Learn how to grow more food while improving the health and sustainability of your homestead or land while saving time and energy.

Hey, you guys, this is Josh with Homesteading Family. And that might sound like a contradiction: to grow your own food while improving the health of your soil, your land, your environment, and doing it in less time with less energy.

Nature is exceedingly abundant. Nature wants to thrive. Have you ever noticed what happens when you leave the ground bare and uncovered? What happens? What's it do, right? Seeds sprout and start to grow. A little bit of water and everything starts to grow.

Even a desert, if you've ever been to a desert, when it rains, it comes alive. May not last very long 'cause it doesn't get rain for a long season but there are seeds there in the ground that are just waiting to come up and cover the ground, and grow, and turn into an ecologically active environment and your ground is the same. The fields that you see, your garden that you see, when you turn it up, when you till it, when you go to prep it, and before you can even get seeds up and going of your own garden seeds, the ground comes alive, it wants to cover itself, it wants to be productive.

And we have gotten into the habit as humans working on the land of not working with nature, not learning how to take nature's abundance and work with it to grow our food, but instead we've tried to dominate it, we've tried to use our technology and we're really working against it. And it is possible, you guys, is totally possible, to improve the health of your environment, your soil, grow more food in a smaller space, while doing it with less work over time as you learn how to put nature to work for you, as you learn how to let nature do her thing and cultivate natural processes in your homestead, in your own garden.

So today, I'm going to show you how to do that and the definition we have for that is permaculture. It's really, really exciting and this is gonna be a packed full 40 to 45 minutes here. So, get ready to just absorb a lot of information. I'm going to get as much in here as I can about what permaculture is and how you can apply it to your homestead, your home site, maybe you're on a suburban lot. It doesn't matter. If you've got some sunlight, if you got some water and a little bit of soil, you can grow something and you can fill up your space and let it become abundant. You just gotta learn how to work with nature, and permaculture teaches us how to do that.

All right, so what is permaculture? Permaculture is a way of working with rather than against nature. It seeks to understand the principles of our created order of the way nature is made and exists in functions, and to take those principles and apply them within our own systems, our own food systems, our own land management systems, to both benefit ourselves yet do that while benefiting nature as well and producing a surplus, simply being productive.

So again, it's a way to work with nature rather than against nature. We can actually improve the land, improve the health of the soil, improve the health of your plants, your pasture, even your forest. And over time, we can do that with less effort because we can actually put nature to work for us. When we work with the created order, it begins to thrive, and we can begin to thrive.

So come on inside with me for a few minutes, let's get in front of the chalkboard and we're gonna just give you some concrete ideas and principles so that you can begin to take this idea of working with nature instead of against it and understand how you can start to apply that to your homestead and your garden.

Okay, so we have determined that permaculture is a system that seeks to work with nature rather than against nature. So, how do we employ that? Before we can move on to what are actionable items that you can take on your homestead, in your garden, we've gotta establish a system of thinking and guidelines that helps guide our actions.

Permaculture has a set of ethics that guides us to ethically take care of our responsibilities, get into that with you here in just a second, and there's a set of design principles that helps us both design our landscape and help us make decisions as we go along and evaluate if what we're doing is working. So, let's take a few minutes and jump into those and then I'll get into how you can apply this, some concrete steps in how you can apply it to your homestead, and then specifically write down into your garden.

Now, I'm going to  cover a lot of information here pretty quickly. So, don't stress. You can get a download about this video with this description of permaculture, its ethics, its principles, and action items that you can take and apply to your situation right where you're at. So, make sure when the video is over to grab that and let's go ahead and dive in.

Permaculture ethics. Permaculture seeks to establish an ethical framework with which we look at how we care for the land, right? Which ultimately, we're trying to provide for ourselves to grow our own food. And so we've gotta have a better ethic and how to do that.

Generally, our primary purpose is people care, right? So we are concerned with people, we're obviously concerned for ourselves, our families, we should be concerned for the community, and humanity in general. So, ethic number one is putting people first, taking care of people.

Ethic number two is Earth stewardship. Taking care of the resources on the land that we have. We cannot fulfill properly this ethic without stewarding the land, without thinking about the consequences of our actions and if what we are doing and how we're acting is sustainable.

