Help Us Heal the Earth by Restoring Our Family Farm! (with special ending!) Realeyes Homestead 2014-01-25 | Click here: http://igg.me/at/realeyeshomesteadWE'RE TAKING THE LEAP BACK TO THE LAND! We have embarked upon the journey of a lifetime... Learning to meet our needs from the land and local community around us, while reforesting the land and healing the soil. You can learn all about it and support our cause here. http://igg.me/at/realeyeshomestead
Population Overshoot - Carrying Capacity - Drawdown - Collapse (Book by William R. Catton Jr.) Realeyes Homestead 2017-06-12 | In this video I share the main concepts from the 1980 book Overshoot by William R. Catton Jr. I address the issues of overpopulation, resource depletion, and what we can do about it from a permaculture perspective. Essentially, the human population is not something we can simply ignore, or leave to "natural patterns" if we care about preserving resources for future generations and reducing unnecessary suffering. One way or another the human population will be "managed" ie; kept in check. Without any intentional management on our part, it's likely that the population will grow until it hits resource shortages that cause a population collapse. This would be a chaotic way to allow the population to be managed by the environment. (Which is what happens with most other living organisms)Another option is to control the population through some central governing body, like China's one-child policy. This also has disastrous consequences, and takes away a fundamental human right of planning your own family, and number of offspring.The ideal way to manage the population is through educated individuals and families being free to make their own choices about such matters. However with this right comes great responsibility, because that means it's up to US to be aware of the lands carrying capacity and voluntarily choose to not exceed it. So, that's partly why I'm sharing this video, to help spread awareness to you all, so you can make more educated informed decisions about your family, and how you consume resources in your daily lives. If we step up to this responsibility, and respond appropriately, then we can avoid the pains of either resources scarcity or oppressive governmental programs.
Intro to Apple Tree Grafting (with Trevor Newman) Realeyes Homestead 2017-03-02 | Trevor Newman of Rootstofruits.biz leads a hands-on introduction to Apple tree grafting. Specifically bench grafting of bareroot rootstock onto scion wood.Lot's of great info shared in this video so I how to tune in, and get your notepads out!We'll keep bringing you great stuff like this so please consider Subscribing to our channel, and signing up for updates on RealeyesHomestead.comMusic: Prodigy - Stand Up
Clever Tricks for Planting and Propagating Gooseberry Bushes (and Currants) Realeyes Homestead 2017-03-02 | Trevor Newman of RootstoFruits.biz shares some cool tricks for planting and propagating gooseberry bushes and other Ribes plants, including currants. This took place at a workshop at Realeyes Homestead. Find out about upcoming workshops and more by Subscribing here, and at RealeyesHomestead.com!Music: Stand up - Prodigy
How To Establish Groundcovers in Your Forest Garden (or Understory plants in your Orchard) Realeyes Homestead 2017-03-02 | This is a clip from a Workshop at Realeyes Homestead led by Trevor Newman of Rootstofruits.biz.He discusses how to seed in cover crops and establish groundcover plants in the understory of your forest garden, or orchard.Music: Prodigy - Stand Up
Pastured Pig dueling, dominance fighting Realeyes Homestead 2016-01-03 | We put pigs together into a pen for the first time, and the mamma fights another pig for dominance while her piglet tries to nurse. Get out of the way piglet!This lasted for about 5 minutes, then we never saw them fight again, except the usual little skirmishes around food. It looks kinda tame, but when we were there, there was an intense electricity in the air, you could feel!
Winter Pig Pen with Pallets and Pine Trees Realeyes Homestead 2016-01-03 | Here's out winter pig pen made out of old pallets. It's about an acre of fencing enclosing a thick patch of blue spruce trees. The spruce helps provide shelter from the wind and snow for the pigs, and we give them straw to insulate from the ground. They use the straw to create a "nest" under the branches of the trees. Then they all pile together to keep warm as they sleep. It's really cute.We've chosen certain heritage breeds of pigs that have thick fur and thick back fat which keeps them warm in the cold weather as well. By using free pallets, and choosing a hardy breed, our infrastructure costs are very low for our winter pens. Most farms will build a barn or several structures for the pigs in the winter.I'm able to pickup a load of food waste from town every 2 days, and pull my pickup truck right up to the fence to dump in the food waste. Without the truck, it's hard to lift the heavy bags over the fences. (And when I do, I usually get slimed in the process)We separated the pen into 3 paddocks so that we can separate the younger pigs, from the adult breeders; the boar and sows. Also, as the snow melts in the spring, all the build up from the winter thaws all at once, and it's not a pretty sight, so this is when we move them into the 3rd fresh paddock, before we're ready to take them out onto the pasture. We also intend to build 2 small (but comfortable) gestation pens for the pregnant mothers to give birth in and nurse their young separate from the rest of the crowd. Until the piglets are weaned. If you have any thoughts or questions, feel free to comment below!Learn more at RealeyesHomestead.com!
