Growing a Greener World Episode 1005: Modern Homesteading - Transforming the Urban Garden Experience

Growing a Greener World is possible in part thanks to the 2019 Subaru Crosstrek Built on a Landfill-Free Planet So You Can Roam the Earth with a Lighter Footprint Subaru Proud Supporter of Growing a Greener World I'm Joel Amble When I Created Growing a

greener

world

My goal was to tell stories of everyday people, innovators, entrepreneurs, forward-thinking leaders, all of them, big and small, dedicated to organic

garden

ing and farming, lightening our footprint, conserving vital resources, protecting habitats natural, making a tangible difference for all of us. They are real, they are passionate, they are all around us, they are the game changers and they are literally

growing

a

greener

world

and inspiring the rest of us to do the same,

growing

a greener world, it is more than a movement, it is our mission, you know the term.

Farming can have many different meanings, for some it means living completely off the grid and providing yourself with all your food and energy, and for others it means providing some of those things, but on a much smaller scale and within an

urban

environment, but not it matters. How to do it All settlers are trying to provide at least some of their own healthy food and live more sustainably and many of them are going beyond organic crops and small livestock by sharing their journey with their children and their community. Jesse Bloom is a long-time homesteader who lives just outside of Seattle and is a mother of two young children.

Jesse is the owner of Northwest Bloom, an award-winning sustainable nursery landscape design company. Jessi's

experience

in green living and permaculture has made her a leading authority in her field while she keeps her busy as a best-selling author, including her latest book, Practical Permaculture. There are many different terms for what I do here and some people might describe it as farming. I would call myself a permaculture listicle, so I look. where I ecologically need water, food, energy and I see how I can meet those needs from a low footprint point of view, so I will collect water from my roof, I will grow food from the nutrients made from composting the waste that I I produce in In my home I will grow food not only from annuals but also perennials and I also grow food from the manure produced by my animals who also produce food so there is a lot to consider in my lifestyle and in how it is done and in general just trying to have a healthy and environmentally conscious lifestyle, you are used to living this way because to me it is common sense and there are many ways to live in this world and if we always go and we do not pay attention to the resources we need to use them.

We have no control over what those resources are. When it comes to our food system, for example, what are we buying at the supermarket? What's in that box? What are the ingredients on the label? Can you pronounce it? them so this is just common sense taking care of the land eating plants from the land you know what's grown there taking care of the animals taking care of ourselves really what it's all about for my kids this is a really normal lifestyle everything for they are used to having chickens and roosters and collecting eggs there is a lot of cooking there is a lot of education that happens in fact some of our best times and my favorite memories and conversations with them growing up were when we are working in the

garden

s next to each other.

I look at it this way, if I don't teach my children how to be good stewards of the earth and make good decisions in their lives, who will? Jesse, I love chickens and I have a lot of them, but I also have a lot of land, so coming in and messing up the garden is rarely a problem, but you've written a whole book for people who have that garden and want chickens, but don't want to. let them pass. and mess up the garden, especially in a small space, so you have some tricks for dealing with that, so talk to me about some of those ideas.

Well, first of all, this is an important topic and the first thing I want people to understand. If you can have too many chickens, that's the first thing you should do based on the amount of space you have. You want to make sure there aren't too many chickens because they compete for resources, so there are many ways to do this. there is free range which means you can just let them have access to everything, yes there are problems with the fact that they can get into things that don't meet their needs and if all you have is a small orchard and lawn they are going to Go through that garden, right, and if you have predators around, yes, that's a risk, but on the plus side, you can get them to fertilize your landscape, you don't have to feed them as much because they'll get food from the soil, they'll get nutrients, insects, all of them. the things they would get naturally if they were wild, but most people can't do that in an

urban

environment so I like to encourage people to do it in confined spaces and this is a classic example.

It's a chicken tractor where we can put them in one area, but keep them very safe and they can still have access to the ground. I use them for many reasons, if at the end of the season I want them to clean a bed of vegetables, they can do it. going to work takes care of pest problems that way if I have an injured bird I can put it here if I have rescued chickens I can put it here as they slowly acclimate to the flock if I have young birds the same so they are young and more vulnerable , they can live in this for a while, the other thing is that if you don't want to do this and want them to grow freely, you can protect your plants using something very simple. yes, this is one of my favorite techniques or tools, it's a small fence made barrier, quite simple, very cheap and you can fold it if you plant some seeds for example, you can place this on top of them, yes, and the chickens.