Ethic number three is a yield or surplus. Obviously, to care for people, we need to pull a surplus or a yield from the land, from the Earth. And so these three all work together, they are not separable. To care for people we have to steward the land properly. As we're stewarding the land properly, we get a yield which needs to be a surplus so that we can then take care of the people and the Earth. The yield feeds people. It helps us be healthy, it sustains us, it takes care of us.

But just getting a yield, just gardening, just taking care of your land, so that you get enough to put food on your own plate to fill up your freezers, it's not enough. We have to do more than that if we wanna be sustainable, if we wanna grow more food over the long-term and experience the abundance that nature has for us, then we have to create a surplus, we have to grow in a way and steward the land in a way that there is extra, there's more beyond just our needs and that is to fulfill both of these. So the yield takes care of your need, takes care of my household, okay? Feeds our family, feeds me, that's the yield.

The surplus gives us extra, like interest on a bank account, it gives us extra that we can put back to the Earth. Nature has no waste, it recycles everything. If we are pulling from the land, if we were pulling from our gardens and not returning to the land, then we are degrading the landscape. Also, we should be, if we are caring for people, growing a surplus for the community, maybe that is a market garden for sale, maybe that is growing extra to help those in need.

But our responsibility is more than just caring for ourselves and this is what is really cool, when we do it right, when we work with nature, and the way nature was created, there is plenty of yield and surplus to care for our immediate needs, ourselves and our families, to return to the Earth so that we continue to improve the soil, improve land, and create a sustainable situation and still should be enough surplus that there is extra that we can sell or give away to help others in our community.

Next there are a set of design principles. There are 12 permaculture design principles that help us take specific action, that help take this concept, this ethic, and start to apply it.

Permaculture design principle number one is to observe and interact. That is really just a fancy way of saying thoughtful action. Take time to observe your environment, take time to observe nature, take time to see what's happening around you and interact with your environment. Don't just till the ground, plant seeds, water, and wait for the yield. There's so much more going on. 

Design principle number two, we wanna catch and store energy. Water is energy storage. Your plants by photosynthesis are storing energy. Most of us are very aware of that, what we may not be aware of that those plants are assimilating nutrients and while they're getting nutrient and energy from the soil, they are also returning and building energy into the soil. And that is one of the major ways that we catch and store energies. That's what forests are doing, that's what prairie are doing.

So we wanna think abundantly, and this is really, really important that we don't leave bare ground exposed, it does no photosynthesis. Bare soil that's degraded does not have the ability to hold water so water runs off. The opposite of that is an abundant landscape that we keep the soil covered either with living crops or with mulches, that then takes the sun energy through photosynthesis, and collects that, plants grow, they return energy to the soil, the soil captures water and you start to develop a cycle of energy use. If we wanna do that sustainably, we have to catch and store more energy than we are taking from the system.

Permaculture design principle number three, obtain a yield and surplus so that we can put that back, like we said in our ethics, into the landscape. It's not possible to have a sustainable garden farm without a surplus. Look at your land like a bank account. It has so much energy stored in it, it has so much nutrient. You can take from that and you can draw down that account, but that account isn't accruing interest, and you're not putting back into it or you're not feeding it from somewhere, then you're gonna slowly draw down the account and that you're gonna keep taking that yield. But eventually, there will be nothing to take if there is not a surplus that we put back into the landscape that makes obtaining a yield essentially sustainable.

Permaculture design principle number four, self regulation or self control, we have to regulate our actions, we have to think about our actions as we are observing and interacting and how our actions have impact on the landscape and we have to regulate ourselves. Our tendency is to just want to get that yield, whatever it takes to get that yield this year, or this growing cycle. And so we have got to apply self-regulation, accept feedback from the system as we're observing, looking at what's happening, is what we're doing working and where do we need to pull back?

A classic example of that that we've experienced is animals on the pasture. We grow all of our own meat. And over the years as we've moved to a few different properties and learned how to manage livestock, it's a tendency of ourselves and most people that we observe to just get on the land, and put the animals out there that we think we need to obtain a harvest at the end of the season without enough thought, even when we know we might be taxing the land we're not giving enough thought to what are the ramifications and if this is a good idea to do, and maybe we need to hold back, we need to regulate ourselves and say, you know what? We just can't produce this much this year until we improve the pasture. We can do the same thing in the garden, you're gonna hear me talk a lot about planting densely, about growing a lot, covering the ground, but We have to build soil, we've gotta get some energy stored in the soil first otherwise we will overuse the soil, the garden plot, and we will deteriorate it. So we have to apply self-regulation.

