Tour 1/2 ACRE PERMACULTURE FARM with Edible Acres — Ep 013

hello how are you very well how are you good come on through we could take a look at the garden wait you have all greens in your teeth that's probably from all the parsley he's been he's been mowing the lawn how much do i have a fair amount just don't smile to the camera be like why does that guy never smile that's it is what it is there's a lot oh yeah you definitely have some greens let me deal with that give me just a second yeah have you always actually lived here or did you have another place beforehand before you got this place i've lived here since 2005. okay right on and then um but i've worked waiting tables for a long time and i didn't have these kind of gardens and then and i met in 2013 and then he moved in ultimately and he started like doing more stuff like this oh okay so you lived here then and he he moved in yeah oh that's great so then who was the main garden-preneur who's the one who instigated the gardens well i think you you had the the huge interest in developing gardens here and i think i helped kind of move that forward yeah you helped move it forward let's say it that way that's a very generous way to say it we both are very involved in the garden and the gardening here it's just it's like become this very complex mix between what is partially nursery work what is our annual foods and then beautiful flowers and support for wildlife and that kind of thing so it's become this like wild scene that i think overall we love and then we also try to figure out like how to make more productive and more organized at some point can you show us around and you can maybe point out some of the things where you're like hey you know i think this is something that we're doing really well or this has been something that we've learned and you know and just kind of take us uh take us through yeah sure that's great you've got bread going right yeah okay do that first and then come back out yeah or turn this off this way he won't record you talking to the bread and then you can put that in your pocket so you don't get caught on something so the question was what things that have been working well take it take us through your garden and you know and if there's things that you feel like have been a challenge or that you like or that you feel like you're going to be working on it elderberries kind of popping up here you have you got a lot of stuff yeah this i think if there's a an overarching theme to this garden or the work we do in general it's about really high diversity and really high density with the hope of lots of positive interrelationships but not there's not very explicit design that's happening what i would say that overall feels really good about the system is that that pattern as a driver lends itself very well to like a high level of resilience like we end up in the fall as since we are a perennial plant nursery we hope to have lots of plants for sale in the fall and since we don't we don't actually use well water to irrigate and this has been a crazy dry season very dry so a lot of these beds have gotten next to no water whatsoever and so in a way it's like that everybody jammed together even though it can feel chaotic to our eye or sometimes for a management standpoint it's stressful or it's draining to try to know what to do at the end of the season we end up with a lot of plants so so it looks like some of the stuff has been planted but do some things just kind of volunteer and you let them volunteer or yeah it's a little bit of a mix like for example this bed right in front of us is pretty curated at least till we get to the west end of it and it gets feral again but there is some design happening here so for example these are all uh seaberry or sea buckthorn it's amazing nitrogen fixing shrub and ultimately if these were left here these get 10 to 15 feet tall so that would not work so they're here for a season they've rooted and so we'll dig them up in the fall even though we sell and work with perennials because we're cycling through them um they behave in the garden kind of like an annual so like a chestnut tree which could be 12 feet in diameter and live forever kind of thing if it's dug up in the fall it might it could have also been a beat so so there's like this weird rotation so we've got seaberry which is fixing nitrogen and being really drought resistant in the middle and then tarragon all to the south of it because it likes a little bit more sun and the seaberry is providing nitrogen and supporting the tarragon and then all through here are saffron crocus that are dormant right now but they'll come back again and give us saffron in the fall um so this is a bed that's actually kind of designed or it would seem really intentional but then you get to come down to this side and you're like okay there's random poplars and there's this random mint you have a lot of poplars here yeah and so we're going to now offer them through our website yeah you know we've got tulip poplars we've got sycamores we're a very wet site fundamentally and i see that because even though it did rain recently but it there's a sponginess to the earth here that's the mulch yeah you're standing on about eight inches of sawdust wow and so we have that's part of what gives the resiliency is incredible deposition of material um so when we do get a rain it the garden does not leak yeah like two inches of rain most of it will stay in the mulch how long did it take you to build up that eight inches of sawdust is it over the course of a year we get we've gotten in the past 37 yard loads of sawdust which is basically it fills our whole driveway it's hundreds of wheelbarrow loads and so the pattern is basically digging out the garden walkways and putting that on the beds in the fall to mulch them and to rest and break down and then refilling those troughs of the walkways with fresh mulch and so