this wood mulch and put pine needle mulch around it just try a few things to try to raise the acidity of them as you can see I'm keeping my little spray bottle out here with some soapy water so I can get rid of squash bugs as I find him that's a raspberry in the back right there and like I said my grandson picks these things clean every time he comes over so probably that one I see some nice raspberries on this one down here but that one there looks like he's been getting to that one pretty good again comfrey raspberries now I told you earlier I like to keep the raspberry or the raspberry I'm sorry blueberries and comfrey I keep the comfrey at the end of the beds for chop and drop yeah I use it to basically fertilize these beds I chop it I lay it around the stuff and I just consistently do that I didn't paint these two beds last year I painted the ones on the ends see it's about appearance you know you just have to make it look good from the ends no one sees the middle ones that's another blackberry I kind of alternated them blackberry raspberry blackberry raspberry now raspberry is way more prolific and spreading so it's actually planted itself down here and it pops up all the time between the beds and I have to pull it out and I'll pot it sometimes and give it the plants away or do something else with them this bed was beets I didn't point that out yet we loved the beets for the greens look at this I don't know if this is growing oh it's a weed but look at these Japanese beetles I don't know if you can see them on there there's three or four or five of them right there on that one plant and you're not touching any of the beets they just chose that one but they've just hit it well they can have that also a weed I'll show you here that I let grow in my garden is personally you see it grows up between things I have a bed down here with onions I'll show you in a minute and it's taken over and I don't care because I like purslane better than lettuce so on this bed we have some green peppers we love her we love green peppers and also banana peppers let's say we have any Burley on this and there's some there's some back there growing all of those sweet banana peppers I actually plopped a squash plant in here as well just to take some space there some it's just a this is just a mixed bag of tough stuff here we have there's some broccoli and cabbage grown in here just a lot of variety I just plopped a few different things marigold there's some spinach and crowing in the middle I mean just a feast of different things growing in that bed this was the bed I had to start over with this year I had this bed completely planted with bush green beans and I had got attacked attacked by sow bugs never had a problem with them before and they just demolished every one of the plants so I had to start over in that bed so I just kind of dropped a few random things in there just to kind of fill the bed back out more comfrey blueberry there's the raspberry bush that I guess my grandson hasn't been hitting this one is hard because it's got a lot or as berries maybe I need to get out here and pick him and put a few of them up before he tears that now this is the bed I was telling you well again blueberries comfrey this is the bed I was telling about this is onions and and they're doing good they've been growing well but what happened was look what look what started popping up personally and some dandelion a few other things I haven't we did very well I let it go I love the personal line it creates it doesn't really hurt the growth of the onions or anything it grows around especially if I keep it lower and I let this get kind of tall in there but if you pick that'll you know quite a bit and use it it really doesn't cause you any problems and it'll kind of cover the ground it creates a nice little brown cover and personally is an awesome weed there's really about four weeds that I really really love having around here personally one of them lamb's-quarter is another dandelion and plantain or the other two weed slug grow I told you that it spread itself and look here a Japanese beetle on this raspberry plain you can see that the devastation that he's causing you see that we won't show you his demise but he is no longer but yeah they're just tearing these plants up and I've been trying to just stay on top of it but boy they are really bad this year I just don't know what's going on it's something drew Minh I guess they never have been an issue I think it's just the weather this beds actually got some garlic in it this is a mulberry tree that planted itself and I'm going to let it get taller and then I'm gonna prune it up and get it above the fence I'm gonna let it go I mean it's probably not the ideal place for it because I occasionally Park here where I've got my camper shell set and so I'll probably get a decorated windshield all the time but man I love mulberry it's almost gonna let it go this is a trellis that I put up and it's a walkway as you can see it's to the back gate and this cucumbers so I'm just letting these cucumbers grow up all the way over and that'll look pretty cool and they're gonna actually meet the grapes the grapes are crawling over here across that bar and I'm just gonna let them cover make a little tunnel here cuz I think it's pretty cool there's probably some nice I've been picking quite a few cucumbers and oh yeah there's a couple nice ones they're ready to pick I need to get those out of there those are ready so I'll be out picking those here in just a little bit but we got