How to Make Compost Tea: Cfenster
Cfenster shows us how he makes compost tea to improve soil fertility.
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Cfenster shows us how he makes compost tea to improve soil fertility.
Howard Garrett talks about how to use vinegar in your garden. He uses it heavily diluted in the water he uses to water plants and in concentrated form with orange oil and soap as an organic herbicide for weeds.
How to make seaweed fertilizer yourself rather than spend on expensive commercial seaweed fertilizer. In this video it’s made both with fresh whole seaweed and with sushi nori sheets, water and a hand blender. Babybabkas also mentions that she can also find dried whole seaweed in Chinatown.
She uses the seaweed mixture right away — but I’ve also seen where people let the mixture ferment.
This video looks at the decline of West Oakland, California and how the community has started to bounce back in part through community and backyard gardening initiatives. The video looks specifically at the work that non-profit City Slicker Farms has been doing in the community.
Skip Richter talks about using sprayed on soap and/or oils to minimize insect problems in your garden.
Loren Luyendyk from Santa Barbara Organics talks about water.
Topics:
– How you can use swales to redirect water on your property and also to encourage water that might otherwise flow away, taking topsoil with it to sink into the soil.
– Mulching to help retain water in the soil.
– Collecting rain water and storing it in tanks, in plants on your land and in manmade ponds
– Greywater – Use water more than once. Really easy set-ups and more complicated ones.
– Blackwater (sewage) – Treating the sewage with vegetation. Gives a reed bed example,
– Flowforms to oxygenate water
Introduction to Permaculture Part 2: Water from sbpermaculture on Vimeo.
Yorkshire’s Allotment Diary guy shows us his jigsaw-powered compost sifter in action. Interesting idea.
This is a great talk by Laura Allen (here walking us through her home humanure system) and Gregory Bullock about setting up a home graywater system.
“Greywater (water that comes from sinks, showers, and washing machines) turns wasterwater and its nutrients into irrigation water, saving time, money, and fresh drinking water. Whats more plants love it, especially fruit trees, berries and vines. Last year California rewrote its greywater code, making simple greywater reuse legal and affordable. Learn the why and hows of greywater reuse, and how to transform your household plumbing into a greywater irrigation system.”
They are in California so some of the impacts, positive and negative, that they talk about here focus on that state, but the issues are similar everywhere.
The talk covers really important Dos and Don’ts. Some topics mulch and mulch basins as filters, choosing good soaps and cleaners to use in your home if you are going to set up a graywater system, how to set up plumbing for the system (they look at a system that uses the pump on the washing machine as its driver), costs, types of crops it is suitable to irrigate (apparently root crops are out but it’s fine for “fruit” and leaf crops.
Hyperaccumulators are plants that are highly effective at accumulating nasty stuff like heavy metals in their “bodies.” So much so, that they can be planted expressly to improve contaminated soil.
Here’s the Wikipedia list of these plants.
You’ll notice some familiar plants on the list: sunflower, alfalfa, barley, kale, broccoli, cabbage, etc. The rapeseed plant, for example, seems very willing to accumulate several different heavy metals where some plants only have one heavy metal friend.
Raised beds of new soil are the usual solution for the home gardener who’s done a soil test and knows that they have contaminated soil but phytoremediation is being used by the US government as a cheap, effective, low-on-labor way to clean up the heavily contaminated Superfund sites.
Grist has an interesting article on what happens or should happen to plants that have been used to clean up toxins.
The Real Know How 