sometimes it's soda sometimes it's wood chips sometimes it's charcoal that we make in our wood stove sometimes it's hay if we can like basically anything that is absorbent and cheap if we can get it you'll see almost no weeds in the walkway right and that is a management layer that we've basically erased so if you go i would need a tool to actually get to the bottom of this but right even if there were weeds in here if you put enough mulch it just erases them and so until this breaks down and seeds fall into it it basically gives us a year off from having to do any weeding in our walkways and it's so much better than somebody like purchasing some kind of geotextile fabric and like tossing it over which is the typical way people would yeah you know manage weeds or pesticides or you know or herbicides or something like that yeah black plastic mulch we wouldn't after a year scrape it up and put it in a garden bed and seed it to carrots yeah but this we might i think you'd have to be careful about where you're getting your sawdust from though right yeah yeah i mean it's the kind of the due diligence thing with any material like horse manure well do they use dewormer that's a concern and the sawdust will is it pressure-treated lumber so in this case it's a it's a place that provides firewood and they use a huge circular saw and they just lubricate with water and he even brought over a little ziploc bag of the materials like it's fifty percent maple and thirty percent add so he's really into his product yeah and so i said you know it's sold we'll take it um we do find it robs nitrogen from the beds if we include it too early yeah so the lesson definitively learned is to let it rest for at least a full year the last round we put in after six months and a lot of the beds suffered from that they'll be good later yeah but we lose productivity for a little while got it do you see when they do does it sap out the nitrogen to the point where it's just slower growing or it's yeah there's yellowing in the leaves yeah there's kind of like i don't know how to describe it other than like there's an enui like the plants just are like that kale's been there for two months and it's that big and it's not it's just sitting it's kind of waiting for something to happen and that's it more than anything like they'll survive but they won't thrive um and so then it's really a time scale game of just waiting for it to maturate and be ready um so we won't get more sawdust this year we'll wait for leaf bag season or get more mulch hay or something that'll liberate nutrients a little bit faster so plantains and everything like that is that something that you just like allow you allow in and you're like i could use that or is it just something like i i'd love to hear your distinction between what would we consider weedy yeah what could we consider something that we could use well so sometimes when plantains show up we pull them if they're in the way of another bed in this case you're looking at this is actually a plantain it's called turkish plantain and it's a perennial vegetable it's very broad-leaved really big broadleaf plantain that a friend of ours uh my friend jonathan bates um down in brooktondale shared with us and so we you know plantains like to grow here anyway yeah and so we found a culinary perennial animal not even an analog it is just a varietal of plantain and so the garden's already suggested to us hey dandelions do well here cool we'll get a variety of lettuce that's very similar dandelions plantains do well let's get a variety that we can eat so we just had it for a little while and we're still learning about it is a shiso yeah she's so she so has naturalized a bit and that's definitely a weed now in that it shows up where we didn't expect it or we didn't necessarily want it but it's so beautiful it's so beautiful look at the flowers even they're gorgeous they're crazy yeah um so we would hope we could get more of the green shiso because that one's a little harder to grow but red this is the one that will naturalize so we're just happy to have it now do you find because it's so diverse of an ecosystem and let's walk through so we could see some more but um it's uh is is the fact that it's so diverse do you find that you have very little pest pressures here no we still do you do well pest as in we don't have issues with um you know worms and that kind of thing but we i don't know if i'd call them pests we have other actors in the landscape that also make their livelihood from here like rabbits have been coming in lately and hammering stuff so we have to figure out what that's going to be about right there's some groundhogs on the outside of the fence that are like really working on tomato really pesky yeah yeah so it's a game of figuring out are we going to hunt them for meat are we going to just let it be yeah do we just the things that they like the most do we put in a consolidated area that we can fence off and let the rest of it be free choice for everyone there's no like fungal or disease that kind of issue there's no real bug sort of issue the wild birds take care of those but there's definitely other herbivores that like our garden and we're just always trying to find that balance four-legged kind yeah i mean in general we're so overloaded with plant material to deal with yeah that it interferes a little yeah intervening feels hard to make the time to do that if that makes any sense yeah and you get some beautiful flowering plants here yeah there's these are more these two beds are more nursery oriented and yeah the poplars and the cottonwoods and the tulip those those come out this fall we just let them be here for two years and then we'll sell them or transplant them as just fast trees for other folks yeah um cottonwoods grow so fast so fast yeah most of these are two years old and they'll be around eight feet tall before the season's out from