some nice cucumbers uh let's see here I'll take a stroll we got a few different ways I'll go ahead and go down this way back side of our greenhouse it's just a small greenhouse little hobby greenhouse but we can see we have quite a bit going on here we have some this is uh cilantro I didn't think parsley back there this is cilantro I have a couple things that's starting to go to flour so I guess I better cut that down a little bit so it's usable I have some cabbage here now they were Hitler flea beetles really early and they're really not getting any damage now that damage was from the beginning and I got rid of those and they're doing really well now but they see that a lot of the outer leaves holes in them but I just plop those in there cuz I thought they'd look cool right there and then especially with the cilantro growing on the ends Mayor Gold's in the middle those were probably gonna get covered up and defeated pretty soon but told you also we have some romaine lettuce growing here and it's kind of getting at the end of its lifecycle I've been picking at it and it keeps growing but you know that's why we got the fresher growing in the pots over there onions these are second year onions that I popped back out here just to let them bloom and go to see cuz I want to try to save some seeds from them and I love onion these things I love the blossoms of onions no one usually lets them go too far it seems like and it's like that but onions make a pretty cool blossom and these must look really nice right here in this bed more comfy and I'll show you the ponds here in a minute but let's pop over here into the greenhouse isold deck I put here actually we had those sugar snap peas I had at first we're along this railing on the outside and they were kind of trellising up that and I thought they need more Sun so I moved them over there in here in this little greenhouse it's kind of a mess but these shelves here that I put in and I'll explain the tomatoes in a minute but these are removable of course but this is I fill this up with the shells with the two by fours for the shelving and then we use our you're seeing in early spring well once the seeds are all done and everything's you know out I have raised beds in the bottoms on the sides here and we plant tomatoes in there because they seem to do so well in the summertime in the greenhouse and as you can see they're growing like crazy and I just take out some of the boards I let them grow right up through so it kind of in a way acts like a tomato cage and they'll completely fill this greenhouse with tomatoes these are all Roma's because that's what we were canning with and we will get hundreds and hundreds of tomatoes out of this greenhouse here in a couple months so that's that that's actually a potting bench with the sink and looks horrible because I've got a mess in there but you know hey is what it is right for busy people things get messy sometimes let's go ahead and walk over here across the bridge we have a little pond if you can see it let me come over here from the deck side the sun's really effecting this video today we have a little bridge or some little pond and there's some chloe in there you might even be able to see one swimming around now there's actually a waterfall and a little creek that runs to it and dumps into it I've actually got that shut off right now because I have a leak in the hose and it was sucking all the water out of the pond so this weekend I've got to fix that so we'll get to see the waterfall and we have some more lilies we have a crazy bush that I can't remember the name of it has taken over but it's pretty so we like it we have all kinds of hostas back here where the Sun is just not going to cooperate but yeah we have some nice some probably her train in the background I didn't think about that little decorations and though that's not actually the waterfall right there that I've got shot off but with some nice hostas back here and stuff now this little maple tree right here planted itself for the birds helped or wind or whatever but I left it because I want to do like a little bit of I'm only to get at a medium height and then I'm gonna print it up and I'm gonna give it a little bit of a almost like a bonsai look I think our next to the pond I think that'll look nice I'm going to talk about the bridge to me back up here this bridge is built out of scrap wood I mean I had a lot of leftover two-by-fours when I was putting our fence up and I brought over here and made this little bridge over the pond and then I kind of came off this bridge with a Lowell mulch pathway lined it with rocks and I'll talk a little bit about that here in a minute I actually just threw this up this is a little pin I put up just to let my rabbits hanging out and I'd like to get a couple of them out at a time and toss them in they're out of their cages and just let them have a little a little rabbit time now as you can see here we have a wall of mammoth sunflowers these things are like eight feet tall now they're doing pretty good and it's kind of a privacy screen you know I tried that this year just to try to make a little bit of a privacy screen as you can see all the way down through there it's a nice wall of sunflowers and you know it just gives us a little bit of privacy from from the neighbors and there are good people just nice to be separated a little bit right these are pole beans now in the past I've grown kentucky pole beans but they're so stringy we tried like a stringless variety this year I can already tell though