Designing a Sustainable Garden For My Tiny Homestead | A Blueprint for Self Sufficiency

To me, the dream of tiny living has always been the dream of leading a more self-sufficient and sustainable life, where you earn less money and consume less, but instead have the freedom to live more simply. My journey with self-sufficiency started back in 2020 when I moved into my then new tiny house, a small off-grid house that was self-sufficient in the way that I could collect rainwater for cooking and showering, solar energy for electricity and wood for heating. So I started building up my new garden in the forest, but I should learn soon that I needed more of two things to really be able to grow my own food. Sunlight and space. And in the meanwhile, I had adopted a big street dog, Bosimat, which means captain of the boat in Greenland where he's from, so I soon found myself needing a bit more living space to be able to live here comfortably. Therefore, I decided in a way to reboot my entire homestead so I could create a better and more self-sufficient life for me and Bosimat. And so after four and a half months of building, spring has finally arrived, and so now time has come to start designing and planning my new kitchen garden. It will be based on principles from the permaculture gardening tradition, and for those of you who don't know about permaculture, you can simply put think of it as permanent agriculture. In permaculture, one of the goals is to grow more perennial crops than annual, thus the word permanent, so you can build up soil quality and biodiversity and thereby creating a more sustainable garden. And therefore, the principles of permaculture are a perfect fit for my dreams about living more sustainably and self-sufficiently. So in this video, I will take you through my three-step process of designing my new kitchen garden based on the many methods and techniques from this gardening tradition. But mind you, permaculture has a vast amount of tools and methods, and I cannot possibly walk you through all of it in a short video like this. And also, I do not have the qualifications for it, even though I do hold a PDC, a permaculture design certificate. So take this video as a small teaser and inspiration as to how you can design a small garden with some of the many principles and methods from permaculture. Okay, enough talk, now let's get on with it. So finally the rain stopped and allowed me to come back out here in the garden and do some filming. So I originally planned to make a much longer video for you guys today, but then I realized in editing that it ran way too long and it was way too information dense, I guess, for the casual audience. So therefore, I will make a shorter version this week, and then next week I will release a different video in which I go much more into detail about the nitty-gritties of my permaculture design. So this video will be more like a walk than a talk in terms of me explaining my new permaculture design for my garden. So, but what I was talking about in my longer video was that I have this three-step process for making my garden design. And in the first phase, I gather a lot of information, what you call the mapping phase. So here I was mapping like the different structures on my property, like my house and my annex and my woodshed. I was mapping the elevations of the terrain on my property. I was mapping the different birds and animals that I have on the property. I was mapping the different plants and also the different resources that I have available that I can use for building my design. And then in the second phase, I was doing what is called a sector analysis in which I map out the different energies that I have on my property, like the solar energy and the wind energy. I get a lot of wind from the meadow. The water is also a form of energy where I can collect water. And then the different movements, like how I naturally move around on my property. And then the third stage in my design process was that I made my actual design. And in permaculture, you talk about moving from pattern to detail. So you want to get the main structures down first and then you can focus on the details afterwards. And so what I did was that I divided this southern end of my property into three areas. One area is what I call the kitchen garden area. And another area is what I call the rewilding zone. And then the third area is my forest garden area. So the kitchen garden zone will actually start up here by the house because this is where I learned from my sun analysis or the sector analysis that I have the absolute best conditions in terms of sunlight because it is so open and it has this open view to the south. So these beds that I'm making here, they are getting a whole lot of sunlight. And these are small trenches that I dug down and then I filled them up with horse manure because it's filled with nutrients obviously. And then it can also hold some of the water because I don't have that much water on my property because I still live off the grid. So if I can in a way hold some water in the ground that would just be perfect. And then on top of it I'll put some compost and then some soil on top of that. So these will be very very effective beds because they get the absolute best sunlight right here. And then over by the house on this side I think I'll create something called a herb spiral where you use some big stones to create this spiral because then you can plant some mediterranean herbs in it and they really love the heat from the stones because the stones get heated up by the sun. Because in permaculture you