Transcript from video:

Courtney Brooke: Hey Uncle Zev. What are you doing?

Zev: Oh, hey! I’m  emptying out this liquid duck gold.

Courtney Brooke: Duck gold?

Zev: Yes.

Courtney Brooke: What does that mean?

Zev: An unspoken treasure. This is our duck water from the sweet ducks. The ancona ducks have been swimming in here the last week About once a week we empty this out and spread this water around to different plants that need it, with its beautiful phosphorus and all the nitrogen and nutrients in there and the duck oils which make this cool rainbow colored oily skim on the top and feed all the plants with it. It’s one of the amazing yields of the ducks. Along with the eggs, and their manure, and their beauty and companionship, and bug eating, we get fertigation water. So that’s what I’m doing. Fertigation…. fertilize your irrigation. It’s like saying wave irrigating in ways that are also fertilizing the plants because of everything i just said.

Courtney Brooke: So do you recommend having ducks?

Zev: Definitely yeah

Courtney Brooke: Who do you recommend having ducks? Why? who should have ducks?

Zev: Well probably people who have a few other companions, a few other crew to do it with. Once I had ducks by myself, when I lived in someone’s backyard in a salvaged metal and earthen building I built. That meant that if I ever went away for the night or was just really tired or something then it was always like “oh god, I gotta go deal with the ducks” or get someone to duck sit the ducks. But if you got a few compadres and comadres then somebody can take care of them when somebody else goes.

So, people who have a little crew, and who have a little diversified landscape. Especially where you can rotate them through different areas. Different paddocks, kind of mini paddocks and rotate them through the garden at the right time when they’re not going to trample teensy plants. Rotate them through the forest garden and around the mushroom logs when the mushrooms are coming out so that they eat the slugs before they damage the mushrooms and around the house to eat the termites. So a diversified landscape, home scale is one of the ways ducks fit really good.

Also, people in traditional Asian cultures use them in big large scale rice paddies. So they’re all manner of things. The trick is, that we didn’t do here yet, is to have the water they swim and be high in the landscape so you can use gravity to get fertigation water to other points. So, this is currently down here for convenience and that’s a little inconvenient.

Courtney Brooke: Hey ducks!

Zev: There’s six of them but there’s only five here because one of them’s in there right now sitting on eggs breeding. They’re hopefully going to hatch out into a new round little ducklings.

The post Fertigation at Earthaven Ecovillage appeared first on Earthaven Ecovillage.

Hi all! This is Dr Monique Mazza from our home in Earthaven Ecovillage and I’m inviting you today to talk about our raised beds. These are  three or four raised beds that we have here.

Why do we have raised beds instead of planting right in the ground?

Well there’s several benefits. For the main reason, for us here in this setting, is because there are a lot of vole creatures. Voles and moles who like to burrow underneath. They’ll take the plant roots out so destroying the growth. So by creating a raised bed we have a secure environment these raised beds are lined with hardware cloth underneath at the bottom. So it’s an impermeable layer it allows drainage. It’s not plastic; it allows drainage of fluids and passage of roots but creatures can’t get up from it. So we’ve created little greenhouses here over the winter. This thick plastic has been been covering these collards that have been lovely and vibrant. Then we have a really nice crop of chickweed which is a highly mineral dense plant that’s great to eat as a spring tonic.

Raised beds hold a lot of moisture. So it’s a really great way to grow if you’re not into watering so much. The compactness of the soil holds a lot of moisture we have a drip system in place  on this bed that I’ll show you.

This is a bed where we’re demonstrating the use of shade cloth and usually we’ll put lettuces or something in here that likes to be a little cooler; spinach and lettuce in particular. This is kind of a cinching system that works that just kind of brings it up when you’re ready to harvest or plant. There’s a series of ropes here that just holds it up.