that I don't think they're going to be as prolific as the Kentucky but we're not big fans of the Kentucky pulled means they're just not that great to us so I'd rather have a little less I think then I deal with that now I was telling you about this path here this actually goes out to my livestock pen but it's just it's just a nice little you know meandering path through the garden and you can see I've put comfrey all along it now the reason I did that is this was the weeds were really crawling in here well I'd heard other talk about how come free is really good for as a weed block I mean it creates a barrier with its roots and because there's such a thick mass if you've ever seen a country root now this is a blocking 14 so this doesn't spread it only spreads through basically manual propagation you have to separate the root cuttings and then replant them or or just chop them and they'll kind of grow and spread but these will stay put right along this path and it's already working the weeds aren't crawling into the pathway now it's already created a barrier so it's nice I thought about doing the same thing on this side trying with hostas as an experiment and putting hostas that way because they have similar they have a pretty massive root ball there and I thought just just as an experiment to kind of see which one does better but the real problem was on this side and it has something to do with the Sun coming in from the south and the grass was just growing across this really bad so I wanted to try that and I keep these normally cut down a little lower than this because I don't really want big tall you know three-foot 4-foot comfrey plants here I really just want them maybe 16 inches tall so I actually need to come out and cut these right now and that's great because every time I cut them it just gets chopped and dropped around things in the garden so you know we keep that pretty cut down normally so things are a little out of hand right now they're just some sweet potato vine hanging down it's a little maple tree that me and my grandson found on another part of the property and I thought you know what let's just plant it right here we'll let it grow up and me and my grandson can have us a tree that we planted a little bit of comfrey in there and a lot of weeds though I'm creeping Charley everywhere this is another cucumber plant it's starting to hey look a cucumber I think that's the first cucumber I've seen on this one so this one in there is as good as the other one is because the sunlight back here isn't quite as great but just these couple trellis boxes I put up you know some trellises with some simple boxes in the bottom of them or no big deal and they give you a place to plant this is a crazy crazy bushy nuts mulberry tree I don't get any fruit from it and that's because look at the foilage it's just so thick because of the way I prune it and that's fine and there's a reason I prune it constantly and be topping out at it and costly and that's because I don't either side this mulberry tree is my rabbit and quail pen and they love mulberry so I feed them from this tree daily they get lots of mulberry leaves and a little of it on the other side of the greenhouse here we ask of course mobilities and some broccoli that I just went through yesterday and boy the cabbage worms were crazy on us seen the little white butterflies all flying around it and I went through there and you can see the damage as they were doing to it and I had to pick off a bus just yesterday and here's an apple tree that lots of apples that I should have been thinning out and I probably need to thin out even before they get any bigger because they are hurting this little tree they got the Lee's droop down and I got to get some of those apples off there so they will get some bigger better apples this is a back up here a little bit because you can't go catch this but I just put this little trellis up I'll probably replace this with a wooden trellis at some point but this is just little cattle panel trellis I threw up and I'm growing more of these pole beans as you can see well maybe you can see the Suns in my eyes I can't really see but outside of this little trellis here and it's wide enough to walk through and we get a nice little crop of beans off of this little trellis I'll stand back in a minute give you a better picture of it now this is interesting this is a tomato plant that I didn't plant it's a volunteer and I let it go crazy and I just did that for the fun of it just to see what I would do because it's actually planted in gravel it's growing right out of the gravel and that's about four inches of gravel back here and this thing is well it's no doubt the healthiest biggest craziest tomato plant I have on the homestead and it's I didn't plant it there is some cilantro and that weedy mess right there or some parsley I mean not cilantro parsley and that and that being in a box right there but yeah it's uh I let that get out of control this is a lettuce bed by design it's back here in the corner in the heat of summer you just can't grow lettuce anywhere on this property because it's so hot except for back here and this mulberry tree and this trellis and the greenhouse all shade this and this probably only gets about two to three hours of direct sunlight and splotchy kind of whatever sunlight through the day and you can see that lettuce grows extremely well in this bed so even on the hottest summer days if we created a little microclimate back here to supply lettuce for the homestead now before we