- [Male Announcer] Growing a Greener World is made possible in part by: - [Female Announcer]: so you can roam the Earth with a lighter footprint.

- [Male Announcer] And the following: [gentle instrumental music] - [voice-over] I'm Joe Lamp'l.

When I created Growing a Greener World, I had one goal.

To tell stories of everyday people.

Innovators, entrepreneurs, forward-thinking leaders who are all, in ways both big and small, dedicated to organic gardening and farming, lightening our footprint, conserving vital resources, protecting natural habitats, making a tangible difference for us all.

They're real, they're passionate, they're all around us.

They're the game changers who are literally growing a greener world and inspiring the rest of us to do the same.

Growing a Greener World.

It's more than a movement, it's our mission.

You know the term homesteading?

It can have a lot of different meanings.

To some it means living completely off the grid and providing all your own food and energy.

And to others it means, providing some of those things, but on a much smaller scale, and within an urban setting.

But no matter how it's done, all homesteaders are trying to provide at least some of their own wholesome food, and live more sustainably.

And many of them are going beyond raising organic crops and small livestock, by sharing their journey with their children, and their community.

Jessi Bloom is one homesteader we've been following for a long time.

She lives just outside of Seattle.

Besides being a mom of two young sons, Jessi is the owner of NorthWest Bloom, an award-winning sustainable landscape design company and nursery.

Jessi's expertise for ecological living and permaculture, has made her a top authority in her field, while keeping her busy as a best selling author, including her latest book, Practical Permaculture.

- There's a lot of different terms for what I do here, and some people might describe it as homesteading, I would call myself a permaculturalist, so I look at what I need ecologically, water, food, energy.

And I look at how I can get those needs met in a low footprint standpoint.

So I will collect water from my rooftop.

I will grow food from the nutrients made from the compost of the waste that I produce in my house.

I'll grow food not only from annual plants, but also from perennial plants.

And I also grow food from the manure produced from my animals, which also produce food.

So there's a lot to consider in my lifestyle and how it's done.

And overall, I just try to have a healthy, environmentally conscious lifestyle.

I choose to live this way because it is just common sense to me.

There's a lot of ways to live in this world.

And if we're always going going going, and not paying attention to the resources that we need to be using we, we don't have any control of what those resources are.

So when it comes to our food system for example, what are we buying from the grocery store, what's in that box?

What are the ingredients on a label?

Can you pronounce them?

So this, it's just common sense to take care of the earth, to eat plants from the earth that you know what's grown there.

To take care of the animals.

To take care of ourselves really.

That's what it's all about.

For my kids, this is a really normal lifestyle.

Everything to them, they're acclimated to having chickens and roosters and collecting eggs.

There's a lot of cooking, there's a lot of education that happens.

In fact, some of our best moments and my favorite memories and conversations with them growing up, have been when we're working out in the garden, side by side.

I look at it this way, if I don't teach my children about being good earth stewards, and making good choices in their lives, who's going to?

So Jessi, I love chickens, and I have a lot of them.

But I also have a lot of land, so them coming in and messing up the garden is rarely a problem.

But you've written an entire book for people that have that garden and they want chickens, but they don't want the chickens coming in and messing up the garden, especially in a small space, right?

So you have some tricks for dealing with that.

So talk to me about some of those ideas.

- Okay, well first of all, this is a big topic.

And the number one thing I want people to understand, is you can have too many chickens.

And so that's the number one thing to get right.

For the amount of space you have, you wanna make sure that there's not too many chickens, 'cause they're gonna be competing for resources.

So there's a lot of ways to do it.

There's free range.

Which means you can just let them have access to everything.

- [Joe] Yep.

- There are problems with that.

They can get into things if they don't have their needs met.

If all you have is a small vegetable garden and lawn, they're gonna go for that vegetable garden.

- Right.

- If you have predators around, that's a risk.

But on the pro side of things, you can have them fertilize your landscape.

You don't have to feed them as much because they're gonna be getting food from the ground.

They're gonna be getting nutrients, insects, all the things that they would naturally get if they were wild.

- Right.

