What do you do with those large limbs and logs that fall from the trees around your home after a windstorm? Unless you heat your home with wood, chances are you either call a tree service to cut them up and take them away or line them up on the curb for the garbage truck […]
Browsing: permaculture
The climate you live in largely determines what you can grow and when you can grow it. Most of us have heard of the United States Department of Agriculture climate zones. Those numbers that come on the packets of every seed packet serve to remind us we’ll be hard-pressed to grow peaches in Michigan or […]
In recent years, permaculture has influenced thousands of people to begin to search for more sustainable ways to live in harmony and community with the natural world and the community of people around them. More than just a simple collection of organic farming tools and methods, the permaculture movement rests on three main ethics that […]
Healthy top soil, or humus, is necessary for growing healthy plants. However, top soil takes dozens of years to naturally accumulate through the slow decomposition of leaves and other organic material. For people who don’t have the budget to buy those overpriced bags of garden soil sold at hardware stores, lasagna gardening is a quick […]
One of the biggest challenges we collectively face as a species is how to grow sufficient food for our growing population. Large scale farming dependent on fossil fuel inputs, dangerous chemicals and genetically modified organisms has only increased our vulnerability. Food forests offer us an opportunity to revolutionize the way we grow our food, offering […]
Everyone loves hot water in the home, but the ecological cost of long, hot showers powered by fossil fueled water heaters add some guilt to those long hours in the bathroom. What if you could have a huge supply of hot water heated by the compost pile in your garden? Instead of greenhouses gasses, the […]
Rain is often seen to be one of the leading causes of soil erosion. The problem isn’t with rain itself, but rather with bad land management practices and farming practices that aren’t designed to take advantage of the rain. The best place to store water is in the landscape itself, and through the process of […]
Most of the fruit that we see on the supermarket shelves is grown in monoculture settings that are heavily dependent on dangerous pesticides and fungicides. We have always been told that “an apple a day will keep the doctor away”, but what happens if that apple is what is making us sick in the first […]
Masanobu Fukuoka, the late Japanese farmer, developed a unique farming system he called “Natural Farming”. Trying to replicate what he saw in Nature, Fukuoka’s no till system allowed the soil to continually grow in fertility. Through the use of mulch and cover crops, this system effectively allows for continuous harvests of crop rotations, eliminates weeds […]
When most of us think about the word ‘community’, we tend to think on the scale of a neighbourhood, town or perhaps even a city. We may think about seeing the same people in the local cafe; or having the sense that everyone is looking out for one another. Largely, we have positive associations when […]