Phil Faris

Yes, I can see that drafting a set or perameters and application forms for hosts and vacationers would grease the wheels on this scheme. I'll do some research and collect inputs from others "almost" doing this already. Once this goes beyond inviting local community members to "come out and enjoy the homestead life" it incurs a lot more detritus from Civilization. Such as insurance coverage as a bare minimum. Even if we could ship a "Homestead Starter Package" from Amazon that transferred neural network experience jolts to create simulated vacations, there would be "product liability" issues...

Yes; Wheaton Labs qualifies in every sense of the word. But...  Wheaton Labs is a University of Homesteading and the intensity of the environment is, uh, different from someone who would probably just slowly convert their backyard to a mini-homestead-esque garden. I would think that for every ten Dude-Homestead vacationers, one would attend a Permies oriented training camp. BUt 9 would start reading the literature and blogs and just look at their own yards with a brand new appreciation of how ecosystems work.

I'm thinking that if members formed a Dude-Homestead Co-op with a common scheduling website--possibly just an AirBnB category--then interested families could find interesting host families in interesting states and "take a vacation" there.

I have hundreds of families "connected" loosely to our organization's environmental projects. If I could tell them--plus the tens of thousands of affiliated families nationwide--about this "thing" called Dude-Homesteading, we'd create a market, meet people, make a bit of money, have fun, and start to build critical mass with people knowing what really goes on with us and plants. (Not to mention animals; I toured a garden yesterday in a city-wide event. This garden had what looked like a playhouse but in reality was a chicken coop.)

Phil

I think the "Off-Grid AIrBnB" is probably the way someone would do this as a small-business. But I'm thinking "community minded" homesteaders might host one week in the planting season, while still eating preserved produce from the previous year. And they'd host another week or two during some harvest timeframe.  

My wife and I used to have international students live with us as a "home-stay". This wasn't renting a room to boarders, it was including them in our family life so that they could "experience America" more fully. Usually it was for 1 or 2 months at a time. It wasn't a "business" but a "community service" for us, of sorts. However, the fees the organizer charged for arranging this included enough for our expenses plus $500/month.

I imagine homesteaders doing this as an outreach exercise to promote sustainable lifestyles while making enough money to make it worthwhile.

Plus it would be FUN!

Permies have SKIP training available; but total newbies don't even know if they'd like the lifestyle until they see it.

Has anyone tried hosting a Dude Homestead vacation package on their property? The purpose would be for people who have no idea what Permaculture looks like and how"eating what you grow" works. A family could pitch their tent or camper and then see if they even like "gardening", etc. I'm imagining a sort of Bed and Breakfast arrangement where they join in with family mealtimes and help out a little here and there.

I'm with a community service organization that has projects promoting sustainable lifestyles that are environmentally sound and which restore balance to various ecosystems. Some people might start urban homesteading in their yards if they really wanted to. And
a vacation on a thriving homestead might provide the motivation.

"Community Engagement" is another approach to building a community. The term is often used by community service organizations when they wish to reach out beyond their membership and engage with the community at large. In my case, I'm in an organization of non-homesteaders who wish to "do" homestead like things so that the city and county gain the skills and habits it takes to create sustainable ecosystems and greater resiliency. So we are striving to "do" community engagement and build relationships with a larger slice of our county's half million people.

We are just starting this program, but we are partnering with several other organizations who have overlapping permaculture goals. They, too, are struggling to engage with the broader community. Our environment is full of peri-urban agriculture and hobby farms, all of whom tend to dabble in permaculture related online forums.

I know this is different from this thread's "homesteading community" concept; but I think it might be more like Paul's bloom where you're planted suggestions. One thing is for certain, there is no lack of people within 30 minutes drive; but there is a definite lack of cohesiveness focused on permaculture environmentalism.

This year one "campaign" for community engagement we're planning is to perform community service by establishing sustainable ecosystems in the shape of edible landscaping and water-harvesting food forests in neglected riparian lands adjacent to public lands and streets and state and national parks. The key is to create observably "balanced" ecosystems to educate the community. Hopefully, these will allow "us" to start building ties with hundreds or a couple thousand like-minded citizens.

Who knows; it might even work!

Phil Faris
Spokane

I watched the long and detailed presentation--it was fantastic! I'm working with several organizations to try to create a "community  garden" in a rocky wasteland underneath power lines and below some railroad tracks. The idea is to create an edible-landscape, food-forest that captures rain from a brand new street/bike path above the tracks. But there are 4 months of no appreciable rain here...  

So we're pondering deep hugelkultur wood reservoirs in the pits to stretch out the water retention might almost cover the dry spell. trees have grown without irrigation in this land on a part of it that once had a house, But the half mile plot is also just above a river that was carved by the ice-age floods, so river rock is about half the "soil".

When we get the books, "everything" should be clear. But we wonder if sealing the bottom of the non-tree-containing hugelkultur pits would help conserve water? Where trees are, of course the pits wouldn't be sealed.

Meanwhile, we'll read the books...    
Thanks.