- But, most people can't do that in an urban setting.

So I like to encourage people to do confined range.

And this is a classic example.

It's a chicken tractor, where we can put them in an area, but keep them very safe, and they can still have access to the soil.

I use these for many reasons.

If at the end of the season, I want them to clean up a vegetable bed, they can go to work, takes care of pest problems that way.

If I have an injured bird, I can put 'em in here.

If I have rescue chickens, I can put them in here as they acclimate slowly into the flock.

If I have young birds, same thing.

So, as they're young and more vulnerable, they can live in this for a little while.

The other thing is, if you don't wanna do this, and you do want them to free range, you can protect your plants.

So by using something very simple.

This is one of my favorite techniques or tools.

It's a small barrier made out of fencing.

- Simple enough.

- Simple right?

Cheap, and you can bend it.

If you were to plant some seeds, for example.

You can lay this over the top of them, and the chickens aren't gonna get to it.

If you have a plant that's coming up in the spring and they're starting to go at it, you can bend this into a cone shape, or a dome, and keep it protected from the chickens that way.

So there's a lot of ways to do it, but fencing is the easiest way.

And you can either keep your plants protects, or you're gonna have to keep your chickens protected.

But there's a lot of little tricks and a lot of information to know.

And a lot of it's just learning what the chickens like, and making sure they have habitat, and they have food and whatever they need in the garden.

- Yeah, great tips.

Well I have to confess, I'm a bit jealous of your massive compost heap.

And you know, I'm a huge fan of composting.

You do it around this property in a lot of different ways.

So tell me about some of those methods.

All right, well this is the biggest one.

And luckily we have the machine to give us a hand with all the work.

But a lot of biomass comes in from offsite.

And a little bit from here as well.

We have one compost system that's dedicated only to our greenhouse.

And it actually heats the inside of the greenhouse.

We use a lot of manure and bedding from the barn for that one.

We have a few different worm systems.

We also have a passive system for food scraps, which is a really great way for people to take what's in their kitchen, leftovers, put them in the ground and let the earth do all the work.

- So you're talking about a food digestor system then, right?

- Yeah.

- Very simple, minimal inputs on our part.

Something I know our viewers really wanna have.

Describe the process.

- All right, well basically there's a container that is halfway buried underground.

And the bottom half of it has holes, so that organisms can move in and out.

And basically they're decomposing all of the material for us.

- Now there's a store bought version, but you can also make your own.

You're a big do-it-yourselfer, right?

Tell me how to do that.

- The one that you can buy, is pretty costly, it's not very easy to find as well.

So the easiest way to do it is to buy a 20 gallon galvanized trash can with a tight fitting lid.

And drill holes on the bottom and the sides about a quarter of the way around the bottom of it, bury it in the ground, put your food scraps in it, and away you go.

[pleasant music] - [Theresa] Jessi has a lot of edibles here in her homestead.

And mixed in to all of her garden beds, are many different kinds of culinary herbs.

Now if you're growing culinary herbs, you might wanna preserve some of that flavor for later.

And one of the best ways to do that is to dry them.

To dry your herbs, you wanna harvest when they're at their very peak of flavor.

And that's usually right before they go to flower.

If you can, pick them in the early morning when the essential oils are most concentrated in the leaves.

Cut the herbs into little bundles, and wrap each bundle with a rubber band.

That will hold them in place as the stems shrink and dry out.

You can hang them to dry just like that.

Or if you have an herb that may lose it's leaves, take a paper bag, add a few holes for circulation, and then place the herbs in the bag and tie with another rubber band.

An opened paperclip, hooked under the rubber band, makes an easy loop for hanging.

They should dry in just a few days, depending upon your humidity.

But if you need 'em in a hurry here's a quick tip, pull the fresh herbs off the stems and spread them out on a cookie sheet in a single layer.

Then, just place them in the trunk or the back of your car on a warm day, preferably in the sun.

In about 24 hours, you have crispy dry herbs, and a car that smells fantastic.

[thoughtful music] - [Joe] Not too far from Jessi Bloom's homestead, lives another modern and well-respected homesteading expert, who shares her know-how with others.

