10 Permaculture Projects For Your Backyard

Hello, Chris here from Coulter's Good Earth Farm. Now we practice permaculture on a larger scale here on our commercial farm, but today we're going to walk around the property and look at 10 different components that you might see in any scale of permaculture. And these 10 would make great backyard projects for you to try at home. When you're building your permaculture system, one of the key components that you should probably start with is a medicinal herb bed. They're very important for your health and they're not hard to do. This one's a very small area and this one's set up in a keyhole shape. You can do an herb spiral, you can just do a straight rectangular or square raised bed, but it's important that you have some medicinal and some culinary herbs close to the house that you can use. Now this is full of 40 to 45 different species that cover a wide range. So we have some things that are just here for culinary use, we have some very important medicinal herbs and for teas and for things like that as well. So this is a small component in a bigger system, but it's a very important component. Another component that's used in permaculture systems a lot is the swale. And these can be a large scale, you know, half a kilometer or something like that, but you can also do it on a small scale. You don't have to have large area or large property in order to make use of swales. This is just a short little mini swale here I have on contour that will stop and collect water as it comes off this slope and soaks it in. I've actually bermed up a little bit of soil, but on top of that I've taken some old mushroom logs and sort of added to the mini swale. So that sort of soaks in water, slows down water, and really allows that water to infiltrate the soil here. I've got this berm planted, this is some pawpaw, and I've got some comfrey and some different stuff in here, that's a mock orange I think. I've also just scattered some seeds. These are, looks like honey locust seeds that are coming up right here in this little mini swale that I just threw the seeds out. It's a nice moist area. It's a fertile soil because it collects the stuff that's running down the hill, and as the wood rots that's going to add fertility as well. So this is just a really small swale, but it adds a lot to your permaculture system, and this is something you can do in your backyard. So this is a good idea as well. Another great permaculture project for certain people in certain environments is a hugel mound. Now this is more important for people that had forested areas on their property, but we don't have a whole lot of woods here, but we do have some spare wood. In fact, there were some trees that were taken out, we had some spare wood, so we just made a hugel mound here. Now this is what I call an informal hugel mound, and this is just piled up wood with just a lot of, a little bit of soil and debris on top. If you really want to make a real hugel mound, you're going to need to bury wood in the ground and put soil on top, and then you can plant that. Well, you can also just pile up some wood and make a nice wood pile. It's a good place for overwintering of beneficial insects, beetles, things like that, and then over time, this wood will rot down. I put this on a, it's already doing a pretty good job of just breaking down naturally. This was a fairly slopey, clayey site, so this may take several years, but I didn't need the space. The wood was extra, so I piled it up here. If I have some extra brush or something, I just throw it on top, and then in three or four more years, this is going to break down. This wood's going to rot, and it's going to make a really fertile soil here. So this is something I'm not in any big hurry for. I just pile it up, let it rot, let nature do its thing, and then we're going to have some soil improvement without much work. So a hugel mound is something you might want to try if you have a lot of extra wood. Another permaculture project that's actually more like a planting pattern that you can do in your backyard is to plant in guilds rather than to plant in blocks or to plant individual plants. Now a guild is a community of plants that sort of have a symbiotic relationship and help each other out. It normally involves some kind of perennial tree that's in the middle. In this case, we've got an apricot here. You could do a pear, cherry, some other kind of fruit tree. It doesn't even have to be a fruit-bearing tree, but primarily use something that you can get some yield on, and then you're going to have your support species around that. You can do perennials, you can do some annuals, but mostly stick with perennials here. We've got some rhubarb, some comfrey here. I've got some strawberries, some sorrel planted. You're going to have bushes and maybe fruiting things that are a little bit bigger. This is some gooseberry in here, some currants as far as the shrubby species. You sort of want to do a mix of components and see which ones complement each other. So a guild planting is just a community of plants that help each other rather than individuals that are stuck in different places of your yard. So when you think about planting, think about planting in groups and guilds rather than planting individual plants. A very key component to many permaculture systems is the hedgerow. This hedgerow here is made out of aronia berry. This is a native berry that takes very little maintenance. It's five to six foot. This is viking variety. It produces an edible berry. It's high in antioxidants. We love the berry. It does well here. You want to kind of fit your species with your environment. So there's a variety of species you can use for hedgerows. We use several different components and varieties here on the farm, but this is one of our favorites. Five to six feet has a nice fall color, so it looks good. It's actually a visual barrier and we're getting a productive yield of a good quality berry from it as well with very little maintenance. So once you get these hedgerows established, they're a great component in a permaculture system. Not every component in a permaculture system has to produce an edible yield. This is one of our butterfly gardens planted just for the enjoyment of pollinators, butterflies, and other beneficial insects. Bees love this as well. We've got this planted with a lot of native perennial plants, a few annuals stuck in there, everything that butterflies love to draw them in here. So you don't have to have a large area. This is actually a fairly small area. Just a few plants tucked here and there, or you can do a dedicated area like this, put a bench, put a birdbath, maybe a hummingbird feeder. All these things will draw in your beneficial insects and pollinators. So this is a great component that's aesthetically