Learn how to grow elderberries for food and medicine, right in your own backyard! Elderberries can be grown from cuttings, starts, or seeds. Growing elderberries is easy! Why Grow Your Own Elderberry Shrubs? Elderberries have become extremely popular in recent years due to their powerful immune boosting properties. Because of this popularity herbal shops and…
Permaculture
Learn about transforming your garden or homestead with permaculture design principles! Permaculture uses integrated systems to help you maximize the food growing potential in your backyard or farm.
We'll show you how permaculture works and many backyard permaculture projects, such as installing a DIY rain barrel or making herbal comfrey tea fertilizer, to get you started with your sustainable permaculture garden.
6 Easy Backyard Permaculture Projects for Beginners
Permaculture is a word that brings to mind beautiful and large swathes of property filled to the brim with fruit trees, perennial food forests, and natural water sources. While this is a dream that many of us have (myself included!), it can feel like a difficult reality on a small suburban lot. Surprisingly, it isn’t…
Comfrey Tea: Homemade Natural Fertilizer
My husband Joel has been making this awesome homemade natural fertilizer for our garden using comfrey, and its been working amazingly well! It’s super easy, too, especially if you have comfrey growing in your garden already. Basically, it’s a simple comfrey tea, or infusion to be exact. Joel wrote this post for us today to…
3 Ways to Extend Your Growing Season
Growing your own food is one of the most rewarding things that you can do, whether you have a large homestead on many acres or a small backyard lot. Either way, it is well worth the effort to have homegrown produce. It is helpful in many ways to be able to extend the season a…
How to Make Apple Cider with a DIY Press
Learn how to make apple cider from scratch with apples from your tree! Homemade apple cider with a DIY cider press is easier to make than you might think. Pressing Homegrown Apples When we moved into our new house, one of the most exciting things for us was the apple tree in the backyard. While…
Backyard Garden Update
Well, I figured it was about time for me to give you a backyard garden update! As you may or may not know, we moved into a brand new little homestead this past March, and have been feverishly working on the garden ever since. We don’t have a huge amount of space to work with,…
How to Build a Permaculture Swale Planting Bed
Hello my gardening friends! As I alluded to in my recent updates post, I have a really cool project to share with you today. If you’ve been reading my blog for a little while then you know that I’m big into permaculture, and my husband Joel is even more so than me. He has taken…
Tropical Permaculture
Hello! As you may have seen in my Updates and Recent Happenings: Costa Rica! post, Joel and I have recently returned from the wonderful Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica. Even though we were there on our honeymoon, we still couldn’t resist the urge to learn as much as possible about all of the awesome tropical…
How to Ditch Your Lawn and Grow Food
Grow Food Not Lawns! This is my new mantra. While lawns can be nice for playing soccer, rolling around on, or as a place for your dog to poop (don’t roll on it after that), all of those tasks can be done elsewhere. Beyond that, with the drought that we’re having out west, why would…
How to Make a Rain Barrel
Spring is coming! I know that this is when a lot of you out there get torrential downpours. April showers bring May flowers, right? When I was growing up in the Portland area I coined the term April showers bring May showers! It’s true, although thankfully here in Southern Oregon it’s not quite as dismal…