How to Move a Portable Pig Pen Realeyes Homestead 2015-10-09 | This video shows how we move our pig pen onto new ground. The system we've come up with is very efficient. We can do the whole move in about an hour, the pigs never escape their pen, and it's big enough that they get space to roam. Check out the article for more details on the equipment we use: http://realeyeshomestead.com/how-to-make-portable-pig-pen
Upcycled Living - The Resource Collection Zone ie; the Junkyard Realeyes Homestead 2015-09-29 | Strategic Zone of Materials Accumulation: This is an essential element of any sustainable homestead. Basically it's where you store all the useful crap that you can get your hands on, before that future project comes along when you need it!!We like to collect things like lumber, sheet metal, barrels, buckets, bins, tubes, tanks, pipes, pots, foam, pallets, bricks, block, etc. Of course it's also good to collect firewood, compost, leaves, woodchips, straw, etc but we typically locate those closer to the gardens.Ideally this zone would be situated not too far from the workspace, but hidden from direct visual access. Thinking around zone 2-3. It's also important to incorporate good access paths for vehicles (my truck is the main method of materials collection). It's smart to keep things that aren't as outdoor-proof covered from rain (sheet metal) up off the moist ground (pallets) and out of the sun (tree cover/visual screen). It's also a good idea to keep things organized for easier future reference, although I'm still working on this point.This is a great way to reduce your footprint by repurposing, upcycling, and recycling unwanted resources. Plus you can save a load of money by not buying new materials. If you want to go to the next level, you can save old metal parts, separate them into the different types of metal, and sell them back to recycling plants for the cost of the metals. (scrapping)
How we made a Permaculture Plant Nursery Realeyes Homestead 2015-09-15 | Over the last few years we've been collecting unique and useful perennial plant species from all over the world. (except invasive species) Some we get from friends with farms and gardens, some are responsibly transplanted from the wild, and some we order from nurseries like Oikos Tree Crops. (http://oikostreecrops.com) Some of the plant species we are collecting that grow in our climate (zone 5b): Black willow, Chinese Chestnut, European Hazelnut, American Filbert, Heartnut, Red and White Oak, Hickory nut, Hardy pecan, Persimmon, pawpaw, korean nut pine, apricots, plums, quince, sand cherry, nanking cherry, kousa dogwood, elderberry, buffaloberry, currants, gooseberry, jostaberry, black locust, blueberry, comfrey, lemon balm, catmint, chives, bunching onion, sea kale, skirret, lovage, calendula, Illinois bundle flower, leadplant, mountain mint, bee balm, echinacea, columbine, strawberry, wild ginger, rhubarb, asparagus, sunchokes, leeks/wild ramps, highbush cranberry, sweetfern, new jersey tea, honeyberry, blue bean, northern bayberry, mulberry, asian pear, heirloom apple, serviceberry/saskatoon, lingonberry, siberian pea shrub, cornelian cherry, raspberry, blackberry, black raspberry, yarrow, anise hyssop, good king henry, false indigo, daylilies, hardy kiwi. Learn more @ http://realeyeshomestead.com
How to Use a Pig Tractor (Portable Pig Pen) Realeyes Homestead 2015-09-07 | This is one of our pig tractors at Realeyes Homestead. We built them out of salvaged lumber and pallets, on cedar skids so that we can drag them all around the pasture. This keeps the pigs healthy and happy because they always have fresh ground to root up and forage in, and it keeps them away from their feces accumulation. This helps to break the parasite cycle. Plus it's really easy and quick to do the move, but it does require burning a little fossil energy (unless you got horses!) to pull them with a truck or tractor because they're much to heavy to move by hand. We tried building one that could be moved by hand, but we sacrificed strength and the boar ended up escaping and taking a stroll down to the lake for a dip and a nap. Plus it was STILL backbreaking to move it by hand. So we're gonna stick with these heavier duty tractors.