Design principle number five, recycle everything. Okay, so when we think about what permaculture is, it seeks to work with nature not against nature, what does nature do? Nature does not produce any waste, it recycles everything.

In design, principle number six it's very similar, produce no waste. It almost seems redundant, but the design system really wants to emphasize that we recycle what we have, we produce as little waste as possible, and by waste that means things that have to go off site, that are not usable, that cannot be used somewhere else. Again, nature does not produce any waste, it reuses everything. So we want to reduce our waste.

Principle number seven, observe patterns to design details. Now, this sounds a little complex but really all it's encouraging us to do is observe patterns that are happening before we get into creating and designing our details. Oftentimes, we just jump right in, design things the way we want them, lay out our garden, put a road in, put the chicken coop here, all kinds of different steps we take without really observing different patterns in our landscape, maybe patterns in the way we move around the property, maybe the pattern of the sun and how that's gonna affect a certain area of the garden, or the chicken coop or the greenhouse. So again, we wanna make sure to take time to observe larger patterns that affect us and affect our land and then design details that fit into those patterns.

Alright, permaculture design principle number eight, stack functions. This is one of my favorites, it's one that's just really exciting to play with out on your farm or homestead. And that is how can we take multiple different components to help them benefit each other and get more benefit from the same action? We tend to separate things, the chickens have their place over here, the cows have their place, the gardens got its place, even in the garden the corn, the lettuce, the cucumbers, whatever we're growing, they're all in their individual places and they all have a role. Where do those roles benefit each other? And where can we stack what's happening? Where can we put elements together that benefit each other? So the same things are happening, but they're happening in a way together that creates more productivity.

Chickens are a classic example of this in permaculture. They don't just lay eggs and provide meat for us, they put down manure which can be used in compost, in the garden, to improve the fertility of our soils. They eat bugs. So, whether it's out in the pasture eating fly larva from the cow patties, whether it's in the garden at the right time to eat bugs in the garden, there's a lot of work that we can have them do while they're providing eggs and meat for us. That's an example of stacking functions.

Alright, principle number nine, use small slow systems. This just means to slow down, create systems that aren't moving so fast, that aren't so large, so that you can get control of things, you can observe, you can react and shape what's happening on your homestead.

All right, design principle number 10, value diversity. This can be one of the most fun and exciting principles to play with and it is where we really get a chance to mimic nature. Nature does not do mono crops, okay? It is our large industrial agricultural system that wants to separate everything out and put the corn over here, and the pumpkins over here, and the tomatoes over there, and the cows out there, and the chickens in this factory, and the pigs in another factory, and create mono systems with no diversity in them. That's not what nature does.

As we're trying to mimic nature and we look at nature, nature always has all kinds of different things going on, different types of plants, different types of trees, different types of animals, all mixed in together. Of course, we wanna do that in an organized way that meets our needs and improves the health of the soil but we've got to learn to value diversity.

Design principle 11, use edges. Now when we say edges, what we're talking about is the edges of two different kinds of landscape or environments that meet, a forest versus a grassland, the edge of your garden versus your lawn, where a building meets up against somewhere in your landscape. Fences are edges, anywhere where components come together and meet that is an opportunity for abundance in diversity. And in a just natural landscapes, say where the forest meets a meadow or a pasture, that is where the most diversity, the most activity, the most abundance is.

Design principle number 12, the last one, creatively spawned to change. In the natural environment, things are always changing, which is always gonna present a challenge to us. So, what this principle encourages us to do is instead of to fight it, to squash it, to control it, to get creative, to maybe observe the patterns, see what's changing, and learn how to again, work with it, work with the flow.

Wow, was that a lot of information or what? Now, don't stress about remembering all of that. I have included the ethics, the principles, in the PDF download so that you can refer back to it later. For now, let's just move on and get into some actionable steps that you can apply on your homestead and in your garden.