Erica Strauss started out as a trained chef, but her desire for wanting to grow organic produce for her kitchen, turned into an all encompassing obsession for both Erica, and her husband Nick.

Soon Erica began documenting their journey of living and working towards a more natural, sustainable lifestyle, that led to her very popular blog, NorthWest Edible, a podcast, numerous writing credits, and a new book in the works.

- Some people call this lifestyle urban farming.

Which is a good description, but it's not one that I embrace because I don't consider myself a farmer.

I have a big vegetable garden, I have chickens, I have ducks.

But I'm not relying on taking my produce to market to earn a living.

So for me, I don't have the farmer's side of it.

What I like to think of what we're doing here is trying to move away from a real consumption based lifestyle, and move towards a productive based lifestyle.

So all around our home, we're just trying to do a little bit more on our own land.

You know, our chickens give us eggs, our ducks give us slug control, we have solar panels that help generate energy.

We try and grow a lot of our own fruits and vegetables.

We can't to do it all, we're in suburbia on a third of an acre.

So there are some things we just can't produce.

But we are trying to do what we can, with what we have where we are.

10 years ago when we started this, we put in just a few raised beds, four by eight simple raised beds, and now we're up to I think 17 of them.

So most of our annual vegetable production is done in those raised garden beds.

We have fruit trees that we are sort of cramming in all over our property.

We've started growing grape vines and kiwis, all kinds of fun fruits.

We have a large berry patch.

So all of that production makes it so that we have from about April to about October or November we're providing all of our own fresh vegetables and fruit from our yard.

I don't think I could do all of this without my kids actually.

My daughter is very involved.

And she's so helpful.

We have a whole gaggle of chickens and ducks, and Bella is really in charge of wrangling all that.

Every morning before school she goes out and harvests the eggs, and adds new bedding to the run or the coop if they need it, cleans up, checks food and water, it's been a real source of pride for her to be so responsible about that.

My son is basically a fruititarian.

He knows where every little bit of fruit is all over the yard.

And as things ripen in succession, you can find him in the strawberry patch, and then you know, under the plum tree, and then in the raspberry patch.

So right now he is only four, so we don't rely on him a huge amount, but he's already learning to take responsibility for some of those things, like harvesting.

I'll admit that most of the fruit goes into his stomach, and not into the harvesting basket, but that okay, he thinks it's great.

And watching him go around and gather fruit from all over the yard is so much fun.

My husband's so involved too.

On the blog I call him "home brew husband" because he does all this home brewing for us, and we get delicious home brew beer from his efforts on that.

Food preservation.

He's also been very involved in developing the filtration technique for our duck pond which is very important, because filtration is a key part of duck management.

And he even does stuff like hang up the laundry on the lines.

So in this effort to make our entire home more productive, he's been a key element as well.

It's really a whole family affair.

- [Joe] Erica, I love the fact that you have ducks here, because it gives me a chance to get your take on a question we get all the time from our viewers.

And that is, are ducks as messy as they maybe think they are?

- Well ducks can be messy, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that they're different than chickens when it comes to their manure.

Duck manure is quite wet and loose compared to chicken manure, and the way that you deal with that, is you give the duck some place to go.

Now, one of the nice things about managing ducks, is that they really prefer to do their business in water.

So if you provide that for them, it actually contains the manure, and you can harvest that as a form of fertilizer, instead of it just being a mess all over your back patio.

- Okay, so harvesting the manure.

Let's talk about that for a second.

What's your process for that?

- Well because we have this in-ground pond, we use a filtration system that actually sort of captures all of the nutrient rich manure, and then we can filter it out and we can put it on garden beds, fruit trees, that kind of thing.

If you didn't have an in-ground pond, a lot of times what people will do is get like a kiddie pool, and they just refill the water every few days as it gets dirty.

And where you dump that water becomes an extra fertile area of your garden.

- Makes a lot of sense.

Now you've had chickens for a long time, and then the ducks come along.

What made you decide to have ducks?

- Well chickens are great, we love the egg production.

