The Impossible Farm - Straw Bale Composting

hello and welcome back to our off-grid homestead it's early in the morning today on a Thursday it's the first Thursday in August and today Nick and I are starting another project which we're going to track here for you we've been off-grid and living off the land long enough to know that great things can be accomplished we also know that it's easy to lose focus and whole years can go by without having done what you meant to do so we've done some gardening here on our land and some of it's been successful and some of it's been total failures but today we're beginning to garden in earnest and to turn our 3 acres of dirt and see what we're calling the impossible farm [Music] why the impossible farm well it's been a hundred degrees every day this week and it hasn't rained since June were under snow for a four to five months of the year and on top of that our slope is North facing we love our tall trees but they shade the ground and the pine needles make it nearly impossible for anything to grow under them when we first told an acquaintance who was an organic farmer about our plans to be self-sufficient on three acres in the woods he said to us that is impossible [Music] we've learned the hard way that he was completely right it's been very hard for us to grow crops however we've been learning we've been studying and we still believe that it's possible if not to grow everything we need to go a lot more than we are right now it's going to take some gumption some determination and some work so we're starting today [Music] so I guess with the the house livable were shifting focus from sort of survival and shelter to growing a little bit of food so we know that we're probably not ever going to be 100% self-sufficient because I don't know that such a thing exists but we do want to grow food right here on the property living in the forest like we do we have to do a lot of soil building so that's what this whole composting project is all about and we decided this year to go ahead and get aggressive about it so we're setting up a big hot composting project where we are going ahead and we're importing some materials we have organic straw we have horse manure from just down the road we got some old moldy hay which is awesome for hot cob composting and we're in talks with some restaurants to get some food scraps as well we have time between now and next year's planting to really make some awesome rich soil that will produce food like we haven't seen here before so these compost bins we built pretty much upon arrival they more or less just served as a waste disposal method there were a couple of times where we really loaded it up intentionally with layers of straw and manure and other greens from around the property but there were also times where we more or less ignored it and dumped our food scraps in there when we got back from our trip this year we had cleaned out the chicken houses and everything and had a lot of great material to go ahead and heat it up so it takes a little bit of water it takes the right combination of stuff in there but it's really pretty easy to do and we are getting temperatures right up into 150 degrees it's a little cooler now but that means that it's mostly finishing off or it's just dry and we need to water it so these have been great but it makes no sense at all for us to get all of the pallets that we would need to make something like this it's not a construction project and as hard for that as hard as that is for me to come to terms with it just isn't a construction project I could really distract myself making awesome compost bins but I would rather spend the time making awesome compost [Music] one of the strategies that we're using will be very familiar to all students of permaculture as well as all students of common sense and that stacking functions or just the idea that any laborer should serve more than one purpose we're trying not to put an extensive amount of labour or money into anything that serves only one function so that's an interesting thing about the difference between the compost bins that we had before which were really only for holding compost and for holding compost in one place and the compost thing that we're doing right now the compost project that we're doing right now which actually serves three functions it is one building compost for us it is two helping to prepare the ground where it is to hold a good good planting in the spring and three we've actually set it up precisely along the line of a roadway we need to help our road become convex instead of concave so that the water will shoot off the sides instead of straight down the middle so this composting project is actually serving three purposes whereas the compost bins that we had before only served one Nick mentioned that old moldy hay or fresh alfalfa hay for that matter is really good for setting up compost and that is my understanding that's while the kids are fine that's just their game that they're playing there in fact in the middle of winter the first time that we had just enough of a thaw for the snow to melt a pile of hay that had been under snow for more than a month heated up and melted the snow around it for four yards wide so and it was just a pile of hay so hay is really good for kicking off hot compost in fact I have it one one other place let me show you in my worm bin or what Sadie calls her worm bin over here this is our kitchen worm bin but at the moment it's standing in because we have designed a an outdoor worm bin for the future in our kitchen garden which will take it over take us a while to get there but um this kitchen worm bin is standing in and I'll show you I have I have old alfalfa hay on top and where the old alfalfa hay is touching the surface here it's hot let's see how hot is it maybe 120 degrees but down further then I have a layer of food and then down below the layer of food it cools down again to below 100 so it's comfortable for my worms to survive if I were to either get this hay completely wet or spread it out throughout the material it would heat up too much and kill my worms but sitting on top it helps to make the composting happen really fast just in that layer while the worm still have a nice place to hang out and eat and reproduce and incidentally we don't use the worm castings very much what we want worms for especially in Vulcanus for the liquid especially if you're working with a lot of perennials and you don't want to be dumping the physical dirt of compost on it compost teas and warm teas are really awesome so we want lots of warm tea lots of the liquid that comes when the worms do their job so for our little hot compost operation here we're going to use straw we're gonna use the old moldy hay that we have and we need another nitrogen source so we are on the hunt for some manure we're gonna go see a neighbor see if they have any or food scraps we're checking with some restaurants to see about food scraps excuse me excuse me thank you so this works out because our neighbor gets some shoveling done and we get what we came for but it is sweaty work on