seed yeah is pretty stunning i'm always like impressed with the cottonwood because you know you you could see one with a huge trunk and you'd think it would it's 60 years old and it's like 20. right they're fast and they're the beautiful part with them in a landscape is they're the fast trees they're the pioneers they grow super fast and super fragile they fall over and then an oak is there or a maple or someone who can be there for the long run so in our own designs we work with fast trees to pioneer and hold the space and then cut them to feed the chestnut or to feed the hickory or whoever's going to be there for the 100 plus year horizon you didn't need water for these though so you could you know don't you it's not really a dry not a dry although if people have dry sites they can get they can match the needs of these plants through mulch so by all accounts these plants should have suffered this year it was very dry here but the mulch held this winter's precipitation yep and a lot of these beds have like woody cores we do the hugelkultur thing to some extent so there's logs and debris and charcoal built into some of these beds which is why the weeds describe that a little bit more for some of the viewers because hugo culture is something that i've seen a number of people do yeah and with the mounds so describe how you're doing it let's say i'd like a a raised bed or i'd like a bed that will be a permanent bed in the landscape i have no intention of tilling or running machines through it when the bed is getting built i take coarse logs woody debris old bones from the chicken yard different debris that we have charcoal lay that first and then soil and compost on top and in the winter the groundwater is high and it gets absorbed into the charcoal into the logs and then all summer that's available as like a savings account of water that the plants can get access to so there's fungal life there's little creatures in there basically mimics woodland habitat but in a little bit more productive way so some of these beds have it some don't we've been making these beds randomly for the last seven years so i couldn't quite tell you how many of them have it but when we start new beds a lot of times we start with sticks and logs and then go up from there and have you have you had any challenge with your mints spreading like crazy or do you like let them let them do what they do this is what happens but you know so this is minardo right yeah this is the monarda fistulosa which is the more native really not as pleasant to eat yeah but better for the native it's not as though we have some thing where it's like oh we only grow native we grow all sorts of plants but if there are natives available we love to work with them and so menarda as a mentha family plant does not spread that aggressively so that's helpful same thing with anna's hyssop in fact they're just marginally hearty here sorry i'm pulling off your leaves and smelling every single one feel free feel free to nipple sniff when you're in the garden but there's also have you worked with monarda punctata no but that's is that what it is that's another menarda this is uh crazy are these like the bracks or the leaves i couldn't tell you okay wow it's soft there's they're just on the edge of the monarda clan and they're wow they're very slow to spread but they're just so beautiful and now i can't really smell i just smelled minarda and then anna's hiss off and then this one and i'm like confused my nose is confused you can see the last it's almost like an orchid style that's so beautiful yeah they're really special oh my gosh it's so gorgeous yeah these are that that sort of looks like ladies that sort of flower form seems incredibly helpful to butterflies and hummingbirds so we try to grow we try to have without knowing the science of it or being really deep into it we try to just find the heartiest perennials that have the most different types of flower form and it seems like that's a good thing do you use this for tea or how do you how do you prepare this so far the monarda punctata and fistulosa were just growing to ramp up their numbers since they're slow menarda dituma like the nice standard garden bee balm we dry for tea and sashi uses as a culinary herb sometimes i mean it's kind of like a more floral oregano yeah um we're just we part of the way we work with these is when we get new plants new to us plants we try to grow them and get them so they're really solidly locked into the landscape yeah and then begin harvesting and interact like it's basically making sure they feel really settled and then we start asking for parts of them to work with but for the most part this is just for them and then yeah for the wild creatures that enjoy there's lots of different bees and bugs that come into this get the sense of this plant that it has these like colorful leaves around the flowers because the flowers are quite you know they're creamy colored with little just little stipples of red so this probably draws the the you know bird or the the bug in yeah to it and it seems to hold a little longer than you know you're the regular minarda yeah these are a little later flowering too yeah it's almost like they're like beautiful landing pads yeah indeed if i were a bug i'd land on it yeah this is a nice bed for the the pollinators have a lot of fun in this whole section this we just put in last year and so now there's enough inertia in this plant material and it's filled the bed enough that we'll probably try to go through when it's dormant lift most of these plants and actually divide them out so they like become more solidly in the garden is there something that you've been meaning to grow but haven't gotten around to it yet yeah i'd like to add all the plants everything i mean it's it's i think a productive obsession yeah to collect more plants every year like of all the things that you could get really into