Land as Insurance, Part 3: The Role of Farms

Here is part 1 and part 2 of the Land as Insurance series. In an attempt to understand how to create insurance for my family around food, water, energy, and money, I came up with the idea of [...]

Urban Swales

Last year, we did a series of videos looking at the swale systems on our property and demonstration site. Part one looks at how we’ve combined the featuress of a Hügelkultur system, a wicking [...]

Urban Swales Part 2: Construction, Spillways & Catchbasins

This second video in the urban swales series looks at permaculture design with water as the primary consideration. Here I work on redirecting water passively from roofs and topsoil overflow areas [...]

Urban Swales Part 1: Weeping Tile & Mulched Pathways

Last year, we did a series of videos looking at the swale systems on our property and demonstration site. Part one looks at how we’ve combined the featuress of a Hügelkultur system, a [...]

Our Permaculture Homestead – Video Tour

Join us for a beautiful and info-packed video tour of our permaculture homestead! This is a 3-part series where we explain and explore our: – thriving food forest complete with fruit trees, [...]

Coppicing – A Lost Art Revisited

Coppicing has always been interesting to me as a wood production system (fuel, timber) because it uses trees that can be cut perpetually. In other words, the tree is cut and grows back. This is [...]

Gains From Catching Rain In Drains: A Video Explanation Of The Rain Tank Project

In this video Rob showcases one of the major water harvesting feature – an underground rainwater cistern – on Rob and Michelle’s urban home property. This rain tank is unique because [...]

How Ecological Design Can Mitigate Life, Financial and Infrastructure Risk

This past weekend I did a consultancy of a property that illustrates the power of understanding how water moves through a property and the consequences of getting it wrong. What is interesting is [...]

The Grass Isn’t Greener…

If you’ve been following permaculture in Calgary, then you’ve probably been hearing about Permablitz – the transformation of lawns into productive, abundant landscapes. You may be [...]

All About Water

This last weekend our Spring PDC class spent a whole day learning about all aspects of water including grey water, black water, rain water, and storm water. We learned how to put all of these [...]

Zaytuna Farm Yields

 History has shown time and time again that civilizations have risen and fallen based on the quantity and health of their topsoil. Since food is the basis of civilization and topsoil is the basis [...]