Five years ago I wanted to make compost on my one acre lot full of weeds, hoping to turn the rocky dirt into fertile soil, so I took a local composting lesson. Then someone said "biochar" and I spent months trying to develop a "simple" way of using slash from my micro-forest to both grill meat and make biochar without complicated gear. Then I searched for expert advice about secondary air burning woodstoves and "Permies" provided the most info. THEN I had to look up "permaculture" to figure out just what the heck it was--and I still don't really know even though I promote it daily and am creating a Rotary committee revolving around it!

Today I see that permaculture fan-bois are even hate-filled groupies lashing out at each other for whom they favor and whom they despise regarding their philosophical purity! I wouldn't have noticed the trend except that I watched it engulf Objectivism.

So now I just use the work to refer to the best mantra to hum while seeing everything as part of an ecosystem.

After the weekend Permaculture Properties Summit, I'm particularly creative but not very practical. So I'm wondering about the following "design" concept:

Goal: create a 5x10 hügelkultur garden in sloped and rocky, infertile roadside space.

Proposed construction:

1. Dig a 12" deep pit (or a short contour trench and berm)
2. line it with plastic to retain water up to the wood layer height or former surface level, and surround it with a 24" wide woodchip path, slightly dug in and lined with plastic as an extra rain catchment area draining into the pit/trench..
3. Layers: (from bottom to top)
    a. 12: Pack logs and wood slash mingled with dirt for the tightly packed and recessed bottom 12" of the pit/trench.
    b. 6" Raw compost feedstock plus dirt/biochar mix
    c. 6" half decayed compost plus dirt/biochar mix
    d. 6" finished compost plus dirt/biochar mix
4. Plant a permaculture-informed, layered, edible and ornamental garden or landscape

The result will be a circular hill/bump or a normal hügelkultur berm shaped garden. Rain catchment will be optimized but manual watering will be available and logged. Theoretically, the wood layer will increase the time gaps between watering, but this is one reason for the project. The idea is to do a one-time garden installation that lasts several years with no-till planting methods and mulching. The hügelkultur structure is the easy part, in some ways, as the plant selection and layering will require a lot of ongling "design effort".

The primary goal is to transform unproductive space into a garden that needs minimal intermittent watering and care. The trench and berm could extend indefinitely along the land contour or be repeated as circles wherever space is available.

The project is to test out disaster relief gardens for families rebuilding homes after earthquakes or other natural disasters or for refugees from conflicts. The assumption is that survival food is rice or other "aide" provisions but that nutritionally dense foods must be grown.

Continuing the "brainstorm" that my tangential comment earlier exposed, "small scale" biochar exists on a continuum: from commercial kilns; down to either a. high-tech backyard burn-barrel retort designs (rusty barrels) or b. forest-slash burning fire-pits extinguished with wither water or covered with a plate-steel lid; further down to backyard recreational fire-pits (portable or laid-brick) doused with water; further down to fireplace-canister biochar micro-kilns; down to (really?) dutch-oven style kilns. Every person faces unique situtations and scenarios.

And, regarding the "purpose" for the output, ultimate soil-amending applications are relatively homogenous EXCEPT for timing: how soon will the charged and nutrified biochar be added to edible gardens. Some people recommend a few weeks of "charging", yet others suggest that on-site or in-situ charging will happen anyway, so don't worry.

But, my marine-toilet composting problem has always been "timing". I was faced with finding a suitable compost pile in which to dump my pre-composted human waste. Observers asking, "Watcha doin'?" were always triggered by the answer--which meant 'sneaking around"...  But, by taking the peat-moss and compost mixed composting-toilet output as feed for micro-biochar production, I can answer probing questions by saying, "This is biochar from my yacht's woodstove." And then just dump it in forests or trash or landscaping without qualms.

However, "charging" or nutrifying the biochar with urine is still needing further investigation. I just read that using urine as the moisture and mineralizing step with plant-based compost for the biome can be a, uh, sweet package-deal. I'll let you know if it works. What I do is use grass and other vegetable compost piles to create non-manure compost. This I use to mix in the marine composting toilet with human waste. (This actually deoderizes almost instantly and yields "earthy" compost in days.) Then I'll pyrolyze that mixture in fireplace sized cannister kilns and mix it again with more plant-based compost. Then I'll use that in the urinal holding tank/bucket to absorb and break-down the urea to prevent ammonia production (hopefully). Then the automatically charged and nutrified compost/biochar mix can be distributed to gardens or forests without even being recognizable as composting-toilet output. And all this on a weekly basis (meaning total quantity is less than a 5 gallon bucket).

Now, the secret I haven't mentioned is that this is actually a model for disaster relief shelters that help villagers stay on their property, safe and healthy as they plant permaculture gardens to augment their bags of rice food supply.

This "small scale biochar" discussion is surprising and interesting to me, a new biochar convert. I'm surprised because I thought "small" would be a cubic foot of biochar made from a fireplace or firepit with a pile of branches that were extinguished by water at the appropriate time. The cooled charcoal breaks up easily into biochar. My concern was to fully pyrolyze and burn off the gases. But this sounds like people also make biochar on an even smaller scale. My approach also uses up my slash piles and grills meat and entertains guests--while wasting energy if done outdoors. I've also considered the biochar "canisters" set in fireplaces, but thought they were too fiddly. However, the tangential thoughts about human and animal waste open up new possibilities. I have composting toilets in boats and camp latrines and faced social opposition to how to ultimately process that compost.  Much to think about.