All right, water is one of our key resources, we gotta have water, right? And no matter where you're at, you get some water and maybe in some places you get too much water. But most places even they get a lot of water have a dry season, we need to learn how to control water and prevent it from doing damage. Erosion is a major problem. So we wanna learn to catch water and prevent erosion. Those are steps that you can take right now.

Look at your landscape, observe and think about what's happening with the water. We wanna learn to catch water, to slow it down as it moves through our property, let it sink in, hold it for as long as we can and then if we have to let it go by because of heavy, heavy rainfalls or just the amount you get in your area, then we wanna prevent erosion.

And so that's something to start to think about right away. What's happening with water on your homestead and what can you do to catch it, to hold So that it soaks in, and increases your own water table and doesn't create damage. So, a couple of examples of where that might be applicable.

Most of us have roads, some of you may have solid surfaces that are shedding a lot of water. What's happening to that water? Is it just running off your property down the road? Is it carrying away some of your soil and some of your resources? If it is, we wanna figure out how can you slow that down? How can you divert it? How can you run it off your driveway, off your road, but then slow it down so it doesn't cause erosion and it soaks into the landscape? That can be simply some hand dug ditches, as you will, that divert the water and slow it down and spread it out across an area.

Another area may be your garden. How does your garden handle rainfall? Does it shed the water and all start to run off and take some of your soil away with it? Not everybody has flat ground, even if you have flat ground, is your garden setup so that is catching as much water as possible? And then when you do receive an excess, it has a way to run off gently and instead of taking the fastest line off of your property, you move it and spread it about. And that can be done with simple handwork, sometimes it requires machinery, but we want to catch water and prevent erosion.

You want to cover your soil. If you have any bare dirt on your property, it's a problem and you are losing an opportunity to create abundance. If that soil is bare, that means it's washing away when it rains, and so we wanna get that soil covered. And there's a couple different ways to do that, two primary ways.

One is mulch, just carbonaceous organic material. And there's a lot of different ways to get that from straw which of course, you've gotta be very, very careful about, you do know a lot of straw has been sprayed with heavy pesticides so you absolutely have to know your source, but there is good material out there.

A great one for a lot of people is the tree companies that go and trim the trees in the city and chip it. It's all ready to go. Often, they're looking for a place to dump, or they will come and dump arborists, a lot of arborist have to get rid of their chippings and that is an excellent excellent way to cover your soil and slow down erosion, help water absorption, eventually that mulch starts to decay and break it down and you're gonna start to build fertility and then you can plant a cover crop which is the next strategy which can be used either with mulch or can be used on its own and that is another way to plant.

There are different plants, different strategies, of cover cropping that just begin to cover the ground. They're just like your weeds, your weeds wanna come up, right? When you have bare soil, usually something wants to come up as soon as there's some moisture, it's often something we don't want. You can take those weeds, let them grow, chop them down, before they go to seed that is better than bare soil.

Don't spray them, don't kill them, let them grow up just to the point of seeding so that you get a lot of biomass and cut 'em down, mow 'em, leave 'em down, that is better than nothing. And you're slowing them down but you're using them to their maximum benefit, then you can come in and mulch, or you can get a cover crop seed mix that's appropriate for your conditions and it will sprout in your conditions and begin to cover the soil. That starts to slow down erosion, it starts to catch water, just doing this, it starts to create biological activity in your soil and there's just no need for wasted space.

You may see that and go, "Oh, there's nothing to do with that ground. "It's a waste, it doesn't matter." No, there's always opportunity, have an abundant mindset and realize that there is always opportunity and get that soil covered now, and then what can you do there? You can think about what can you do in that place, maybe it's just the side of a road, maybe it's off behind a building somewhere, what would do well in that environment that doesn't have to be maintained and that's gonna provide something for you? However you go about it start to think about covering your soil.

All right, action number two is to start to plant diversity, to start to plant an abundance of different sizes and types of vegetation. Now, if we step back for a second and you realize the action items by starting to catch water, by covering the soil, doing those two things, you're starting to create a process of life, of decomposition, of building soil, and you're setting the stage to be able to grow more. Capturing water, covering the soil, improving that, taking your dirt and turning it into soil, into something biologically active that can grow plants.

And now you wanna plant diversity. You don't wanna just go out and put a lawn in there, okay? And even a cover crop is just a start. Start to think about planting across heights and a variety of different plants. In permaculture, we have what are called food forests and guilds and they start to put different elements together.