Ducks give great egg production too, but they also have another benefit.

Here in Seattle, we have a huge problem with slugs and snails.

And I was spending a lot of money on this iron phosphate slug bait.

And it's organic, but I thought I could do better.

And ducks love to eat slugs and snails.

So that was the main motivation behind bringing them on to our little homestead here.

- And a very good one.

Now tell me about your ducks.

The variety here, how did you select them?

- That's an Ancona, the breed is called Ancona.

They're an endangered breed.

According to the Livestock Conservancy, there's about 2,000 of them in the country.

So we were pretty excited when we learned about this breed from a relatively local breeder down in Portland.

We loved the idea that we could maybe even help contribute to expanding the species, expanding the breed.

- Right, and when the ducks are making their way to the water from the pen, they tend to be more polite than chickens, right?

- Well certainly.

As a vegetable gardener, I struggled for a long time with how to incorporate chickens well into my vegetable garden.

The chickens were always making holes and scratching and digging up.

Ducks don't really do any of that stuff.

They will nibble on little leaves of chard or lettuce or whatever, but they don't have the same destructive potential in a garden that chickens sometimes do.

- Yeah.

Which is very good news for the gardener.

- I think so.

- Right.

When it comes to homesteading, there is so much going on.

And usually that involves animals.

Probably at the top of the list, chickens.

Now we know where there are animals, there's manure.

But we also know as gardeners how important manure is to the garden.

The key is to how to manage that manure efficiently, especially between the fresh and the finish stage.

But one of the best ways to do that with chickens, is called the deep litter method.

And it's the one Erica uses.

Now here's how this works.

The chickens come in at night, and they roost on this bar on this upper level.

But the key is, while they're sleeping, usually they're doing their thing and a lot of manure collects over night.

But because this is a layer of sand, think of this like kitty litter, where it absorbs some of that moisture.

So in the morning you come in here, and you rake that manure away.

So you just scrape it off and it falls into this lower layer along with the hay and the straw and any other organic matter.

But over the next couple of months, this is gonna break down and decompose and become fantastic compost.

So then, maybe a couple times a year, you scrape away this top layer and then you harvest this rich organic matter and put it straight into the garden.

Nothing could be better than that.

[quaint music] Raising livestock can be a big part of what it means to be a homesteader.

But probably the most defining aspect is the food that you grow and how you use it.

You're a chef, and now you're a gardener growing your own food.

Has that had an influence on how you cook as well?

- Oh absolutely.

I would say that because I came to gardening from food, I had some expectations about what my garden was going to be.

I thought you know, in all my arrogance as a beginning gardener, that I would throw some seeds in the ground and then I would have this sort of year round green grocers that I could go and pick and choose from.

And what I've realized as the years have gone by and my experience has grown is that, I'm really on the receiving end of what the garden gives.

I'm receiving the bounty.

I'm not telling the garden what to give me.

So when I get ready to cook something, I walk through and I see that maybe the broccoli is ready.

- Right.

- And so, that's what dinner is.

I don't plan broccoli, I go out to my garden and I see, ah broccoli.

- [Joe] Excellent.

I love how your perspective on that is so spot on now.

But one of the things I know that you're doing because I've seen this in the other part of your garden, is that you're focusing more towards perennial food, rather than the annuals that are always you know, here today, gone tomorrow, right?

- Right, well the annuals are great.

I mean you can get a lot of production in a really small space.

But like all of us, I'm pretty busy.

I feel like I'm juggling more and more things as my kids get older, they have activities.

I think every parent, every working parent understands.

And the perennial crops allow you to sort of plant once and with a lot less maintenance, harvest multiple times.

Over and over and over.

And so, it's a way that I can continue to push into that productive lifestyle with a lot less ongoing maintenance.

Which from where I am in my life right now, is important.

- Yeah, very important.

[soft guitar music] One of they key components in homesteading, is finding ways to extend the growing season.

Our own DIY guide, Todd Brock, is also the author of the book, Backyard Homesteading All-in-One for Dummies, and has an easy project that can help even a hobby gardener try it out.