go any further with the garden I'll just give you a quick little intro to my hidden rabbit pen so far you see nothing that would say he raised his livestock in town and that's always a big issue for some people they don't know especially if you live in a place where you may or may not be able to have any kind of livestock what can you do well we have a little secret here behind all this mess we have this little shed little garden shed right it's just a garden shed where we keep a lawn mowers and weed eaters and nothing nothing fancy my back it's an absolute wreck in here got my little wood chipper and got this lawn mower here and weed eater and a little tiller cultivator and in the back is a door a secret door and you walk through the secret door what do you see you see a lean-to built off my garage and in this we have pages this is just a simple lean-to that I built off my garage it's actually got a tarp or if that's running really heavy-duty tarps but yeah it's nothing fancy and it's even a little bit messy but we have we have some quail in here in a couple cages and then we have a lot of rabbits a lot we have a few rabbits with pregnant rabbits and you know it's just a simple little setup I have I will grow out pin in the back for baby rabbits actually we wean them I will just put them together in the back of the pen and then at about usually 10 to 12 weeks we're usually processing those so just a simple little setup now also down below where we catch all their waste that's actually vermicompost we vermicompost all the rabbit waste and that works out pretty well I just got tarps on this and with some bungee cords and bulbs under at the bungee cords pull the tarps down shovel that out when we need some vermicompost and yeah we got fans well going in here you probably hear those fans blowing but can't keep things cooled off for them nice shady side this is the north side of the property so of course the garage is providing a nice little shade for this area so it keeps a lot cooler in here and everybody seems happy like so we do try to rotate them out in that pin I showed you outside but yeah it's a sneaky little place here and my secret my secret little livestock barn but that's it we produced about maybe 350 pounds of rabbit meat last year maybe 30 pounds of quail me and over 2,000 play legs in that little space last year so lots and lots of meat production egg production going on air ok let's continue our little garden tour now we step around here to a mess and that was actually an old compost bin that I'm getting ready to redo that's actually gonna be a compost bin again but we're gonna redo that make that a little different this is grapes and this is usually a pretty nice defined productive grapevine area but I've made some changes and things are a little out of control this year but we're gonna get this back together and you can see the Japanese beetles man they really been hitting this thing but there's quite a few grapes in there hang and I can see some really hard to see through the stick mass more comfrey that I used to feed the rabbits from here usually these were plants because them and the ones around the tree a lot of times just make it into the the quail and the the rabbits so they really enjoy that more lilies Louise by the way are edible these flowers you can cook those up and eat those beginning I was telling you about the trellis that will meet the cucumber trellis here at some point I just kind of put that up this year and I'm trying to walk it over my garage door and I'll kind of prune it down a little bit and just to give it a nice look and in about a month I imagine this will meet up and then we'll have about I don't know a month month and a half of look at all these Japanese beetles right here on this one leaf yeah I'm gonna get out here with some soapy water here in a little bit and get crazy with it because they're they're still here I mean they're not quite as bad as they were a few days ago but yeah they're definitely bad I have another IBC tank back here too and I'll show you in a minute what we just did with one where's my grapes that I saw I thought I saw some hanging Wow maybe maybe they've heard it helped there some back there hanging look you can see him with the but it's usually we get I don't know 30 jars of grape jelly from this one great mess here I actually want to I was telling you about some changes I explained some changes we want to make at some point I actually want to just do way this was just a trellis and what I actually want to do is build an arbor here when I kind of extend it over and maybe put like a swing in the middle of it and actually build an arbor where maybe we have about three or four grapevines over that Arbor so I actually have some plans to make some big changes here and make this a little bit more usable and controllable this was actually five years ago this is one of the first things we plopped on the property this whole backyard there was none of this none of this none of these raised beds grow no greenhouse no trail no pond this was all grass no sidewalks there was one little cement sidewalk that went straight from my back door to the garage no deck there was this little cement step and a pad there and none of this was here and right here all about right here I put in two raised beds there was two of them side by side and that was it that was all that was the first two things I did I put in two raised beds and I plopped in at that grapevine and built that trellis there for it so it was really like the first