Spontaneous Gardens Planted by Our Pigs Realeyes Homestead 2015-09-07 | We created winter pig pens using pallets that were freely available at many warehouses in town. We fed the pigs old vegetable waste from town throughout the winter, then covered the left overs with leaves. Many squash and tomato seeds from the food waste germinated in the spring and sprouted up through the mulch. The abundance of fertility in this location provided much plant food, and the leaves helped keep them from drying out during the summer. We never planted, irrigated or weeded these "spontaneous gardens" they were literally planted by our pigs! In a few more weeks we'll harvest and store as much of the abundance as we can, then send the pigs back in for the winter and they'll finish off whatever we didn't get! Thus completing the magical cycle of nutrients in a very hands-off, ecologically regenerative way. Woohoo!
Building Soil from Scratch Using Pigs and Cover Crops! Realeyes Homestead 2015-09-07 | For the last couple years we have been experimenting with movable pig pens, and cover crops in order to build the soil fertility, and plant diversity of our pasture. The results have been overwhelmingly positive! In just two years, we've transformed patches of our knapweed and beach sand site, into a thick lush pasture with diverse forage crops. In the mid-summer we only put down a few species because these cover crops aren't irrigated and few seeds can survive in dry sandy exposed soil. Even with the abundance of fertilizer the pigs lay down. At this time we use oats, field peas, turnips, daikon radish and buckwheat. Getting into fall, as we get more rain we move into a very diverse mixture of perennial pasture grasses, wildflowers, clovers and more plus the annuals. (It costs some money!)In order to work the seeds into the soil, we simply broadcast them into the pig pens with the pigs a few days before we move the pen so that they trample and root the seeds into the ground. Check out RealeyesHomestead.com for more cool permaculture solutions to land regeneration.
How to Feed Chickens Using Compost and Food Waste! Realeyes Homestead 2015-09-06 | Inspired by a Geoff Lawton video, we began creating a compost pile inside our bird pen using food scraps collected from local restaurants and grocery stores. The chickens not only get to eat the fresh veggie scraps we dump on top of the compost pile every other day, but once those are eaten, they dig into the pile to harvest all the insect decomposers and other goodies that the compost pile generates. For 70+ birds (chickens, ducks etc) we only had to supplement them with about a pound of feed daily, and could probably go grain free if we had to using this system. We also dump leaves on the pile to help increase the carbon content, which helps keep the nitrogen from the veggie matter from leaching away.Big thanks to Bay Area Recycling for Charities allows us to tap into the abundance of food waste they collect!
Portable Chicken Tractor The Hoop Coop Realeyes Homestead 2014-06-28 | We built a portable chicken tractor at Realeyes Homestead! Learn how here: http://realeyeshomestead.com/build-chicken-tractor-hoop-coop
Compost Operation + Pig and Chicken/Egg Production = WIN : Realeyes Partnership with BARC Realeyes Homestead 2014-02-19 | 'Realeyes Homestead' and 'Bay Area Recycling for Charities' are teaming up to turn city waste streams; Old Produce, Food Waste, Pallets, ...into marketable products; Nutrient Rich Compost for amending gardens and farm soils, Pastured Pork, Poultry and Eggs.http://RealeyesHomestead.comhttp://MyBARC.orgAndy Gale of Bay Area Recycling for Charities loves compost! At BARC they collect food waste from various grocery stores and restaurants around Traverse City (Northern Micihgan, USA) and mix it with leaves to break it down into fertile soil. At Realeyes Homestead we raise pigs and chickens on pasture and were looking for ways to supplement our feed costs. That's when we met, and discovered how mutually beneficial our operations are! BARC has begun doing composting operations at Realeyes Homestead which is a location close to the city. This reduces the costs of trucking the materials to sites further away. Some of the food waste goes to feed the pigs and chickens here at Realeyes Homestead, cutting feed costs significantly. The rest of it gets composted down, enriching the sterile soil on our site with beneficial microorganisms, nutrients, worms and more! It was a match made in heaven :)In Permaculture, we observe the ecosystems of nature, and seek to mimic them in our human designed systems. One thing we notice is that in a healthy ecosystem, each element performs many different functions at the same time. For instance, a Yarrow plant performs many functions for the ecosystem in which it lives. It's flowers are not only beautiful, but they attract bees seeking nectar. Yarrow is also a shelter for other beneficial insects like lacewings, parasitic wasps, spiders and beetles. It spreads out along the ground, shading the soil which helps reduce evaporation. It accumulates essential nutrients in it's body; (Potassium, Phosphorus, and Copper) and is even edible and has medicinal properties! By stacking functions within our systems we can accomplish more while using fewer resources, time, and money.