a 100 degree August day well that was less than two hours round trip including travel and all the shoveling my face is red from the exertion that's not sunburn now it's time to unload it we want to grow food we want to grow as much of our own food as we possibly can so that well for one we don't have to leave here to go get it we don't have to leave here to go make money so that we have money to buy it and so that we know where it comes from it comes from right here and we know everything that went into it everything that we're implementing in a large scale today I have tried out in the small scale during the last month I mentioned that I've been doing garden experimenting just a few hours at a time trying not to do anything all the way until I was sure of our plan well if we walk around the property you'll see all sorts of experiments that I've done literally for the last four years I think it drives my husband crazy maybe it would drive you crazy to you but in my defense that's where our data comes from these little half-finished I had an idea projects give us the information that we need to enact our larger project so for example I had a compost pile in straw bales just as we're doing right now in the garden last year let me show you where it was so if you look back into old videos you might even be able to see them there were straw bales and see shapes right here to see shapes of straw bales and you can see that over here this is what the ground looked like before I did that completely capped compacts no way for water to get in and this is what the ground looks like now so when I scrape that compost off and I really did pretty much scrape it I was able to plant perennials there so that that compost batch did two things it helps the land right here where the compost piles were and it helped the land over here where we where we laid out the compost the material that came from that location got spread here I guess the lighting is a little funky but this is a pure compost bed our own compost and you can see that I've planted perennial flowers and also a few vegetables I've also planted in the straw bales now planting cucumbers and squash in August is a terrible idea please don't everybody play at cucumbers and squash in August but I had my own squash and cucumber seeds so it wasn't a waste and I was able to practice to see if I'm going to be able to plant in straw bales next spring there's also a spot up here where we're doing hot compost right now practicing doing hot compost against a straw bale in this location I'm actually completely motivated by learning and curiosity I'm just the kind of person that loves to find out what's possible and that actually is a part of the reason why I am so engaged with this idea of the impossible farm I want to know how much we can accomplish I want to see kind of how we can press those limits [Music] fortunately I am not the only person who lives here because with that particular motivation I would just try things and never actually bring the projects to completion and get that yield that permaculturist SAR always talking about but this time we brought in the project manager of the foutch family homestead my husband Nick who is motivated by controlling his environment making things work and basically making things awesome so that's what's really going to change about gardening on the foul homestead this year it isn't just esters fascinations with an amazingly wonderful fascinating life anymore we're actually going to get some things done I don't feel like any better of a gardener than I did last year or the year before the year before that but I feel like I have a plan so we're being intentional about it we're looking sort of long-range and not just what's gonna grow right now and let's see some results we're really trying to set ourselves up to have a place where anything will grow so yeah it feels good to be implementing a plan before we could begin our star about composting we had a big pile of slash that's the branches and stumps and bark and bits of tree that Nick didn't want when he was milling lumber up on the shop level last month we needed to chip that slash and put it through our chipper and then the the chips that we had at the end I used a wheelbarrow to spread them on our kitchen garden particularly in an area where we're using the back to eating deep wood chip mulch method once our space was clear then we could set out our straw bales in see shapes a one straw bale hi the straw bales don't allow very much oxygen to move so only one straw bale high is a good size to be able to have compost that's getting water and air all the way to the middle we arranged our straw bales in these shapes going up the hillside then I went in with the Clippers and I cut down any plant matter any plants that were inside those C shapes then Nick came by with his I am fork and forked the ground just a little bit to aerate the soil in hopes of promoting drainage so that the liquid that has seeps out from the bottom of the compost pile would get down into the earth and do wonderful good work to particular that soil next we started layering our organic matter Nick was on the chipper so he used the chipper to break down even the straw and the hay into little pieces to make it quicker compost and also to make it easier to come back and turn we did four inches of straw or inches of moldy hay and two inches of manure and repeat on the very top we put a layer of not chopped straw which will just scrape off each time we turn it that keeps the flies off of it and is a layer that will not compost now we keep it watered and we wait in about 10 days we'll come back and turn it and hopefully we'll be able to see decay happening hopefully happening rapidly turning these organic materials into soil supplement so that we can spread it in our garden and start making garden beds so out here on our property we want to grow a bunch of food but today's project is making a bunch of compost just to build soil to support that goal if we can replicate what has worked in my small test scenario all over this area we really are going to have a beautiful garden so I hope you've enjoyed coming along for the first episode of the impossible farm come back again and check on us we're going to be moving some animals around and we're going to be checking on this compost to see how it does and building on our three acres of woods the impossible farm thanks for hanging out with us I'm Nick souch thanks for watching [Music] [Music]

Channel: Fouch Family Off Grid

Views: 120,718

Rating: 4.9419589 out of 5

Keywords: making compost, compost pile, compost bins, prepare the soil, gardening, homesteading, the Fouch family, straw bale composting, compost in straw bales, stacking functions, book about composting, shoveling horse manure, the impossible farm, straw bale gardening, preparing the soil, temporary compost bins, compost activators, permaculture farm, off grid, nick fouch, esther emery, homesteaders, straw, bale, organic, straw bale garden

Id: hY1yiHu2tBA

Length: 19min 10sec (1150 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 23 2017