They're not going to get to it if you have a plant that's growing in the spring and they're starting to, you can fold it into a cone or dome shape and then keep it protected from the chickens that way so there are a lot of ways to do it, but Fencing is the easiest way and you can keep your plants protected or you will have to keep your chickens protected, but there are lots of little tricks and lots of information to know. a lot of it is just yes and what the chickens like and making sure they have a habitat and that they have food and everything they need in the garden yes great advice well I have to confess I'm a little jealous of your huge compost heap and you know.

I'm a big fan of composting. You do it on this property in a lot of different ways, so tell me about some of those methods. Well, this is the biggest and fortunately we have the machine to help us with all the work, but a lot of biomass comes from outside and a little from here too. We have a compost system that is dedicated just to our greenhouse and that actually heats the inside of the greenhouse. We use a lot of manure and bedding from the barn. In that we have several different worm systems, we also have a passive system for food scraps, which is a great way for people to take what's in their kitchen scraps, put them in the soil and let the soil do all the work so you can talking about a food digestion system, so yes, very simple minimal inputs from us, something that I know our viewers really want me to describe the process well, basically, there is a container that is half buried underground and the bottom half has pools so organisms can go in and out and basically break down all the material for us.

Now there is a store-bought version, but you can also make your own, your great DIY. You have to tell me how to do it. What you can buy is quite expensive and also not very easy to find, so the easiest way to do it is to buy a 20 gallon galvanized trash can with a tight-fitting lid and drill holes in the bottom and sides about a quarter of the way through. From the way around the bottom bury it in the ground, put the food scraps in it and voila, Jesse has many edibles here on his farm and mixed in all his garden beds there are many different types of culinary herbs now if you are growing culinary herbs, you may want to preserve some of that flavor for later and one of the best ways to do this is to dry them to dry the herbs you want to harvest when they are at their peak of flavor, and that is usually just before they flower If you can pick them early in the morning, when the essential oils are most concentrated in the leaves, cut the herbs into small bundles and wrap each bundle with a rubber band that will hold them in place as the stems shrink and to dry them. , you can hang them to dry just like that or if you have an herb that can lose its leaves, take a paper bag, make some holes in it for circulation and then place the herbs in the bag and tie an open clip with another elastic band hook-shaped.

Below the elastic band is an easy loop for hanging. They should dry in just a few days depending on humidity, but if you need them quickly, here's a quick tip: remove the fresh herbs from the stems and spread them out on a cookie sheet. a single layer and then simply place them in the trunk or back of your car on a warm day, preferably in the sun, in about 24 hours you will have crispy dried herbs and a car that smells fantastic, not far from Jessie's farm Blooms, lives another

modern

farm and Respected home study expert who shares her knowledge with others Ericka Strauss began as a trained chef, but her desire to grow organic produce for the kitchen soon became an all-encompassing obsession for both Erica and her husband Nick, Erica. began documenting her life and work journey toward a more natural sustainable lifestyle which led to her wildly popular Northwest edible blog, a podcast, numerous writing credits, and a new book in the works, some people call this lifestyle urban farming, which is a good description, but it's not. one I accept because I don't consider myself a farmer.

I have a big garden. I have chickens. I have ducks, but I don't depend on getting my produce to market to make a living, so I don't have the From a farmer's point of view, what I like to think about what we're doing here is trying to get away from a style of life based on actual consumption and move towards a more productive lifestyle, so throughout our house we are just trying to do a little. more on our own land, you know, our chickens give us eggs, our ducks give us slug control, we have solar panels that help generate energy, we try to grow a lot of our own fruits and vegetables, we can't do it all, we are in the suburbs. on 1/3 of an acre so there are some things we just can't produce but we are trying to do what we can with what we have where we are 10 years ago when we started this we put in just a few 4 by 8 raised beds simple raised beds and now I think we have 17 of them, so most of our annual vegetable production is done in those raised beds.

We have fruit trees that we are stacking all over our property. We started growing vines and kiwis, all kinds of fun fruits, we have a big berry patch, so all that production means that from April to October or November or so, we provide all our own vegetables and fruits fresh from our garden. I don't think I could do all of this without my kids, in fact my daughter is very involved and very helpful, we have a whole group of chickens and ducks, and Bella is actually in charge of setting all that up every morning before school , go out and harvest the eggs and add new bedding to the pen or coop if they need it clean, check the food and water.