We don't wanna just plant an orchard, we wanna plant trees, we may wanna plant some large overstory trees that shade some fruit trees. Then underneath those, you could put berry bushes, underneath those you could put some vines, or trellising elements, or smaller bushes. There's a whole world out there, and we can't go into that right here but I wanna encourage you to start planting diversely and getting more onto your property.

If all you can do is go out and buy a tree in a berry bush, find a spot for 'em. If you've got an area that you've cover crop, don't just put it to lawn, put it to some ground cover, put some fruit berries in there, do something that creates productivity and starts to build over these and you're starting to create a loop as you are catching more water, as you are building your soil, covering it and then building soil, you can then start to plant and have fun experiment.

Don't be afraid of failure. Think about all the different things that you can plant. As you do that not only do you start to have a yield that we were talking about, but you're gonna have a natural surplus that is gonna give back, that it gonna give you material to put back onto your soil that in turn is gonna help catch water, that in turn is gonna create a biologically active system that helps you to grow more and you are starting to put nature to work for you, that gets really, really exciting.

Okay, one more action item that you can start to think about doing right now on top of the other three, is to stack functions. And you're already kind of doing that and building that system I was just talking about, but how can you add other elements of what's going on in your property, or your homestead, to work together?

And I'm going to use the chicken example here again, maybe you've got some chickens, maybe you've got some areas that need to be rehabilitated, that you wanna take those ideas that I was just showing you and put to work but you're goin', "Man, that's really degraded. I don't think anything is gonna grow there," or "it's just so so weedy that how do I get control of it?" 

Well, one way of stacking functions, is either get some chickens, or if you have some that are producing eggs for you, or that you're raising for meat, you can put them in that area, you can fence them, temporary fencing for a short amount of time and use them to put down manure and to break down if there's vegetation there that you don't want, that you need to clear out of the way, they will clear that out, they will completely break it down and you're helping to feed the chickens. That's just one small example.

Another example using chickens in a larger context is allowing the chickens to go through where the cows are and breaking up the cow patties and manure, they will actually spread it out. So instead of a pile like this, they put it into an area like this. They'll eat the fly larvae. And so they are helping to, not only put their own manure down, spread manure and reduce bugs, the list goes on and on.

You can do this with plants. We'll talk about it in the garden again a little bit, but how can you use shade trees maybe? Growing up some fruit trees to provide cover for your chickens, your ducks, your geese, your rabbits, instead of having them just in a building all the time. There is an unlimited ability to start to integrate and put systems together that go to work for you, where you have to do less to take care of them and they provide even more.

All right, let's talk about permaculture in your garden. All the things that I talked about previously are completely applicable, some of that you can translate to the garden but maybe you don't have that piece of ground, maybe you are just trying to focus on a garden right now and you need some concrete steps and things that you can start to think about to develop a permaculture garden where again, you're gonna grow more food in a sustainable fashion, and learn to do that with less effort over time and you can completely apply this to your garden.

I hope that you guys will take this and apply it and look at your whole home site or your whole homestead, and think about integrating these ideas in these principles overall, but that can be a big leap, you've got a foundation for it, and there's things you can do right here, and this is a great place to begin right now in your garden where maybe that feels a little more attainable, you're gonna maybe feel like you're gonna see some faster results and you can also experiment there and get a hold of these ideas while creating abundance and providing food for your family in a consistent and sustainable manner.

So, what can you do in the garden right now to start applying permaculture and creating abundance? Well, one of the first things you can do is actually to stop taking action. Reduce or no till. We need to move away from tilling the soil. Our modern concept is that is productive and in the very short-term, yes, it loosens the soil, it aerates it, and it helps it to catch and hold water. And that's great. So that has an immediate benefit.

However, it has long-term consequences. Tillage breaks up the natural layers of soil and therefore breaks up and slows down and eventually destroys the soil biology that is so essential to sustainably growing healthy nutrient-dense food.

And there are times where tilling is appropriate, you may have very compact soil and you may have sod that you wanna turn into a garden plot. There's a variety of reasons why you might till. You don't have to, there's ways to solve those problems without ever tilling but they are slow and they do take time, and there is a better way if you can do it no tilling, but at least we wanna reduce, we certainly wanna get away from turning the soil over every year and damaging our soil fertility, the biology in the soil. And actually while you're reducing compaction up on the top layers, you're actually creating a layer of compaction where that tiller goes across the ground if you're doing that every single year.

