Water Safety Measures for Your Backyard (Strategic Water Reserve for Any Garden Endeavor) Part 3 Don’t build a death trap. Bodies of water above your head can hold tons of liters of water, which equals tons of kilograms. If their walls break, you are going to be smashed and washed away. In a home garden, people usually don’t deal with this dimension of swales, water tanks, ponds, and dams, but you could face blowouts in your system. Catching water to create a strategic water reserve is...
12 days ago • 6 min read
What Are Swales: A Quick Guide for Home Gardeners Swales are one of the most popular concepts in Permaculture and one of the most misunderstood and controversial. Some say that they are ineffective and don’t work. Others argue that they only apply to specific climates and conditions, while having negative effects everywhere else. Some groups claim that you damage the environment by changing the landscape when you shape the earth to implement them, and even say that they are a colonial tool....
20 days ago • 5 min read
Pollution Is Stealing Your Future (5 Universal Lessons From Your Backyard About Waste Management) The neighbor’s grass is always greener, because it’s full of bullshit. They compost the manure and feed it back to the soil, instead of spraying pesticides and herbicides, introducing micro-plastics into their soil, or any other type of waste that breaks the life net. Waste that is poorly managed creates pollution, which rips off future yields and robs current production potential. You may have...
27 days ago • 4 min read
Do you have a big enough roof? (Strategic Water Reserve for Any Garden Endeavor) Part 2 Never die of thirst. Never again lose crops or animals because of lack of water. Never again be vulnerable to drought periods. The solution is literally over your head - catching rainwater from your rooftops. Here is what you need to do to make it work. In this edition, in 5 minutes or less: #1 The Strategy of Water #2 How Much Water Do You Need to Survive and Thrive (Household + Garden + Animals) #3 How...
about 1 month ago • 6 min read
The Roof Water Flywheel (Strategic Water Reserve for Any Garden Endeavor) - Part 1 The skies open and water pours from them. The problem is that it is either too much at once, too little, or too spaced out. If we don’t catch it, this life-giving thing just washes away and may even cause erosion along the way. If we catch it, though, we will have enough to drink, grow food, and raise animals - for free and under our control. We can catch the water directly from the ground or from our roof...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
The 36 Trees That Will Change Your Life Forever - (From seed to Legacy) - Part 2 Never plant a tree by digging a hole in the ground and dumping your valuable young tree there - alone, exposed, and suffocated by grass. In part 1 of this series 'from seed to legacy' you have cracked the code of planting tree that thrive for generations. You can carefully design the tree’s implementation and prevent many negative factors from cutting the tree’s growth and potential by half. You learned that,...
about 2 months ago • 6 min read
The Ultimate Checklist for Planting Trees that Thrive for Centuries (From seed to Legacy) - Part 1 You can hinder the tree’s development by half and cut its lifespan by a hundred years if you plant a tree incorrectly. Planting trees and relying on them for the stability of our planet and culture is the most rational and pragmatic thing to do. No other action yields greater results for the effort involved. They produce soil, create a niche for many animal and insect species to live, and also...
2 months ago • 8 min read
How to Operate the Animal Powered Nursery (The Anti-Fragile Nursery Flywheel) - Part 3 So, you’ve already tried to grow plants from seeds for your garden. You probably had success, but it felt bitter. You enjoyed the work with the earth and the seeds, but the work itself was monotonous, slow, dirty, somewhat anxiety-building, and tiring. It looked like it was more about dealing with setbacks than doing something. It was not your fault: you just lacked a nursery system that sets the stage for...
3 months ago • 9 min read
The Minimum Viable Animal Powered Nursery (The Anti-Fragile Nursery Flywheel) - Part 2 Is it ridiculous to power a garden with small animals and piles of composting earth? We have been discussing in our last letter about a comprehensive nursery flywheel that builds the foundation for any garden endeavor, either as a hobby or as a self-reliant objective. That is possible because we are using design technology to build interconnected systems based on sustainable elements, which, together,...
3 months ago • 6 min read