collecting um so it's basically in the winter months you try to sit and spend time i just want pause for one second sorry just so you know one foot behind you no you're good don't worry about what you're sleeping yeah there's there's no there's a hole there you see where there's like some potatoes oh there was a massive ground wasp nest oh there is a ground there is wasp coming out of there saunders so don't step on that and i've soaked it uh they seem to only really thrive when it's very dry yeah so i'm trying to just they're coming out now yes so yeah yeah you did i was digging for potatoes and they they wailed on me it's a big nest yeah maybe we just we'll walk we'll walk around this way it's a good thing that you know you said it's a little disorganized in some cases but you actually know where all the wasp nests are well i find them when they start stinging yeah and then i try to i'm learning that it's like they need the dryness yeah so we're definitely never going to use a poison yeah uh so it's just every day i dump like two gallons of water yeah get the idea like okay maybe they'll leave but they're pollinators too though aren't they they're awesome yeah but they they hammer like they go at you so hard yeah that i feel like they could be the way i die yeah like i've had a couple close calls like 10 20 stings and like i had to sit and you need an epipen on you just in case plantain yeah broad leaf really it draws it out fast enough that i can feel like my heart is starting to like lose its rhythm a little wow and with enough plantain on each sting and sitting and focusing on breathing i'm good within a few minutes oh my goodness yeah you got to be careful yeah yeah a good reason to leave plantain around sometimes like when i i've weeded it enough i'm i'm cursing myself when i'm trying to find it i'm like wait a minute i need this in order to live yeah it's like i don't want it here like i need it you need it to grow right by all the wasps yeah put some seed in the spring um orange is that borage and this one right here yeah yeah wow it's we don't see tall so it's in actually the borage and the tulsi yeah we don't explicitly seed anymore they just keep showing up tulsi of the basil something that smelled really that just you should take a nibble if you'd like it's really spread like very complex basil flavor wow really superman you need to hit that you'd love it like um i smell it it has like a anise but then a floral scent and a mint all together all wrapped into one medicinal bubble gum yeah something right yeah it does have that little bubble gum flavor now that you mention it it's really hard to describe it's so hard yeah it's basil i mean it's like it's interesting to have the standard genevieve's basil right next to it they are the same family yeah but this lives so far out on the edge of it and that's one that sasha will dry and make tea of all winter it's a lovely deep nourishing tea but the flowers are just as good too if you yeah all the parts flowers wow flowers are really intense yeah it's a special plant this is lupine too it's so pretty i love lupine a little bit of an over packed bed you might say here yeah but it looks like it looks happy and then these are more seaberry so there's the perennial nursery do they spread by rhizome yes okay yeah they're actually really aggressive over there somewhere yeah but these will get lifted in the fall yeah you have to be on top of it yeah well as and so nitrogen fixing deer proof yeah incredibly flavorful citrus like zone two hearty shrub it's high value plant yeah and so the the behavior of aggressively suckering and spreading is just to me icing on the cake it's like cool every two years we can go through and dig up all the runners and have these beautiful plants that are known female or male because they're clonal and people can set them as long as it's full sun other than that they don't care and no deer mess with them the birds must have the berries though they don't go for them really at least not here maybe it's not a non-native or they don't know it it's a non-native the wild birds here i think haven't it's not in their repertoire yet yeah so we get to have it for a little while yeah and then they'll figure it out and hopefully we have enough then you're like that guy keeps on eating that berry yeah what do you think maybe the blue jays will be the first so somebody will start get i mean the birds have found the elderberries were thrilled for them for that we just get elderberry so fast it's fine yeah we get all we need pretty easily yeah they they clean up the currants they don't like them until they're fermented i think it's more like they like the boozy flavor rather than like the musky beauty flavor that they have oh this is this is fantastic why don't we head back this way do you or do you want to where do you want to go use your own adventure garden yeah let's let's go around this way so this is an left of the amaranth turn left yeah emerald's another one that we don't grow anymore my mom um my mom used to grow these and i i love them they're cool yeah they get powdery mildew very easily but yeah this time of year it's like okay they're wrapping up yeah but but the bumblebees love them i always love the bumblebees on them and they get in the pollen and the pollen starts just dropping off they're a really that's so sasha's influence in here is it's like we both have our affinities there's tons of overlap in what we want to grow yeah but we have our kind of edges that we both like and it's fun because all the plants it's like we learn each season who all can work together and it feels like the list keeps expanding there's less and less of like oh no that never works with that most plants like each other it seems i mean look at this asparagus growing around like right through a current bush yeah so this fall so again with the nursery ideas like this is a single current