We have our three layers of three layers of drip tape here. You can see there’s a main line that comes in the bottom and then each bed is fed with a pipe off of a stand pipe further away. We could turn each bed on or off individually. That then leads into three little drip tapes that go down the entire bed so it is a slow way to irrigate with more penetration down into the soil. It keeps it more evenly irrigated.

This last bed we’ve had this great cover crop of clover growing all year. We like to keep them green and growing with something so that the earth is never bare. That keeps all of the healthy soil organisms alive all year. So, either cover crop or in this case we’ve just used chopped leaves to keep the beds warm.

Another benefit of having raised beds is if you’re in an environment that has had bad soil below, say clay soil, or a lot of rocky soil, or even an area where they may not have been using organic practices and you’re concerned about that, putting up a raised bed is pretty simple. So you can create your environment of brand new soil fill with your organic amendments your compost or healthy soil. Then you’re starting on top and you’re likely only growing vegetables that are going to create root system in the top six inches, eight inches, 12 inches max. Usually a raised bed is about 12 inches from the ground and the roots are only going to be exposed to the soil that you choose to put in there.  So it’s a great way to just start from scratch if the ground below is questionable.

Another benefit – it’s an opportunity to use materials that may be lying around. Most of this is just scrap wood that we found – pieces of sheet metal. If you look on the inside you can see this is old roofing material on one side and old sheet metal on the other side and it looks great. It’s really durable it allows the soil and water to be held in place so that’s one of the reasons why they’re so likely to retain moisture.

And, as you get older, it’s sort of easier to garden. You sit here; it’s a nice place to sit- and do your weeding. It gives you a little bit of a built-in bench.

So many benefits of raised beds. You can paint them the color you want. I hope that you all are inspired and make your own! Thanks for joining us!

The post Dr. Monique Mazza’s Raised Beds at Earthaven Ecovillage appeared first on Earthaven Ecovillage.

This is the second year of operation for “Yellowroot Farm,” the half-acre Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm we operate at Earthaven. This year we have 20 shares, five more than last year. We plan to grow food for the Hut Hamlet Kitchen and its 15 or so members as well. Our new name, “Yellowroot,” reflects a part of our sacred landscape at Earthaven. We love the yellowroot plant, which grows abundantly along Taylor Creek (less than 100 yards from our farm), because of the plant’s beauty and medicinal value.

Over the winter we built a large, 14 x 30 ft. greenhouse, designed around our great find of 8 large recycled 4 x 7 ft. windows. The greenhouse, financed by the two of us, was built by Mihaly, Robert, and Andy, with the site cleared by Cailen, and the lumber felled and milled on the land.

Starting plants in flats in the greenhouse has allowed us to get an earlier start with many more plants this year. Last year folks received kale, collards, lettuce, chard, dandelion greens, potatoes, tomatoes, summer squash,okra, beets, carrots, onions, garlic, peppers, turnips, and beans. This year the season will go into the fall and shares will include sweet potatoes, several varieties of winter squash and pumpkins, corn and some of our homemade kraut and pesto.

The season is now fully upon us, requiring long and wonderful days both in the field and the greenhouse. It feels so wonderful to have our hands in the dirt again! We have been working hard since mid-February filling the greenhouse with baby plant starts, getting the soil ready for planting, setting up irrigation, and making fence repairs. We have a variety of yummy greens already in the field that will be ready for harvest in mid-May.

We appreciate that our shareholders support local, sustainable, biodynamic agriculture. We believe this choice is crucial to creating positive change in the world, here and beyond! It gives people the opportunity to eat fresh and vital food, know who’s growing their food and where it’s coming from, the opportunity to learn about organic and biodynamic growing techniques, and much more.

If you’d like to help, Yellowroot Farm can use donations of large clean baskets, large plastic bins (2’x3′ or so), portable coolers, a digital camera, a chalkboard and chalk, volunteer labor, Leaps (Earthaven’s alternative currency), and of course money to help us keep doing what we love.

The post Yellowroot CSA Begins Second Year appeared first on Earthaven Ecovillage.