Comments

Parts 6-12 of the TSP Homestead Summer Review Have been Posted to Youtube — 16 Comments

  1. Really enjoyed the walk around your place. It’s very inspiring to see all the work that’s been done on 3 acres, but know you have only begun your master plan. Thanks Jack for inspiring me to continue on my own mini food forest.

    • Not sure if you heard on the Monday show, but they will be starting PermaEthos TV soon (before the PDC is released), and it will be free to anyone who signed up for the PDC until the PDC starts. That will definitely satiate my need for Permaculture talk. 🙂

      PS Jack – do more Permaculture shows. 😛 I LOVED the shows this week, the Comfrey one and the Bison one were fantastic. My wife is so tired of me teaching her about how to raise Bison and Comfrey.

  2. Awesome, ur my hero! With the spread of your audience we could network the development of heat and cold hardiness breeding one zone at a time much faster than any one of us in a single location (like the seaberry). Your plant with the purple flower is silverleaf nightshade (Solanum eleagnifolium) and the other is one of the nine species of groundcherry native to the region (Physalis). Some are toxic, others not. Go man, go!

    • Just wait to see what is coming form PermaEthos! Frankly I am done bitching about modern ag, the hell with it, lets just obsolete it! People now know the problem, so it is solutions time.

  3. That volunteer watermelon is huge, (so was the Comfrey next to it). My melon (Navaho Winter) can best be described in one word, cotyledon.

    Long term when you are overrun with fruits and nuts, what is the plan for the excess?

    • Well lots of vinting for one thing, quite a bit of cider making. Some direct sales, Dorothy is wanting “something to do” and wants a little road side stand. She will be selling meal worms and eggs by fall. She want to start propagating plants to sell and sell produce as we exceed our ability to use it. What we can’t sell or eat or feed to stock or turn into yummy wines, meads and ciders will go to local food banks.

  4. I have a goji berry that lived and got established. It started smaller than any of the ones you showed. Four years later it is eight feet tall and has spread through my blackberries and into my raspberries. It now covers an area 12 feet long. I have never pruned mine which you can do. Just be careful. If you get some established which it looks like you have. They could over power some of your other berries. I do enjoy eating them though. And they are probably healthier for me than the raspberries and blackberries. This year I will probably dehydrate or freeze some for the winter.

    • The area those two are in is the urban garden showcase a zone one system that will be heavily pruned many times a year. I am depending on them to get big like you say along some of my remote fence lines.

  5. I have really enjoyed these, thanks for the walk thru. One thing that was not clear to me however, where are the support trees? I know you talked about having three or four support trees for each main planting. Stuff that you were going to hack down after a few years once the fruit trees were well established. I would have thought to see a much higher density of trees in the ground based on the concept of 3-to-1 or 4-to-1, support-main, planting groups. Are they there, and I just didn’t realize it?

  6. Hi Jack,

    What you are calling swales… Little confused. So the swales were cut on contour, and the mounds- Are those the Hugelkuture mounds or dug woody beds that you made or just the dirt from the swale excavation? Would those mounds on a more sloping ground be the lower lip of the swale? I guess I’m confused because you are calling the mounds the swales and I thought that the swales were the ditch part. Thanks for all you do.

    • The swale is the ditch on contour that harvests water and soaks it in. The mound is the result of digging the swale and is placed on the down grade side of the swale. No they are not woody beds and I really I think need to do a show on why many times the two techniques are best now combined unless you really have done the water calculations and left a lot of room for a major excess rain event.

    • Thanks for the explanation. Looking forward to taking the Permaethos PDC next time around. Just bad timing this time for us in that we are moving from the burbs to an 8 acre homestead, and every penny counts as we are trying to do this with little debt. Count me as another in the list that you’ve helped find a better way to do this thing called life.

  7. I loved the videos.
    After hearing you talk about them for so long I’m wondering if you ever aregoing to put Muscovy ducks on your land?