pleasing and it actually does a great benefit to your native insects. Another classic component of most permaculture systems is some kind of raised bed or bed for vegetable production. Now we are a vegetable farm, so we have four acres of vegetable production, but often that's in a place that's not close to our house, not in Zone 1. So we do actually have Zone 1 vegetable production and we did that in raised beds here. So a raised bed is a good project that a lot of people start with. You don't have to have a raised bed if you have good soil, but if you're on a rocky, slopey area like this, sometimes a raised bed fits in well. This was done from repurposed block and we fill it with compost from the farm here. And I use this for some herbs and some vegetables, some sweet potatoes or some cucumbers, lettuce and stuff, so I don't have to walk back to another part of the farm in order to pick up fresh tomato or a cucumber or a pepper if I need it for a meal. So raised beds are a classic component of a permaculture system and if you have the site for them, they're a good one to try. One of the first permaculture projects that you should install is water catchment. Water is life and it's very critical and that's easy to do. Most structures can be guttered if they already have gutters and those gutters can be diverted into catchment tanks. A lot of times that water is just being run off or wasted. This is good, fresh, clean water that can be saved for irrigation, if not for drinking, after it's been purified or filtered. So we catch water on our greenhouses, on our buildings, in our house and you can use large tanks like this. This is a thousand gallon IBC or you can use a smaller scale, just a 50 gallon, 55 gallon rain barrel are popular. Those blue barrels are very popular. We can use those as well. You can use something smaller or something larger than this. So as long as you're catching water in something, it's easy to do and it's a project that you'll want to install on your property. Once you get that water, it'll store and you can use it for anything, including hooking up a drip system to it and using it to irrigate. An essential permaculture project every homestead should have is a way to make compost. This can be a formal area that you have enclosed. You can have a compost bin, a compost barrel, or you can just compost in a pile on the ground with no structure whatsoever. We just compost in these semi-open bins. The cold compost, so we fill one side up and when that's full, we move to the other side. After about a year or so, we have good compost. It may have some weed seeds in it, so we take that into account, but we are recycling nutrients from the farm and we are producing fertility here in our compost pile. We also have, this is our main composting area, but we do have another compost bin closer to the house, which makes it more convenient to use, so we'll use it more often. And we also use vermicomposting, which is a different form of composting, and we'll take a look at that next. Another type of composting is using compost worms to break down organic matter, and we do that as well. It's called vermicomposting. You can use a small household bin like this that we can stick in your basement, underneath your kitchen sink, or you could vermicompost on a larger scale using an old bathtub like we have here set up. And the good thing about vermicompost is the weed seeds do not exist in this because we don't put them in there. We only use this for kitchen scraps, weed free organic matter, so we know at the end of the cycle, after the worms have broken this down, that there's going to be no weed seeds in this. So we use this for seed starting and things like that. We don't want any weed seeds. The worms will break down almost anything. They'll recycle all this material. We actually have this set up. You want to come over here and take a look. So we have this bin sealed off from flies that may come into it, soldier flies especially, that like to eat organic matter. So as long as it's sealed, we do also have a sealed drain in the bottom, so all the liquid that comes in the top or the excess liquid drains off. We catch that here and it actually makes a really nice liquid fertilizer that can be used directly on plants as well. So once you get the vermicompost finished, you can take it out and use it as well. You may have egg shells or any other kind of stuff in it, but this is good finished vermicompost that we can put directly on our plants and it's all recycled material. Maybe one of the larger permaculture projects that you can install is a greenhouse, but it is one that is very critical to any permaculture homestead and one that I would recommend. It doesn't have to be this big. It can be a smaller greenhouse. This one's about 30 by 14, something like that, but you do have to have a way to start transplants and it's also a multi-purpose house. We use it for drying, for season extension, for storage, for lots of things. So it's going to have a lot of purpose and a lot of usefulness on the homestead, but it is a project that maybe be a little bit bigger, but one that I would definitely recommend putting in early, as early as possible, so you can have a lot of production from it. To be truly sustainable and self-sufficient, livestock really have to be integrated into the property, but that's easy to do on a small scale with animals like rabbits. They make a really great backyard animal. They can eat things like weeds, like lamb's quarters, that you're not necessarily going to eat, and then they produce fertility with their manure that you can use on your vegetable plots, and then they also produce meat. So rabbits are multi-purpose animals that are good for that, and they fit into a small backyard permaculture project really well. For true sustainability, you sort of have to think outside the box sometimes, and there may be a component that may seem strange to you, but actually fits the niche really well, and one of them is the pasture pen, which we normally see for rabbits, for chickens, but you can pasture a lot of animals, and one that's often overlooked, but not in South America, is the guinea pig. So the guinea pigs are vegetarians. They love to graze and eat grass, and they're an important food source in a lot of parts of South America. So it's one of those things that it works well in a backyard, in a small permaculture setting, and if you can bear it, you can actually use these for food. So I hope you've enjoyed today's video and maybe picked up some ideas about projects that you want to do on your own property. If you liked this video, give us a thumbs up, subscribe to our channel for more content like this, and hit the notification bell, so when we do post new videos, you will be aware of that. We appreciate your time, and thanks for watching today!