Wild Edible Walk
Wild Edible Walk Lenoir City, TN Saturday, May 20th 10:00 am to 2:00 pm Join me and one of my design clients Belinda for a guided wild medicinal and edible plant identification walk on her property in Lenoir City, TN. We’ll walk through her mostly wooded property to see what we can find, focusing on commonly available and useful plants, trees and shrubs. In addition, we can show a food forest project in progress and we will have time for discussion and questions. $20/student paid upon arrival and I’ll have a handout prepared that addresses what we’ll be identifying. Brings snacks and plenty of hydration. Address and directions will be sent to those who RSVP. All students should email me: strongrootsresources@gmail.com to reserve your spot. Spots are limited!
2023 Spring Update
Happy Spring, everyone! No doubt that y’all are a lot like me, reveling in the longer days, warmth (at least here in the south!) and ability to work the soil. I love how spring gradually emerges from the depths of winter, first very slowly then all at once. I enjoy finding the little signs – bud swell on the trees and the cedar waxwing and bluebirds returning to the farm. Rabbits are everywhere, doing what rabbits do best. Yesterday a wild turkey came through and evaluated the Narragansetts and Slates hanging out in their pen. My schedule has also emerged from the slow winter months into full spring productivity. I’ve got three new consults ongoing and I’m especially excited about helping some folks put fallow pasture back into production right here just a few miles from our land. More consults are on the books and I have availability to add…
Spring Events
March is going to be busy – Saturday, March 4th I’m going to be in Birchwood, Tennessee to show how I build compost bins from pallets. Details and tickets for this weekend event are here: Homesteading Conference Tickets, Sat, Mar 4, 2023 at 10:30 AM | Eventbrite The Self Reliance Festival is scheduled for March 25th and 26th in Camden, TN at the Special Operations Equipment compound. SRF continues to grow and improve with every event. The focus is strongly on solutions, building businesses, building community and practical lifestyle design. I’ll have a table there with land evaluation information, permaculture practices and homestead design tactics. HOME – Self Reliance Festival
Video – Tools for Property Evaluation
Happy New Year, all! I’ve got a new video up about the tech tools that I use in order to evaluate land and assist in the property / homestead design process.
Late Summer Update
Howdy, friends! I hope everyone has been enjoying their summer and splitting the difference between getting stuff done and also enjoying life! It’s even better when those two things come together under one umbrella. This second half of August has been far more mild than what I recall last year, and I’m totally fine with that. I’ve started getting that inkling of fall sensations in the cooler, clear mornings. Here on the farm we’ve been wrangling 11 turkeys. They’re around four months old now and solidly in the “mouthy teenager” stage. It’s looking like we’ll have more males than are necessary, so they will find their way into the freezer and the rest will kept as breeding stock. They’re all heritage breeds: bourbon red, blue slate and Narragansett. Turkeys have a lot of personality: they like human interaction and can even be herded. We were allowing…
Homesteaders’ Surplus Swap and Social
Back in April, I led a foraging walk for a group of folks at the annual Living Free in Tennessee Spring Workshop. The general goal was to identify useful plants, mainly for edible and medicinal purposes. I touched on how to make accurate identifications and how to test for any undesireable reactions. Plant ID is more than just learning how to look for a certain species. It lets you begin to understand microclimates, how nature forms guilds and it’s the basis of simply understanding what the land is trying to convey. It should also be seen as a lifelong endeavor. I have experience and I’m comfortable teaching and consulting on a number of nature-based topics, but I’m still, and always will be, a student of the land. I always want to maintain a sense of wonder and connection and most importantly, humility. With that said, here at the homestead…
Winter Wrap Up
It’s late February and I feel like we’re finally rounding that curve towards warmer weather and the ability to coordinate and complete projects without wrestling in the mud. In a lot of ways, this was a quieter, introspective winter. Wintertime can always be a little difficult for me. I probably don’t tolerate the lack of sunshine very well and I’m not well suited to being indoors during poor weather. But keeping in contact with like minded folks with similar goals has been a balm. We’ve lifted each other up when any of us have been feeling a little weary. Seeds have been started, beds are being prepped. I’m working on rooting mulberry cuttings and I’ve made some progress in invasive species removal. A quail aviary is in the process of being framed and I have a plan for housing a breeding pair of rabbits. I’ll also be pasturing chickens via…
Keep It Close
When I head out to do a property/site assessment in order to help someone develop their homestead systems, one of the first suggestions I put forth, and probably my strongest one – is to keep your systems as close to your home as is reasonable. This applies on any size property but becomes more relevant on larger properties. There’s a kind of myth that your garden is supposed to be located far from your home, laid out in long, horizontal rows. If that’s the only space available, that’s one matter, but in my experience, out of sight = out of mind, no matter how well intentioned you are. Weeds seem to know when your back is turned and deer and other critters will wear out an unwatched garden. Of course, I’ve seen deer walk up to my mom’s back porch, so that isn’t foolproof, unfortunately. Systems that need daily maintenance,…
No Spend January
In Mid December, my wife and I were looking over our budget and realized that we had gotten a little spend-happy during the second half of the year. Our tax refund didn’t arrive until July, (despite filing in February) so by then we had a number of things we wanted to purchase. We used a sizable amount of it for projects, books, (my weakness, I confess) supplies and some back up items such as a propane water heater, extra propane and other preps. While we hadn’t accrued any debt, we didn’t have as much cash stowed away as either of us would prefer. So as usual, I suggested something some people would see as extreme: No Spend January. I proposed that we would live off of our current supplies (including food) and avoid all spending with the exception of insurance, one medication refill and fuel (though we were going to…
Snowfall as a Way of Finding Microclimates
In classic Tennessee fashion, in 24 hours our weather changed from 73 degrees and remarkably windy to torrential downpours that then turned into a heavy, wet snow in the early morning. At our homestead, we had around three inches. I took time to appreciate the beauty of it, then pursued the hassle of clearing it off the solar panels (note to self, cover the array with a tarp next time) and de-icing all of the vehicle doors. As I walked around surveying the various animal tracks and appreciating the snow’s dampening effect of road noise, I realized how much snowfall and it’s melting pattern revealed various microclimates. There’s a long, south sloping hillside that is abutted by about 40 feet of treeline. That area remained covered with snow even while other areas had begun to melt off. Even being south facing, those trees kept the area significantly cooler. The north…