things we did and none of this was here none of this gravel the sidewalk and none of the walkways no the edging no trees at all and no no raised beds on this side this was actually got a fire pit on this side and we've added every single bit of this in the last five years so let's let's just stroll out here to the back mess and then just have a gate right here and this is something we just added and I actually just put fish in it yesterday and that is an aquaponics tank so I've been showing some pictures of this on some social media but we used a IBC tank and did what's called a chop and flip where you cut a few inches of it off you've turned it upside down that becomes your grow bed and you put a lot of rock in it and you put a tank down here with fish in it and there are fish in there it will pump and as you can see it water flows into the Agro bed it has what's called a bell siphon and now when this fills up with water it'll come just to the bottom of these rocks the bell siphon will it creates a vacuum it'll there's a let me just kind of pull they get to back here I don't know if you'll be able to see it real well or not but there is the thing and then you have a pipe there and once the water starts flowing over the top of that and you have this bell siphon it creates a suction and that's so it'll get about that high it'll start flowing over it crease this suction and it will suck all the water out of this grow bed till it hits air at the bottom and that's what these little diesel gurus the bottom this once it gets that low it'll start letting air flow through and it'll break the siphon and then it'll start it'll close off and it'll start filling back up again and that way it goes up and down up and down and it creates this flow and it sounds like a toilet flushing kind of when it gets to the in there so sucking out but yeah there's a there's a bunch of fish in there they're just all hiding in the back you can't really see them I didn't stick a couple little pots right here someone grow some old comfrey plants or something up over here in the air just kind of decorated a little bit but it's kind of excited about that a little aquaponics tank and if this is real successful maybe some more in the future and now here behind my garage we have a little bit of a wreck now this used to be I had a compost bin right here just last week all this across here this compost bin and I've actually just got this one back here work through some pallets together and I'll just walk over here to the other side there's a just a few plastic pallets I threw together to kind of make up for the one I just tore down I threw some stuff in that got it filled up we'll be doing something a little bit different with the compost I told you on the other side by the grapevine that's gonna become a compost area but yeah I got to do something different but I wanted an area to put my cut on my clippings and prunings and things like that this is actually the backside of the little animal pin the livestock pin so as you can see it's pretty concealed you don't really notice the like privacy fence and you can tell something going on there but not a lot but that is the tour so I mean there's still a lot of things we're not doing we could definitely plant more shrubs more maybe even design things a little bit different especially up in front of a house there's a whole bunch of of grass in the front of the house as well as a whole bunch but there's enough grass in the front of the house we could definitely grow a few things there and you know there's just some potential still I mean the like I said do a lot of changing here a little manipulating here and there to even add a few more things we have a few trees we have a few shrubs we have a few raised beds you have a random things just kind of sitting here in there we could definitely do more container gardening around our deck we're not doing a lot I'm actually we put this gazebo up because we're starting to do a little more of an outdoor kitchen design we course we have a grill we have a little electric smoker here and stuff but we'd like to do a little bit more you know container gardening maybe some hanging pots around the the edge of the gazebo and definitely some more around the base around the edges here and stuff definitely we could upper container garden game a little bit but hope you enjoyed the tour and it's helped you to maybe perhaps see some of the potential some of the possibilities of of an urban homestead some of the things you might be able to do and you know maybe maybe help you get past a limitation that you may have when it comes to thinking that because you live in town you can't homestead because you absolutely can there's a lot you can do and you can even do a lot more than I'm doing here if you want to so hope that helps hope you enjoyed the tour and then maybe we'll do more of these as we add things and it's it's so much easier to take pictures and individual things and talk about individual things as we as we put them in but I've had a lot of people ask for this for a complete tour of the property and there you have it hope you enjoy it hope you subscribe to our youtube channel to check it out thanks for watching

Channel: Harold Thornbro

Views: 103,143

Rating: 4.8590722 out of 5

Keywords: Homestead Tour, Urban Homestead Tour, urban homesteading, Homesteading, 2018, Small Scale Homestead, Gardening, Permaculture, Urban Permaculture

Id: 2fAmHb8RsE4

Length: 49min 10sec (2950 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 07 2018