(Transcript from Video)

Courtney Brooke: Well, we’re not at Earthaven, but you know I’m still on planet earth and just seeing this.

I’m on the side of the highway in north Georgia. I’m like driving by and I’m like:  Wow! look at those trees blooming. Then I realized that it’s a tiny little agroforestry situation. There’s all these cows underneath the trees eating the grass. Hello baby cow.

I just wanted to stop and admire it because it’s such a place where we have room for improvement.

There’s a huge field that this is attached to and only a few of these trees.  I think they look like apple or pear trees. Yay for agroforestry!

I mean, you know, I’m not saying this is the most shiny example. But I am just saying “ Yay, agroforestry!”

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Transcript from video:

Courtney Brooke: Good morning. I wanted to show you something really exciting in my garden.

This is my artichoke patch. I got several artichokes here some different kinds that I’m experimenting with.

I planted them just last year so they’re about a year old. I love growing artichokes. They make these…. their flower is edible. They make that big flower but if you let that thing go to seed it’s this huge purple, bright purple,  like almost the color of my pants, lavendery beautiful thing that the insects just really love.

I’ve also been planting the cousin of the artichoke the cardoon, which is less well known for eating the flower buds but more well known for eating the leaves and the stems. So they make a really yummy spring green and I’m excited to be growing these ones. They’ve over wintered here. We did cover them once with a cloth when it got to really cold temperature not quite sure what would have happened if we didn’t, they might have still survived. They’re really hardy and grow really easily.

After they have grown for about a year ..you can see right here…. So you can see this see this is the mama plant here and then it’s made this little baby plant here.  It makes a side shoot so they just keep on making more and more of themselves.  You can propagate them vegetatively or just let them grow into a patch. They don’t need really high quality soil they can grow in pretty marginal areas and on the edges of things. Then you know in some harder less nutrient dense soil.

So yay for artichokes! It’s one of my favorite perennial landscape plants

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Transcript from video:

Courtney Brooke: Good morning, it’s Courtney Brooke here. I wanted to show you another exciting plant in our landscape which is called an Alder. It’s a tree; it’s these trees here. This is a baby one. It was planted about …maybe two years ago. Here’s one that was planted three years ago; it’s the taller bigger tree there.

What’s going on here is that we have an existing muscadine arbor.  Just here… behind me is an existing muscadine arbor, which is made out of logs to hold it up and then it grows muscadines which are a wild grape. They make a lot of food; they’re just really delicious. They’re native to this region.

The scheme here is that we are growing these alders. At the base of each one of these, each one of these trunks, each one of these, what would you call it,…whatever the thing that’s holding up the arbor is. An alder that we planted to replace the pole, the post when the alder gets bigger.

Alnoculture

Nitrogen Fixing Living Trellis

The alder is a really cool plant. It’s actually fixing nitrogen. It’s a nitrogen fixing tree that’s non-leguminous. So, it’s not a legume. It doesn’t make a bean pod. Alder fixes nitrogen with its roots so it improves the soil. It helps to put nitrogen, which is part of what the plants need to grow and be well, into the soil.  Then you can see here this alder here and there’s a grape here. So this grape will be trellised up the alder when the alder is a little bit bigger.

This is not something that we came up with on our own. There’s a whole beautiful way of growing grapes that’s called Alnoculture because the latin name of this of this older tree is called Alnus. There’s this whole thing from up in Europe where people grow a lot of grapes for a really long time called alnoculture. They use these plants to trellis, as living trellises. So we’re not gonna cut the tree down. We’re just gonna let it be living and it’s gonna be a living post.

Pollarding and Propagating

Then you coppice it, you know when you pollard it. We don’t want the alder to get really big. We want to cut it and let it stay as a trellis. When you cut it releases nitrogen into the soil so this is an old thing. Tried and true. Especially out in Italy there’s all these old vineyards where they are practicing alnoculture.

Then another thing about the alder is that you can do something that’s called stooling. So when… let’s see if I can find an example… if you pack dirt around the bottom of the tree then it will make another baby tree. So you can see here that that is what has been done we just mounted the soil around the original tree here. It has made a whole bunch of other little babies. Then we can cut those off and have vegetatively propagated older trees to be feeding our grapes… yay!

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(Transcript from video)

Courtney Brooke: Hi there. Well, I’m gonna share a really exciting thing that’s happening right now in our yard. So, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of wild ramps, but they’re an Allium, in the onion clan. They grow in the wild mountains around here. You can go wild harvest them; they are a food.

Planting Ramps at Home

Some people plant them in their garden also.  We’ve planted some here, and they’re an ephemeral.
So that means that they come out in the early spring before the trees have leaves on them, and they soak up the sunlight, and then they to put that energy into their roots to come back again next year.

We have planted some here in this little patch of forest that we have in our land which is small. There’s probably, like, 15 trees in here. It’s a tiny little forest and it still spring.  The trees, as you can see, don’t have any leaves on them yet, barely at all. And I was just walking by and I noticed that the ramps are popping up.