we've learned definitively they do not need to be protected inside a fenced garden area from deer or anything so there's not really a reason to keep such a large being in our main garden it can go out to the wild and so all summer i just kept adding soil at the interior kind of like it's a huge shrub potato yeah and they root and root and root and then in the fall we can dig this up pull 25 or 30 divisions and set it out to an orchard and then have the space to do you know the carrots the kohlrabi the stuff that needs a little bit more protection how deep would this rootstock be if you were to dig it up do you it's an idea it'll be a project this will be a few hours to get out uh and you're doing it all by hand yeah yeah well i have a king of spades nursery spades it's all um airplane steel and super sharp and really strong and so when these plants are asleep i can see more what's going on and making a cut around the whole root ball is doable and you can also use it to pry the plant out [Music] this will have a really fibrous not very deep but very wide root system and they're they're completely adapted to having the roots cut so as long as they're asleep they're completely happy with it um and we'll have an asparagus we'll have to move too yeah it looks like how old is this asparagus now because it does take a while to establish huh these are probably i would guess these are four or five years old so certainly old enough to be productive i mean this is a great example of a design decision that i don't think was great on our part okay like asparagus is lovely but there's only you know two three months out of the year that you're actively harvesting and then the rest of the year they take up so much space and so i think this fall we'll lift these divide if we can and set them out our neighbors let us take basically piece by piece we're removing the whole lawn and turning it into more garden oh wow and so all the asparagus will go out in like one huge bland monoculture of asparagus because that just makes sense it seems rather than you know one here one there and then just this huge sprawling mess of wonderful plant the childhood home that i grew up in both the garlic and the asparagus took over but even now 20 plus years since nobody lives there now it's somebody else purchased it when you mow the lawn you could still see the asparagus coming up yeah they beat out lawn that's yeah that's part of the reason why i thought they would make sense out there is we're coming out of lawn into perennial production and asparagus feels like a pretty legit plant to do that work it's nice that your your neighbor caught the bug yeah yeah it might be more that i gave well what is i think it's that he doesn't like mowing doesn't really find it all that exciting or compelling and as long as he doesn't have to do a lot of the stuff then it's awesome and he's he likes the aesthetic he's gotten on board with the aesthetic that we have in here and so we just manage it and then any and all that he wants to harvest is there i think it's going to be time to teach him all the different plants he was like what's that one fruit that tastes like meat black currant it's like i love that one let's get more of that so that's so cool yeah it's a good it's a good pollinator plant yeah it's another reminder that we have a fundamentally upland wet site yeah the they're all anywhere that we don't actively manage that's crazy this one little section it's all stinging nettle which i see but you you could harvest that yeah it's here to it's here for our medicine and food hopes yeah is this stinging now like when they oh yes when they're small they're not as stinging though no they're stingy all the time most of the time i thought when they're young they're less stingy it could be the stalks are it's a stock that really yeah the leaves will have it too if the thing with stinging nettle they if you harvest them pretty firmly yeah and you know put squeeze so it's basically little needles and if they're flattened out they don't sting yeah and then as a raw green it's pretty nice but this time of year they're really it's really very early spring and then if you cut them after they seed and they regrow in the fall if you get the timing right there's another fall flush that you can harvest but they're really for us it's about having spring greens like six to eight weeks before annuals would even get going yeah they're just so early nasturtiums those are nice they almost have a those kind almost have this nice little red edging yeah that's a variety sasha put in it's a empress it's some cultivar name they look heartier they look like far more hardy a little bit taller yeah more upright yeah a little canada thistle that could be one that we select out easily is that cartoon behind you yeah oh wow yep not in bloom but always a really impressive yeah we just thistle like bloom we transplanted these this one out that's one we'd like to offer on the website at some point um i love the growth structure of it they're so sturdy yeah we've definitely learned in our garden unless they're on the most raised of a bed yeah their roots cannot handle how wet it is in the winter and they die they rot out um they're they have to raise them up then yeah this bed is just very raised yeah and so we put this one here it's very happy and we'll see if it's raised enough for them to be happy over winter they're definitely cold hardy enough to our area we sasha's been cooking the stems in the spring and it's nice yeah it's bitter it's funky but it's a it's a huge amount of food if you can crack the coat on on cooking those stems how does she uh how does she prepare them you're gonna have to ask her okay i'm not sure somehow magically and then it's good it's really good um how much of your food do you harvest here like how much are you supplementing or are you do you feel like you're subsistence farming now like