by | July 31, 2026 · 1:43 am

Fertilizer on the Homestead (Principle 6)

I was recently asked if the fertilizer shortage caused by the closing of the Strait of Hormuz was going to cause problems for our homestead. There are many reasons that I am against this war, but I am glad to say that needing fertilizer from across the globe is not one of them.

Rattlesnake Pole Beans Climbing

The main reason for that is that we do not use synthetic chemicals on our land. Commercial nitrogen was invented about 100 years ago while plants have thrived on land for about 500 million years. So, I am quite convinced that chemical fertilizer is not a necessity. (See the pictures in this post of our gardens and judge for yourself if plants can do without it.)

2026 has been our best cauliflower year

In fact, fertilizers are not only unnecessary, they are a huge problem. Pollution is one major effect. About 80% of applied nitrogen is lost to the environment polluting land, water systems and the air and atmosphere. They also negatively impact soil ecosystems by decreasing soil life and reducing organic matter. Thus, our soil releases more carbon into the atmosphere, plants are not as healthy, and our food is not as nutritious.

Beets need phosphorus and potassium more than nitrogen to get this big

Permaculture principle 6 teaches us to Produce No Waste, to instead value the byproducts of one system as inputs into another. This is entirely how natural systems work – like the way plants breath out what we need to breath in and vice versa. Humans have managed to create a few products that defy this rule – plastic and nuclear waste top the list – but it’s otherwise easy to notice around us and apply the principle ourselves. We do this by reusing, repurposing, recycling, composting and more.  We can approach fertilizing this way, too, with nitrogen fixing plants, and animal waste – including human animals.

Leafy greens need lots of nitrogen

Maybe people are unaware that urea, the common nitrogen fertilizer, is from mammalian urine. A synthetic kind is made industrially to sell to farmers. So, on the one hand we are using clean water to flush our own urine to expensive and often ineffective factories to be processed into less of an environmental hazard. Meanwhile, we are going through another expensive technological process to make synthetic urine and use further scarce resources to ship it around the world.

Tomatoes also need plenty of nitrogen

The easier, cheaper, safer way is simply to use our (and livestock) urine on our pastures and fields. This puts the power back in the hands of food growers and cuts out so many resource-intensive steps. The Rich Earth Institute in Vermont has done extensive research into the safety and efficacy of using urine. Their findings are very encouraging. They are working to educate and implement systems in this country. Other countries are ahead of us on this.

Maybe the biggest obstacle is the social taboo about even talking about human excreta. But I think we can overcome that. 

This is an opportunity to turn a problem into a solution and to create a more circular economy at home. Urine diversion has worked extremely well for us here over the past few years.  Let’s practice principle 6 – there’s no such thing as waste!

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by | April 30, 2026 · 5:22 am

Raised Beds for Vole Control (Principle 4 Revisited)

Last March I delved into Permaculture Principle 4: apply self-regulation and accept feedback. One of the topics discussed was vole control. One reader asked for more details about our techniques to deal with them, especially how we construct our raised beds. This post will delve further into how we have approached it, presented through the lens of accepting feedback to make positive changes.

Beets and Carrots, Saved from Voles

Our first few years at Living Land there weren’t that many voles. Our very first potato planting yielded about 15 pounds of potatoes for everyone one pound we planted! Carrots and beets were similarly successful. However, we had also set up something of a vole haven so it was only a matter of time. First of all, we were planting things they loved to eat, both the root crops and young fruit trees with delicious inner bark. I was also creating deep soil and covering it with mulch. Lastly, we have a lot of fencing set up to protect our garden from herbivores and our poultry from carnivores. So, the foxes and coyotes and bobcats can’t get in to help us keep the vole population in check. This resulted in a plummeting number of intact root vegetables at harvest time. Our last potatoes planted directly into the garden yielded 1/2 a pound for every pound we had planted. I’m willing to share, but this was ridiculous!

For a start, we do have two cats who we let out to patrol for rodents.  We do put bell collars on them which in our experience makes it nearly impossible for them to catch birds. It probably also makes it harder for them to catch rodents but we feel this is a reasonable compromise between competing ideals. One of our cats is a much better hunter than the other for some reason. Tabitha, now 18 years old, killed and delivered five voles to me this week alone. Still, that has not been enough to keep our veggies safe.

I tried moving the root vegetables to various parts of the gardens and orchards, but the voles always found them. This is when we decided to try to make special beds to protect our harvest from voles.

Standing Bed with Carrots

For Root Crops: Carrots and Beets

A friend gave us two standing beds made mostly for ergonomic reasons. These are high up off the ground, incredibly easy to work with, and definitely vole proof. However, we’ve also found them difficult to keep watered and in these times of drought that is a real issue. So, we have come up with a design of on-ground, vole-resistant raised beds.

We create them using as many found materials as possible. Steve brings home a lot of discarded pallets that we can use as an initial structure or take apart for the wood. We also had some small pieces of metal roofing that work great for sides.  On the very bottom we staple metal mesh / hardware cloth with a tight weave, usually ¼ inch.  (See below for photos of the process.)  It will eventually rust and rot, we know, but we hope it will take a while and give us maybe a decade of growing. The size of the bed is mostly dictated by the materials we have on hand the space we’re putting it into and we want it small enough that we can move it around to get it started. We put them straight on the ground and then sheet mulch into them, layering manures, seaweed, leaves, etc. The bigger ones we started with some big hunks of wood at the bottom like a hugelkultur bed.