It has been a real source of pride for her to be so responsible with the fact that my son is basically a fruitarian and knows where he is every little bit. There are fruits all over the garden and as things ripen in succession you can find him in the strawberry orchard and then under the plum tree and then in the raspberry orchard so now he's only four years old so we don't depend on him . a huge amount, but he is already learning to take responsibility for some of those things, like the harvest. I admit that most of the fruit goes into his stomach and not the harvest basket, but that's okay, he thinks it's cool to watch him go and pick. the fruit from around the garden is so much fun, my husband is also very involved in the blog.

I call him a homebrew husband because he does all this homebrewing for us and we let him know that it's delicious homebrewing thanks to his food preservation efforts. He has been very involved in developing the filtration technique for our duck pond, which is very important because filtration is a key part of duck management and he even does things like hanging clothes on the clothesline, so in thiseffort to make our entire house more productive, he has also been a key element, it is truly a family affair, Erica. I love the fact that you have ducks here because it gives me the opportunity to get your opinion on a question that we get all the time from our viewers and that is what our ducks are. dirty because they might think they are fine, ducks can be dirty and a lot of that has to do with the fact that they are different than chickens when it comes to their manure.

Duck manure is quite wet and loose compared to chicken manure and the way you deal with it is to give the ducks somewhere to go. One of the nice things about keeping ducks is that they really prefer to do their business in the water, so if you provide that, it actually holds the manure and you can harvest it. as a form of fertilizer instead of just being a mess all over the backyard, okay, so harvesting the manure, let's talk about that for a second, what's your process for that pit? Because we have this in an earthen pond, we use a filtration system that actually captures all the nutrient rich manure and then we can filter it out and we can put it in the garden beds, fruit trees, that kind of thing if you didn't have a lot of inground pond.

Sometimes what people will do is look like a kiddie pool and they just refill the water every few days as it gets dirty and the place where you dump that water becomes an extra fertile area of ​​your garden. Okay, it makes a lot of sense now that you've had chickens for a long time. time and then the ducks appeared, which made you decide to have ducks. Well chickens are great, we love egg production. Ducks also give great egg production, but they also have another benefit here in Seattle. We have a big problem with slugs and snails.

I spent a lot of money on this iron phosphate slug bait and it's organic but I thought I could do better and the ducks love to eat slugs and snails so that was the main motivation for bringing them to our little farm here and a very good now. Tell me about your ducks, the variety here, how did you select them? It's in Kona, the breed is called Kona. They are an endangered breed according to the livestock conservation organization. There are about 2,000 of them in the country, so we were very excited when we found out. about this breed from a relatively local breeder in Portland, we loved the idea that maybe we could even help contribute to expanding the species, expanding the breed properly and when the ducks head to the water from the pen, they tend to be more educated. than chickens, certainly as a gardener I struggled for a long time with how to properly incorporate chickens into my garden.

The chickens were always making holes, scratching and digging. Ducks don't really do any of that nibbling. little leaves of chard or lettuce or whatever, but they don't have the same destructive potential in a garden that chickens sometimes have, yes, which is very good news for the gardener. I think when it comes to agriculture, there's a lot going on. and usually that involves the animals that probably top the list, chickens. Now we know where there are animals and there is manure, but we also know, as gardeners, how important manure is to the garden. The key is how to manage that manure efficiently, especially between the fresh and the finished stage, but one of the best ways to do it with chickens is called the deep litter method and it's the one Erica uses now.

Is that how it works. The chickens come in at night and roost on this bar on this upper level, but the key. it's while they're sleeping, they usually do their thing and a lot of manure builds up overnight, but because it's a layer of sand, think of this like cat litter, where it absorbs some of that moisture, so in the morning you come here and you rake the manure, you scrape it and it falls into this bottom layer along with the hay and the straw into any other organic matter, but over the next few months this will decompose, it will decompose and it will become fantastic compost, so then such Once a couple of times a year you scrape off this top layer and then harvest this rich organic matter and put it directly into the garden.

Nothing could be better than raising livestock. It may be a big part of what it means to be a farmer, but probably the most defining aspect is the food you grow and how you use it. You are a chef and now you are a gardener. Growing your own food also influenced how you cook. Oh, absolutely, I would say that because I came to gardening from food. I had some expectations about what my garden was going to look like. I thought that, with all my arrogance as a beginning gardener, you knew that I would throw some seeds in the ground and then have this kind of garden all year round. fruit shops that I could go pick and choose from and what I have realized as the years have gone by and my

experience

has grown is that I am truly the recipient of what the garden gives.