for yourself i no i don't we're nowhere near you know oh everything we eat is from the garden yeah but um most from march until november or so most of the aspects of most of the meals comes from here but we're not trying to get stuck on the idea that 100 quite often there'll be a meal where we sit down to an omelette with you know eggs from the chickens greens from here and then it dawns on us oh cool this whole thing is from here but then we realized wait a minute we use butter yeah and we use salt yeah and so we're just being real like um we barter a lot with folks for meat and for milk and for cheese different things that in this small of a landscape there's no way we could be doing ourselves but the nursery has such high value that it can translate without money into most of our diet did you set out with the idea of starting a nursery or did you have plants like these tulip poplars and these cottonwoods just to kind of come up and you're like okay these are spreading like crazy let me start a little nursery and sell these yeah the spirit of it's more the latter i mean this just happened in the last few years so now we're working with that yeah but so i started 15 years ago growing and exploring as many perennial vegetables and perennial just super hardy plants as i could find and then one day maybe it was around 10 years ago someone was visiting and they asked oh do you ever sell plants and just that morning i had dug raspberries that had like completely taken over a walkway and i was composting them and so i said yes and i went and got them and they were still they were still alive and fine so i soaked them i potted them up and i called them up a few days later i was like i have raspberries and they're like okay and i just realized well if you set in motion these plant systems that are so abundant and wild and spreading and self-replicating then the management work of just keeping up with all of that inertia of plants can translate into a livelihood and then over the years we realize it actually can translate into 100 of our whole income and maybe support other folks too yeah all without having to shed any of our ethics like we're not going to go down the route of drip tape and plastic and all that it's like if it can work in these sorts of contexts we're happy to sell them um and then this way we sell plants that folks don't have to coddle in order for them to work in their context yeah well i i really do appreciate that because you have here a half an acre and it seems like you know the earth is giving you the plants and then you're you're figuring out how to to work with them which is just brilliant yeah people may or may not like just as the example it's not like this is the thing we do but these sorts of plants i don't know if people will like to have these as an offering yet and if they don't sell that's fine we could even cut them and use them as a mulch it's not like every being is precious in here but it's nice to acknowledge the value intrinsic to them yeah and since this landscape wants to generate those sorts of plants how how can we work with that i mean if we're going to be calling ourselves a permaculture nursery part of that is [Music] observing and interacting like what what is happening how much can you adjust your own aesthetic or your own plans your own goals to match what is already coming to pass now you did you plant the cattail or did they find themselves here they found themselves here so lots of little hand-dug ponds in the garden just to catch there's so much sheet flow of water certain times of year and so this was actually bone dry up until the other day when we got like a half inch of rain oh pummeled with rain so much rain exciting though yeah yeah it was torrential and then it was done maybe it was more than that i didn't have a rain gauge set up but this is so there's little silt catches and all the hay soaks up moving soil and then there's the little pond here basically i kind of jokingly say like if you dig a pond it's cattails and frogs are in there within 24 hours it's like they're floating in the air just waiting for a wet spot yeah sometimes it's you know it's raining frogs yeah yeah so we we added in the arrow root or the pot yeah said um i'm still trying to learn the names on some of these plants we bring in all these plants all the time and then it's it takes time for me to remember how to identify them you know well and it looks like alder here as well is this alder uh this is a variety of hazelnut oh that looks really aldery and there's an alder there then we've got alder as well the alder we didn't plant that's those are all children from that tree interesting same picture we'll sell them on the website if people want want them the hazelnut is so this is more explicitly a nursery bed with lettuces and mustards and whoever else on the edges you know to for us to eat so um but yeah the alders will have to start digging up they grow so fast at two years old they basically will swamp a bed so you kind of have to move them along um and then this is uh your chard those are some beets beets oh nice that are getting ready to thin yeah so we got some beets in here do you use both the beet greens and the the beets yeah this variety this is early early wonder tall top so the greens are really nice the the beets themselves they look nice i mean they look a little bit like charcoal and then there's beans in here but then in the long run there are high bush cranberry and gooseberries oh that's smart planting the cranberry near the water yeah is it acidic soil or or i don't know yeah we never tested it yeah it's probably a little on the acidic side the cranberries will tell you yeah we have like true bog cranberry yeah those are growing in some beds but they really need a lot of support yeah unless it's perfect context this is actually a cranberry uh shrub so this will ultimately get around 12 or 15 feet tall