We have been using these for a few years, making new ones each season. Early on a few were just about a foot tall and if grass grew up around them voles would access them from the top. We could tell because the bottom part of the beets and carrots that they usually decimate was fine but the shoulders were gnawed on. We extended the height and made sure to cut back the grass for these and now they are working.

Carrots from Protected Bed

For Potatoes

Plastic barrels have made their way to us over the years, mostly intended as rain barrels. Now that we have invested in much larger containers for rain catchment, we cut these in half, drilled some holes in the bottom and have been using them for potato growing. We are having mixed results. I think that keeping them watered is the biggest issue. Potatoes are very sensitive to getting enough water and it has not been easy to keep these moist. Last year before I planted the potatoes I put a wooden stake into the middle of the barrel. I left it there and would wiggle it around and water into that middle hole, throughout the season. This did seem to work better as less of the water simply ran off

Potato Barrels, Harvest on Top

around the edges. As a bonus, the barrels are somewhat easier to harvest. We can put down a tarp tip over the barrel and pull out the potatoes in the fall. We get nowhere near those original fabulous yields, but it actually felt worth doing this last time with about a 5 to 1 harvest.

 

We will continue to observe, interact, accept feedback and adjust but we are glad to have made some progress in learning to live with these furry, competitive neighbors of ours.

Bottom of be with stapled on wire mesh

Attaching supports to hold sides in place

With sides added

Wood added on top for further structure. Beds placed and planted, now growing well.

Four raised beds, plus a sheet mulched mound ready to plant.

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by | February 28, 2026 · 3:42 am

The Ancient Tradition of Agroforestry

This past November, Steve attended a workshop on agroforestry practices at Wellspring Forest Farm in New York led by Mark Krawczyk & Steve Gabriel. Steve has been experimenting with these techniques for years.  This workshop, along with the books both the leaders have written, has deepened his understanding of the systems so he can make even better use of them. Here are his reflections, which tie in multiple permaculture principles:

Berries from perennial plants are abundant in these systems

For more than ten thousand years, our ancestors lived in extraordinary symbiosis with woody plants. Fossil fuels did not yet make unsustainable and polluting mass production possible. Humanity’s regular harvest of young wood encouraged tree species that sprout back reliably and renew the vigor of a tree’s eternal youth. Cord wood illustrates this difference. A mature forest in NH might sustainably produce 1 cord per acre per year. When managed as an established coppice stand cut to the ground every 3-5 years, each acre can consistently produce 5-10 cords per year! In the case of oak, fast-growing coppice wood is actually denser than old growth wood, thus more useful as fuel in less space.

Edible mushrooms can thrive in the shade of coppice and pollards

But heat for warmth and cooking were just the beginning of how people met their needs with wood, often from the same land that served numerous other purposes. Such function-stacking embodies the principles of permaculture, including catch and store energy (#2), obtain a yield (#3), use and value renewable resources and services (#5), produce no waste (#6), integrate rather than segregate (#8), Use small slow solutions (#9), use and value diversity (#10), and use edges and value the marginal (#11). We are just beginning to rediscover the depth and nuance of what is possible and was, until recently, understood by every human who has lived in a wattle and thatch cottage since the last ice age.

Woody plants are excellent goat food (fodder)

Intensely managed coppice, pollard, hedge and wood pasture lands provided food, livestock fodder, tools, various supplies for crafts and cottage industry, building materials, rich hunting grounds, transportation infrastructure, fencing, fishing weirs, musical instruments, and most everything else people needed. Indeed there were hardly any other options available for securing needed resources, especially as the population of people increased. It was common knowledge how to use a “froe” to make “hurdles”, how to lay “pleachers” and bind “heatherings”, how to “handle” an axe (literally), how to cut “chips” with hand tools, and how to carve wood with an adze, draw knife, hewing axe and other tools that are now all but forgotten. Such carving was critical to building strong ships that could reliably cross oceans. The extensive jargon people used to describe these practices and tools demonstrate its importance as the center of economic productivity. With time and evolving specialized expertise, wood was also the basis of charcoal production which fueled the refining of iron ore into the fundamental tools of early civilization.

A Pollarded Maple

If you can picture a world before chainsaws, skidders, trucks, and portable sawmills for cheap dimensional lumber, it becomes clear that smaller diameter wood is safer and easier to process with basic hand tools. Even with modern options, this reality is still true. Most common species of temperate trees – except evergreens – sprout back well if a clearing large enough to provide abundant sunlight is made and the stump is protected from excessive impact by herbivores. Coppicing involves cutting to the ground every 3-20 years, producing fairly straight rods and poles. Pollarding maintains a tree small enough for easy management yet keeps most of the foliage out of reach of herbivores, by cutting the central leader at 6-10 ft. Laid hedges are tightly planted rows of vigorous shrubs (such as willow, hazel or hawthorn) cut partway through and laid down to encourage low growth, with horizontal pieces woven between vertical stakes to form a tight living fence. Dead brush can similarly be woven between stakes to form a dead hedge fence where light is less abundant.

Hazelnuts are a great hedge shrub

In this way abundant animal fodder, posts, poles, rods, stakes, fencing, basket-making twigs and various other useful supplies can be produced quickly on a few sunny acres. At the very least, keeping a few trees alive and forever young moderates temperature extremes and builds soil fertility from the leaves they drop. Consider these factors if you seek to build greater sustainability and self-reliance on your homestead, in your community and throughout our troubled world.

For more information on this topic consider attending my upcoming online class and in-person tour through Seacoast Permaculture.

One version of a silvopasture system

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