But this we're building today, is a cold frame, a really simple project that is like a mini greenhouse, yeah?

- Exactly, yeah.

And really, all a cold frame is it's a box that's open on the bottom.

And you're gonna put this over your garden bed, across the top we're gonna make a lid that's usually glass or some kind of clear material.

And that collects sunlight, traps that thermal energy, heats up the inside of the box, and it extends your growing season by changing the climate inside the cold frame.

And in fact in the book, we've got stories about farmers who live in zone five right, where we're talkin' minus 20 in the winter, and there are farmers in zone 5 who are pulling fresh vegetables out of the cold frame every single month all winter long.

Just by using one of these.

- I know it.

Let's get started and put this thing together.

- Okay.

- All right.

- It's a good idea to raise up one end so that the top of it has an angle, and that's for a couple of different reasons.

One is, you don't want a lot of stuff to collect on the top.

You know, leaf litter, rain, snow.

The more stuff that piles and pools up on the lid, it just blocks sunlight.

More sun, the more you're doing with the cold frame.

- Okay.

- So this lid is gonna fit over the top, and this is just two by two, again, scrap lumber.

But we built it to the same size as the box.

And then, we're gonna use this clear plastic sheeting that'll be draped over the top.

And this is what's gonna provide our clear greenhouse like material.

- Right, right.

[pleasant music] Venting is so important, there is so much heat that gets trapped in here overnight and as the day comes on, it gets too hot.

So I'm gonna be wanting to come in here and prop it open with something like a four by four or whatever.

Anything goes.

And then there's gonna be times where I need to come in here and really open it up for harvesting, or planting or whatever, and at that point I'll just use a stick or something to hold it up.

- Exactly.

So you want this to be a true lid.

So we're gonna need hinges.

- Okay.

- I pulled this off of an old door I don't need anymore.

We'll just put these on the backside, and that'll be the last step.

- I love it.

Price is right too.

- That's exactly it.

- I love that, so easy.

And so inexpensive.

- Yeah, it really cost us nothing.

This was all material that we already had piled up just waiting to be used.

- And you know what I like about the simplicity of this for people that want that greenhouse or that hoop house, like me, they don't need to wait for that, in a couple hours and a few bucks maybe, you can extend the season with something as simple as this cold frame project.

- This is a great way to get into it.

With little to no investment of time or money.

You could build more of these to cover this entire bed.

You could pull this off and use it somewhere else in the garden.

This is super versatile, it didn't cost you anything.

And it's gonna increase your productivity.

That's what homesteading is.

And you just took a little step, but an important step, to get there.

- I'm ready, bring on the fall.

- Yeah.

[laughs] [bright music] - One of the best things about homesteading, is that you can ease into it.

In fact, it's the best way to do it.

Start small, and add things like livestock and garden beds as you become more comfortable.

That way, you can ease into your lifestyle as your garden and skills grow.

For more information on homesteading?

Well we have that on our website, under the show notes for this episode.

The website address?

It's the same as our show name, growingagreenerworld.com.

Thanks for joining us everybody.

I'm Joe Lamp'l, and we'll see you back here next time for more Growing a Greener World.

- [Male Announcer] Growing a Greener World is made possible in part by: - [Female Announcer]: so you can roam the Earth with a lighter footprint.

- [Male Announcer] And the following: - Have different ways of-- - [Man] I need to cut you, you blew out your audio, again.

Just kind of keep it monotone.

You came up, and just went red light.

- All right.

- [Man] And action.

- Jessi, I have to admit I'm really jealous [laughing] about your composting.

Take 40, let's go.

[claps] - Why do you just turn it off like that?

[laughing] [bright electronic music] ♪ [male announcer]: Continue the garden learning from the program you just watched, Growing a Greener World.

Program host Joe Lamp'l's online gardening academy offers classes designed to teach gardeners of all levels, from the fundamentals to master skills.

Classes are on-demand any time.

Plus, opportunities to ask Joe questions about your specific garden in real time.

Courses are available online.

For more information or to enroll, go to: [funky techno jingle] ♪ ♪