and it's deliberately planted just to the south of this pond so that it'll shade and keep it cooler so we have less evaporation and then the little frogs that live in here will have more shelter and more space to relax it's nice thinking of the beautiful amphibians here the this context and the frog life that volunteers or enjoys being here is probably the number one reason why we don't have runaway slug pressure yeah by all accounts wet site marginal-ish soils deep deep hay mulch we should be overrun with slugs but because there's holes that fill with water and frogs live in them we end up having almost no slug we have slugs but the pressure is so minimal that we don't even worry about them fantastic yes the frogs just work all day every day it's well except for that little one there's one living sasha put these little glass bottles in there so they'd have little nooks and crannies there's one enjoying oh my goodness look a little red do you see that saunder yeah oh my god another way to use your mason jar or whatever the yeah it's an old gallon glass jar there's probably a few down at the bottom for fish and you know we had fish in here but these ponds are proving to be a little bit more variable yeah so and we've learned that fish eat frog eggs so for now it's it'll dry sometimes it'll be wet sometimes yeah it's mainly fine did you try like what like tilapia or what did you try 11 cent feeder fish okay they which did really well and got big and overwintered and i think had a negative impact on the frogs got it so should we uh should we work our way to the to the front of your garden sure yeah i know the chickens are going crazy it's like i laid an egg look at what i did i did it again i did it again it's been one day since i did it are you proud of me [Music] this area is kind of crazy this was this is a much younger garden so we the the first area we were walking was where we began in 2013 together and that garden and it's interesting because that garden in some ways has the most challenges like the weediest or its floods and then is dry nutrient issues and so we kind of made lots of mistakes there so we can kind of get better as we move through the landscape this area in 2015 the county decided to redo the road it seemed unnecessary yeah but they were ripping up all this stuff they were cutting all these trees down and so i i caught them while they were cutting trees down and chipping them and said hey you could use our front yard as a place to dump your chips if you want oh so in 2015 this was a wet lawn yeah with forsythia yeah and they dumped about 80 yards of wood chips wow it was like 10 feet tall and half the space you're like free resources yeah it got stuck a few times because it was so wet and just like this sad pale lawn and so then we just spread all the wood chips out that erased the lawn took all the forsythia that was growing here chopped it up and laid it all out where this band is and put the chips on top so it's a really rough huge mound took there was a wild apple growing here good is it a good tasty one or is it we grafted it over to 10 varieties oh wow so there's these are mccone they're like cider apples in here there's keeping oh these are both keepsake actually okay um so these are these were grafted in 2016. this is all the graft we added in the mulberries which just exploded elderberry sorry those grew like crazy three or four years ago and they're on the north side of our firewood shed so that when people drive by they don't see it's a pretty pretty rag muffin shed but it works yeah and then basically started shaping up permanent beds here this is close enough to the road and there's enough truck traffic that we're not that psyched to grow a lot of our food this close right so this has kind of evolved devolved shifted whatever into all large powerful perennial plants for the nursery that are also sound barriers yeah that are dampening a bit of a sound dampening yeah and then the living wall is our last like basically our last line of defense from air quality and visual pollution and a little bit of air or a little bit of sound protection you might get a kick out of it i don't know if it if you can fit through here very easily [Music] but this is a pretty fun so if you can imagine when they redid the road all along the road it was just completely denuded beat up sand i mean it was top soil but it was really beat up and i i intercepted the people they were driving down the road after they did all the the work with this big machine with a guy standing on the back with like it looked like a gun that was spraying this blue paste on the sand which i guess was some mix of grass seed and fertilizer or so and i caught them right before they got here and said wait can you not spray ours and they said yeah i guess so as long as you plant it to something but they didn't say what we had to plant it to so this is what we put in instead of a lawn these giant grasses wow yeah we're where are you in the chicken coop we're in the we're in the living wall my goodness i was like where are you guys it's kind of fun to actually like be inside i kind of feel like a kid again it's pretty neat so this is five years old and the mescantis grass actually stands all winter yeah um and then we cut it down and weave it into the chicken fence so that's the the chicken coops or chicken fence area is just on the other side of this and it's an incredible grass though yeah you can't get rid of it though once you get it have it but this is a variety that doesn't set viable seed oh and it's a clumping grass so it absolutely expands but it doesn't send up 20 feet away or whatever and it gets bamboo yeah we can weave with it you can make roofing out of it walls you can use it for firewood to like start little fires cook with these are five-year-old stalks they take forever to break down and basically within a few years we had 100 visual barrier from