So, you can stop tilling and here's one of the great benefits of this, you're gonna immediately begin to reduce your weed population. Every time you turn over the ground, you are bringing seeds up to the surface and causing them to germinate. As you stop tilling and you start taking some of the other actions we're gonna talk about, you will drastically begin to reduce your weed population and the things growing up that you're always fighting with in your garden and competing with, you're gonna reduce that just by the fact that that surface level is gonna sprout, you're gonna pull them, control them, whatever you do and those other seeds are gonna stay down below the soil where they don't get warmed up and signaled to activate.

Okay, so step number two is to prevent erosion. If you're gonna go to a no till system, you are gonna start to create permanent beds. And while some of you may have flat land, maybe you don't have an erosion problem, you're gonna pick one of the methods that I was talking about and this doesn't really affect you too much. You've got good saturation, that's great.

But a lot of us have problems with erosion either at certain times a year, if you've got really hard soil around you may not take a lot of rain. And like we were talking about on the homestead we wanna learn to catch water, but we also wanna prevent erosion and so you're starting to think about permanence by reducing and not tilling. And so you wanna look at creating a system that will catch water and not erode away.

And if you're on any kind of slope, what this often means is creating permanent garden beds on contour that follow the contour of the land, and don't run water off. And if you have excessive rain, they have a way to release the water in a controlled manner and spread it out across your landscape. So, look for ways to prevent erosion as you create permanent garden beds that are not dependent on tilling.

Okay, next you wanna work to cover your soil at all times. And if we're going to no till system, we're starting to achieve that. But in an annual garden, no matter what you're gonna have sections and areas that you're gonna have to have the soil exposed to plant a crop that is gonna get up and be productive for you.

But we wanna minimize the time that soil is exposed. So, we can do this in several ways. We can use mulch that keeps the soil covered and mimics what nature does in a forest or in a prairie where it's always laying down organic matter and keeping the soil covered. So, that's one method.

You can do cover crops or what's called green manure if you wanna research those, and that is planting of valuable, quick growing, densely planted crop that is not made for you to consume generally though in some cases you can, particularly with something like peas, but you're gonna grow that in an area that maybe you're not gonna plant to later in the season, or maybe you harvest early and they're still growing period. So instead of leaving that bare, you can grow a cover crop that will build organic material, maybe even fix some nitrogen and improve your soil.

Lastly, in areas where you've got to leave the soil exposed for your plants to get up, I know one for me as we grow succession beds with a lot of lettuces to provide us with fresh eating for as long in the season as we can, and I have to leave some of that soil exposed for a period. So, what I do is either keep some of the areas I'm not using under landscape cloth or tarp that keeps the weeds down and holds moisture, or more importantly, I plant very densely.

And so I'm gonna plant, actually I do that with everything in the garden. I try to plant very densely so that as things come up, they're covering the soil as quickly as possible. I can always go back and thin a little bit. And I've usually set it up so that what I'm thinning is providing a yield.

So yes, there's a little bit of work there, but it's providing a yield and often even a surplus that I can then put back into the garden or I can share with somebody else. So, make sure and learn how to keep your soil covered as often as possible, just the way nature does, and you are going to build just a wonderful soil biology as you are not disturbing the natural process, as you were starting to capture water, as you're keeping your soil covered one way or the other.

Okay, another strategy that you can start to employ right now is companion planting. Learn about companion planting. Nature does not do mono crops, it doesn't do rows of variety, it doesn't do very large patches of one species. It is very diverse, it mixes it up. This is healthy above ground as these plants often play off of each other or have neutral relationships, they may benefit each other by shading, by different nutrient exchanges, by the pollinators or the birds they bring in. They also benefit each other under the soil. The more diversity of root structure you have, the more diversity of the biological life in the soil which is gonna create a healthier soil and in return more abundance.