That’s them there. That’s them, that’s them. We planted these here.

Delicious Little Indicators

We have a few; enough to have a little celebratory snack on them. But we know that when they come up here that they’re starting to come up in the wild mountains around, and we can go wild forage and harvest some and usually just go once a year. And then we freeze them into ice cubes and just take a few and leave the most of them and just have them as a wild food in our lives.

We’ve planted these here as little indicators to let us know when it’s time, because, you know, if we drove all the way to the wild mountain places like an hour drive and then two hour walk and all that…

So, we have these here to let us know. So, we don’t go too early and we don’t go too late.

Exciting!  Ramps!

You can get them. You can buy bulbs from different plant vendors; they sell trays of ramps, and you can plant them out in your yard.

Enjoy Now and Throughout the Year

They are really delicious. You eat the leaves and you can also eat the bulb. The bulb is really small. We mostly just eat the leaves and we blend it up with olive oil and then put it into ice Cube trays so that we can just pop the ice cubes. We put them in a bag, and we can just use one ice Cube whenever we need to put it in some special pesto or put it in some pasta or whatever like that.

So celebrate the ramps.

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Transcript from Video:

Courtney Brooke: Good morning, Zev.

Zev:  Good morning.

Courtney Brooke: What are you doing?

Zev: I am grating this incredible black turmeric grown by Leon with his mad, passionate devotion to beautiful food and medicine plants at Full Circle Far next to Earthaven Ecovillage.

Courtney Brooke: Look at that color of the grated root.

Zev:  This is after Courtney Brooke dug it up with Leon, harvested it. Then I had this vision that doing a steam inhalation with it would heal my nasal passages. So I’m working on that and I’m gonna tincture some and make an elixir with some, like Rachel taught us to do. Really excited about this plant.

Courtney Brooke: This plant was dug maybe like a few days ago. On Thursday? Like last week. Just from our neighbor.
I have a motto that I live by that I eat purple things every chance I get because you are what you eat.

Zev: And she wants to be purple.

Courtney Brooke: Yeah.

Zev: Wow.

Courtney Brooke: The smell is intoxicating. It’s not like regular Turmeric, is it?

Zev: No!

Courtney Brooke: The smell is like, what is that? Some people say it’s kind of like….cardamon?

Zev: Camphor? But I don’t know. What do you think, Mom?

Courtney Brooke: What’s Camphor?

Jodi: Hmmm. Camphor usually drives me crazy when people have it in their cedar closets. I would like, oh my gosh.  I just accidentally broke open this little Orange one.

Courtney Brooke: Let’s see it.

Jodi: Or maybe this is called yellow.

Courtney Brooke: Wow!!

Zev: Yeah, that’s the one that we call carrot turmeric…

Courtney Brooke: Because we just eat it.  It’s so crunchy and sweet and mild. That’s also from just next door at Full Circle Farm. They’ve got that turmeric,  the normal turmeric. They’ve also got what they call a red turmeric. And then they grow this also black turmeric.

Zev: Which is actually purple

Courtney Brooke: Which is actually purple. Blessed are we. There’s a saying,….all these, come from the place we call India….And there’s a saying there that says, if you have the black turmeric in your home, you’ll have good fortune and abundance of finances.

Zev: Finances.

Courtney Brooke:  So maybe…

Wealthy are we.

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(Transcript from video)

Courtney Brooke:  Hi there. Coming to you from the sauna at Earthaven EcoVillage. And the Sauna is right by the swimming hole, which is in the creek. The thing about that is that the Creek, when it floods, erodes away the bank. Then if it erodes away too much more than it will start to impact the sauna.

So we’ve been trying to come up with the plan to save the sauna and prevent some erosion from happening. We had a water expert come out, and he showed us how to put these big cement blocks in.

And so now the big cement blocks are getting placed.

So check it out…

We got Paul driving the excavator and Brandon helping out here.

The way that the blocks are placed, so that when the water comes, the water’s flowing this way. When the water comes in a big event, the sediment gets trapped behind that block, and then the water can keep going. So, it actually builds the bank.

It’s like a water bar, but it’s a sediment bar.

Ok, here it goes. Swinging it (the camera) around.

So that the part that’s in the Creek is facing upstream, at an angle….And they’re just lowering it down.

Brandon: Up again.

Paul: I think that’s sticking out too far.

Brandon: Ok. Wait a second.

Courtney Brooke: Alright. And so there’s going to be several more of these that are going along the bank here. Where we see that the erosion happens here.

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Courtney Brooke: Hey Andy!

Andy: Hey!

Courtney Brooke: What are you doing?

Andy: Well I’m moving the chickens to a fresh spot.

Courtney Brooke: Oh; good morning chickens! Well, that’s quite a lot of chickens. How many chickens is that?

Andy: Well, we started with a little over a hundred we’ve lost a handful of them so we’re probably around 96.

Courtney Brooke: Wow; fancy chicken house!