the road oh my god because of these plants hello hi what's going on i'm over here on the other side and then we got grapes they're not ripe yet but there's grapes all through they're getting there they need another two weeks there's hops as well oh my goodness do you do your own brewing a little bit sasha's starting to get into it cool she was drying it for tea she actually made a hops ice cream it's vanilla ice cream with hops in it wow oh wow that sounds interesting ice cream wow um mainly this little corridor is used by the wild birds they come through and they eat the grapes they grab they love this stuff for nesting material they shred it and like when the hops are thick enough they actually make their summer nests inside the hops because it's structurally sound for them i love that you have habitat for wild birds it's just so cool they're wonderful beings yeah and they protect our chickens yeah because they're being more wild they're way more dialed in to what's happening with hawks and other things and so the chickens are real lackadaisical about it they don't worry but they hear the language of the wild birds and so when the wild bird says hawk our chickens know to run yeah and so the wild birds actually are like sentinels that protect our hens and there's so much excess food in here that why not let them all be here it would be crazy not to share that the winter we get starlings once in a while and they roost in with the chickens there's after a while we get tired like they will sleep two or three starlings will sleep on a chicken no and they just poop on them but it only happens when it's real cold like they just live they're like 200 starlings that'll live in the coop for like a week or two in february and then they leave oh my gosh it's hilarious chickens deal with it so we deal with it it's like a little blanket it's a starling blanket i do feel little raindrops now you might be lucky and get some a little bit more rain yeah probably a passing rain cloud but i don't think this will be significant now what is uh what's your little greenhouse structure over here what's what do you have growing in there oh this one's a little dry and well it is what it is cucumbers maybe yeah we've got so just like all of them there's a random mix um so this is this is where you come in the winter when you just want to get warmed up a little bit this is a style of hoop house that i've been working with now for five or six years yeah that so they're made out of cattle panels so the whole thing yeah it's seven and a half feet wide it's 16 feet long and it costs 150 for the whole thing which is really nice and the plastic it's good quality greenhouse plastic so it's the same plastic for all those years um and so this one we've got some anna's hyssop not intentionally i think it just showed up we've got some of our tomatoes in here with kale under sewn so that when the tomatoes come out we've got greens for the winter we're doing some ginger although they need a lot more water than we can provide and then some some cucumbers climbing up see your ginger yeah yeah they're there yeah and then some fun stuff like malabar spinach which really needs the additional heat yeah the high tunnel to thrive and so that's a perennial like tropical spinach does it have a little bit more of a mucilaginous leaf yeah yeah it's like a spinach okra um vibe yeah they're beautiful more of a novelty not like yeah not a hearty thing that we're going to grow all the time but yeah you know there's a corner that's hard to reach cool let's fill it out with malabar spinach it's nice to be able to experiment too you know just like how did this grow for us and yeah you know so it is a beautiful plant though they're crazy yeah cool yeah the cattle panel high tunnel i've been really thrilled with it it takes like four hours or so to build it's a dollar a square foot they're pretty nice well is there anything else that you wanna that you have a hankering to show us here um i don't know i mean it's all it's like the same it's the same basic picture over and over again it's just different cast of characters i love the sound that the wind is making through all the all the plant life here yeah thank you so much for sharing your garden with us it was our pleasure for sure yeah and then i know you do a youtube channel as well so if people want to know a little bit more about what you're doing which one is that we are edible acres okay great they can look for it and find it pretty easily and then if they're in the finger lakes area and you are selling some of these extra plants that are popping up when when do you usually start selling them so we we ship and do local sales when plants are asleep so we do dormant sales in the fall and in the spring and we normally update our inventory a few weeks before that begins in part because we don't know exactly what we'll have until we get close yeah we don't have like a known greenhouse it's like i think we've got 80 perennial leaks yeah you know that kind of thing um but yeah folks search for edible acres they'll find all of our stuff that they might be interested in that's great well thank you so much for spending the time with us it was it was our pleasure for sure thanks for coming out thank you yeah [Music] you

Channel: Flock Finger Lakes

Views: 449,816

Keywords: Flock, Flock Finger Lakes, Finger Lakes New York, homestead, homesteading, how to homestead, start your homestead, find your homestead, permaculture, permaculture farm, coliving, communal living, ecovillage, intentional community, upstate New York, agroforestry, summer rayne oakes, how to start a farm, farm life, market garden, gardening, outdoor gardening, gardening Zone 5, small permaculture farm, suburban permaculture farm, 1/2 acre farm tour, how to market garden, Edible Acres

Id: G6zJtTKoxoQ

Length: 52min 34sec (3154 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 30 2021