I am receiving the reward. not telling the garden what to give me so when I get ready to cook something I walk around and you know I see maybe the broccoli is ready and that's what dinner is. I don't plan the broccoli, I go out to my garden and Look, probably excellent. I love how your perspective on that is so spot on now, but one of the things I know you're doing because I've seen this in the other part of your garden is that you're focusing more on perennial food instead of the annuals that are always there. , you know, here today, tomorrow, well, well, the annuals are great.

I mean, you can get a lot of production in a really small space, but like all of us, I'm pretty busy. I feel like I'm juggling more and more things as my kids get older, they have activities that I think every parent, every working parent, understands and perennial crops allow you to plant once and with much less maintenance, harvest several times over and over again, etc. it's a way to continue moving toward that productive lifestyle with a lot less ongoing maintenance, which is important for where I'm at in my life now, yeah, very important. One of the key components in farming is finding ways to extend the growing season of our DIY expert himself, Todd Brock, is also the author of the book "Pattery Homesteading All-in-One" for Dummies and has a simple project which can help even a hobby gardener try it out, but what we're building today is a really simple cold frame. project which is like a mini greenhouse yes exactly yes a whole cold frame is a box that is open at the bottom and you are going to put this over your garden on the top we are going to make a lid which is usually glass or some type of transparent material that collects sunlight, traps that thermal energy, warms the inside of the box and extends the growing season by changing the climate inside the cold frame and, in fact, in the book we have stories about farmers who live in the zone five.

I'm worried, we're talking -20 in the winter and there are farmers in zone five that are pulling fresh vegetables out of a cold frame every month all winter long just by using one of these. I know, let's get started and put this up. together, okay, it's a good idea to raise one end so that the top has an angle and that's for a couple of different reasons, one is you don't want to accumulate a lot of stuff on the top right, a leaf litter. rain, snow, the more things that pile up and build up on the lid will only block more sunlight.

Sun, the more you will do with the cold frame. Okay, this lid will fit on top and this is just two at a time, again, scrap wood. but we build it the same size as the box and then we'll use this clear plastic sheet. Okay, it will cover the top and this is what our transparent greenhouse material will provide. Adequate ventilation is very important. There's so much heat that gets trapped here at night and as the day comes it gets too hot so I'll want to get in here and open it up with something like a 4x4 or whatever and then there will be times where I need to come in here and really open it up. to harvest or plant or whatever and at that point I'm just going to use a stick or something to hold it up exactly so you want this to be a real lid so we're.

I'll need hinges, okay, I got them from an old door. I don't need them anymore, we'll just put them in the back and that will be the last step. I love it, the price is right, that's exactly it. I love it, it's so easy. and very economical, yes, it didn't really cost us anything, this was all material that we already had stacked up waiting to be used and you know what I like about the simplicity of this for people who want that greenhouse or that circular house like me. No need to wait for that and a couple of hours with a few dollars maybe you can extend the season with something as simple as this cold frame project.

This is a great way to get started with little to no investment of time or money that you can build on. more of these to cover this entire bed, yes you could take this out and use it somewhere else in the garden, it's super versatile, it didn't cost you anything, it will increase your productivity, that's what farming is and you only took one small step. but it is an important step to get there. I'm ready, bring it in the fall. Yes, one of the best things about farming is that you can do it with ease. In fact, the best way to do it is to start small and add things like livestock and garden beds.

That way you will be more comfortable, able to adapt to your lifestyle as your garden and your skills grow. For more information on farming, we have it on our website, under the show notes for this

episode

, the website address is the same as the name of our show, getting greener. world calm thank you for joining us all, I'm Joel Ample and I'll see you here next time to keep growing, a greener world, we have different ways, I need to cut you off, you ruined your audio, okay Jesse, I have to take 40, let's go. Now you can continue your online gardening learning and courses for me, Joel Ample, at my online gardening academy, classes are designed to teach gardeners of all levels, from fundamentals to master skills, explore courses available right now plus new topics that cover everything you need to know to grow as a professional Take each class on your own time from anywhere plus you'll have the opportunity to ask me questions about your specific garden in real time, visit Joe Gardner dot -com/learn for more details today