So, learn about companion planting and things you can do. One of the well known ones is just three sisters, which is corn, squash and beans. They all benefit each other. The corn grows up, creates a physical structure for the beans to grow on, the beans return nitrogen to soil, the squash spreads out broad and shades the soil and covers it and kind of does that soil covering while the other two are growing up right, and the squash also gets some shade from the other ones as those large leaves contend to wilt in the heat. So, that's just one example. You can do beans, cabbage, broccoli, banco brassicas can go in there with your beans, even with your corn.

If you saw earlier in the video, I was sitting in a bean tunnel where the beans are starting to fill over. That's all cabbage and broccoli down below. They work well together. The beans will shade, the cabbage and broccoli, they don't like the high summer heat. There's a whole world out there and they don't have to necessarily get along as long as they're neutral or have benefits and you gotta just read and study about this. There is a large variety.

I'm always experimenting and learning but start to move away from rows of corn, rows of tomatoes, start to look at, if you're gonna garden in rows, how much can I plant? I wanna get at least three different species in a row if I can and mix them all up and start to create a diversity in the garden that mimics perennial systems, hopefully that you're gonna start developing on your home site or homestead, and mimics nature and nature systems. That's where things start working on their own. That's where abundance starts to develop, and where your systems are gonna provide more for you with less work.

Another strategy that you can play with in your garden pretty much right away, though you do wanna make sure you are developing your soil and getting some healthy soil but that is to start planting with density. We can actually plant a diversity much more densely and it thrives, creates less work, and it begins to thrive as plants play off of each other, as that creates more shade, that creates more photosynthesis. That then in turn charges the soil biology, there is a larger carbon exchange in the soil that feeds life in the soil, which in turn feeds the plants.

And this is where we get that abundance that I was talking about with less work as we are using natural systems, and even accelerating in a controlled environment to create high productivity. I would tell you to experiment with it in small spaces and then grow from it, but nature wants to just fill up the space. As you move through these things, this is one to play with that is a lot of fun, and it's just kind of a kick to see how much can I get in a small space?

And my corn and pumpkin patch is my favorite and I'm getting a ton of corn, a ton of pumpkins, big giant sunflower heads, amaranth seeds out of it. Occasionally, because of crop rotation, I've ended up with plots where I'm actually pulling tomatoes out of there even though I didn't plant them there and tomatillo's all from one spot. And it gets really, really fun and exciting as you build skills and you start to employ these natural processes in your garden and see what you can accomplish and what kind of abundance you can nourish.

And lastly, include in your strategy to encourage beneficial's and by beneficial's, I mean things that you may or may not consume, but that bring diversity to your garden to encourage other species, particularly predatory bugs that prey on pests that you might have a problem with.

Did you know that wasps will come in and eat a lot of little bugs, beetles, grasshoppers, they'll control some of that for you, and some of them are pollinators. And that's just one example of things that, you might see wasps as a problem, they actually have a role in nature and when we start to understand that, same with birds, some birds can be a pest to your garden, but birds will also control a lot of your bugs.

That's why I like some flowers in there 'cause that brings the birds in and gets them going around. You want some flowers that help with pollination. If you don't have a lot of that around you, if you don't have a lot of bees, and a lot of pollinators, plant things in the middle of your garden along with around your garden that bring in those pollinators, that brings in those beneficial bugs that are gonna help keep your pest populations under control.

Well, hey, you guys, that just about wraps it up. I hope you have enjoyed this crash course on permaculture. This should give you a good foundation, a good understanding of what permaculture is, and some action items that you can go out and apply on your property right now.

Just remember permaculture is just working with nature, it's just seeking to understand nature and mimic it, work with it instead of against it and when we start to take these steps, we will find how productive nature will be for us.

So, a few key things that I want you to take away: remember to catch and harvest water, learn about water harvesting, how to catch it, hold it on your land, slow it down as it moves across your land and prevent erosion.

Remember to always cover your soil. One way or the other, whether it's through mulches, whether it's through cover crops, whether it's through planting diversely and densely, keep the soil covered as much as possible.

And lastly, have a lot of fun with it, experiment. You can't harm anything, you can't destroy anything if you are encouraging nature and you are experimenting and playing with the way the natural world works, the way it was created, and learning how you can mimic those systems to create more abundance in your garden, and get to the point where you really can produce more food in a sustainable manner while creating less work for yourself over time as you allow natural systems to do the work for you.

So get out there, have some fun, and start to grow and live more abundantly. I'll see you soon. Goodbye.