really like to create these smart synergy effects. And then on this side of the house I think I will build a small greenhouse with the leftover windows from my old mudroom back at the old tiny house. And also the old door that I had for the mudroom I can reuse it in that greenhouse because in permaculture one of the principles is to reuse things and have these circular loops of resources. And then behind the greenhouse I have decided to make a composting station because you need that in a garden because when you take out the dead plants from the garden they need to decompose so that they can turn into new soil that you can put back out in the garden as top dressing. And that's a good spot for it because that's to the east which means that those composting bins they will get some hot sun from the west and thereby help speeding up the process of decomposition. So and it's just next to the garden so it's just perfectly located for that. So this area behind me is what I call my rewilding zone because here I will create kind of like a haven for biodiversity because it's always good for a garden to have a rich biodiversity because it has these positive feedback loops in your garden and creates just a whole lot of nice synergies in your garden. So I think I'll create a small pond down here with the rainwater from the woodshed and water is always good to have in the garden because it's just a booster for the biodiversity. So it will attract mosquitoes and the mosquitoes will attract birds and then I think I'll have some bird boxes up in the trees and the water can also attract amphibians and like create this ecosystem of animals living in this foresty area which is by the way connected to the wider forest outside of my property and behind my property here and then I'll also plant some different native bushes and trees that the animals in the area have evolved and adopted to. So it will be just this very nice green zone just as the green backdrop of my garden and then I think I will also have ducks running around because I have a bit of a problem with slugs and it is a little bit increasing for every year so the ducks eat the slugs. So my hope is that they can help create more balance in my ecosystem by eating the slugs. And then there is another positive feature of this area namely that I have a direct view to it from my house. So it has this recreational value because I can sit in my house and look at the birds and the life down here and just enjoy this green backdrop in front of my house and I'm really looking forward to that. And then lastly up in this end of my property I will have my forest garden and it actually starts on this fence going down there because I have fruit trees and berries growing up against the fence and I will plant some more over there and then I'll just sporadically have fruit trees and berries and nuts growing in between one another up in this section. And the reason why I placed the forest garden up here is because it's the furthest to the north so the trees won't cast shade on the lower plants here in the front end of my kitchen garden because it's to the north. And then also because I learned from my sector analysis that I get a lot of wind in from the meadow and then by having trees and bushes up in this end the wind from the meadow will be a bit blocked so it doesn't cool down the plants down in my kitchen garden zone. Oh and I totally forgot to mention that I still have this old part of my kitchen garden zone. But last year I had a very big something called a hyggel mound here in the middle but now I've changed it into three smaller hyggel mounds that are a bit more manageable. But a hyggel culture is just a classical thing in permaculture where you dig down a trench in the soil then you fill it up with old logs and branches and then you tuck in leaves and smaller branches and then you put some horse manure on top of that and then some compost and then some soil on top of that again. Because then when it rains the water will get sucked up by all of the leaves and the decomposing logs and when they decompose they will release nutrients to the plants on top of the bed. So it's in a way a very ingenious bed for lazy people because when it works you really don't have to water it and you also don't have to put fertilizer on it because it's just so effective. So I made some smaller hyggel mounds because they are a bit more manageable and then they face directly towards south so they will get quite a lot of sunlight. But still I have these very tall trees to the west so these will be shaded by about two or three o'clock in the afternoon so it will be more like perennial crops because they have a more established root system and they are therefore more resistant to the shade than the annual crops that I will have over there in the other part of the kitchen garden zone. So now that my garden design was more or less finished I could start building my garden. However my design is not totally finished yet because I still need to figure out the shape of many of my beds in my kitchen garden and also what plants to grow in them and where. But it will have to do for now because now it's mid-April and it means that it's high time for getting down the potatoes. And of course I needed to remove two of my already established potato beds because they didn't fit into the latest iteration of my design. In these two beds I think I'll put green and yellow zucchini and also Hokkaido pumpkins. But thank you so much for watching this video. I really hope you learned something and maybe found some inspiration. See you again next time.