Design

Andy: Yeah, this came from a design from Rrobert Plummenden. He’s got a book on chicken shelters and raising pastured poultry.

I did some modifications to it, but the frame is a pretty basic wooden box. It’s a 8×8 wooden square with two cattle panels that you can get from tractor supply -or somewhere like that; bent over a hoop. This one’s maybe a little easier to see…bent over in a hoop and stapled to the side. Then we also took another cattle panel and cut it in half. So, three cattle panels makes this whole chicken shelter closable.

Then four or five 2 x4’s to make the frame. Next, you round the angle braces and all that. Then, the moving part of it, and this is a recent modification, we’ve got some wheels on the end of some metal pieces that then hook on. So it picks it up off the ground now. Leverages it so that then you’re able to lower it once you get it into place. The chickens, theoretically, can’t get out. This was in an uneven spot.

Moving the Coops

Courtney Brooke: So, then one person can move this ?

Andy: Yes, one person mostly can move it. If you have to go uphill (we usually like to start them like that)  get everybody on board to move them uphill. Then, pull them down. But mostly one person can do it.

Courtney Brooke: Wow…

Andy: First, we got to get the feeders and the water. It’s a little bit different than the Joel Salatin style pens. The main thing that I like better about it is that his pens are like ….they stop here.

Courtney Brooke: Right.

Andy: They’re low pens and this one I can get in and out, especially when the chickens get bigger. We actually won’t close it up at night once they get bigger. When they get bigger and we pen them in there before slaughter it’s it just feels better than having them all penned into a low shelter. They got more space in there.

Courtney Brooke: Good morning chickens

Andy: Slowly pull it because there’s always one or two that like to peck at the wheel and see what’s going on. Not quite yet with the program. I haven’t electrified the netting yet either so they’re all getting out.

Courtney Brooke:  So how often do you move it?

Andy: When they’re this small ideally we move it once a day. Once a day or else you get manure build up in one area. We’re trying to spread the manure across the entire field.

<Dog barking>

Courtney Brooke: That’s how you protect the chickens…with the dog.

Andy: All right so then we lower it and the wheels. Old lawn mower wheels really work the best and then you got to be a little crafty to figure out some piece of metal..something that’s laying around the farm. This one I call the ultra light… it’s not necessarily designed to keep them in. It’s more designed for shade and keeping feed dry. So that one is really easy to move.

Raising Broiler Chickens since 2006

Courtney Brooke:  How long have you been farming chickens?

Andy: I’ve been farming chickens…hmm…I actually did our first batch in this field in one of these shelters 15 years ag. I’ve been raising broiler chickens as few as 50 a year, as many as 150 a year, since 2006. I went to a workshop down the road on raising pastured poultry. I picked up this book that had a design in it. Then, I ran with it ….

Courtney Brooke:   All right, thanks for showing it to us!

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(Transcript) Courtney Brooke: One of the things I most love about living at Earthhaven is my commute to work a lot of times is you know a five-minute walk or a three minute walk.

Today it happens to be a three-minute walk in the rain.

Which is so nice and one of the other things that I love so much about having a land-based life is that I just get in the rain.

You know, I mean I can obviously go in if I’m getting too wet, but I just love getting a little bit of rain on me. When I lived like mostly indoors life then I kind of just like oh it’s raining I don’t go outside but here I’m kind of like well I’ll just walk in the rain a little bit or I’ll just work in the rain a little bit or you know just need to go borrow something from my neighbor and I’ll just go, you know it’s raining and it’s fine ….

So I’m celebrating that. Celebrating the walk in the rain and the sweet commute and the final thing I’m going to celebrate are these flowers…

Pretty sure these are goumi bush …they make these little tart red things and some people ferment them into like fermented ketchup.

Anyway, grateful for the rain, and the commute, and the berries.

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Transcription of The Spring Greenhouse at Earthaven Ecovillage: Our Hope for the Summer

Courtney Brooke:

Here we are in the greenhouse at Full Circle Farm at Earthaven Ecovillage in the early spring. Here it’s raining, it’s kind of cold outside and here is what we’ve got growing…..
We’ve got all this broccoli and celery that’s been growing here all winter….

And here we have all the hopefulness for the season… all the baby plants reaching their roots down and starting to come out of their shells longing to go in the earth

We’ve got beans and what else do we have here who else…

We’ve got some kind of cucurbit some kind of melon, tomatoes over here

We’ve got onions started from seed, broccoli, some cabbage and cauliflower here…
Some more brassicas all the way down that’s basically all brassicas there and then down here…we have… what’s this more brassicas

Got some more cauliflower here and some chard there and lettuce, celery peppers more onions more lettuce, more celery more peppers….

Yeah there’s a lot going on in here some that’s mysterious…it looks like some potatoes there and seed trees curious what’s going on there…

That’s what we’ve got going on in here some more chard, more kale, kohlrabi

Stay tuned to see how the greenhouse evolves over the seasons!

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