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Garden Mastery Academy - Module 1: Dare to Dream
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Canyon Cassidy

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since Jul 03, 2026
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Biography
I was born in Carson City Nevada and raised in historic Virginia City. By the time I was 7 or 8 I snuck a handful of seeds from my mother’s collection and walked to a nearby vacant lot to make a small garden plot with nothing more than a stick. It was a simple set of rows with seeds planted every 5 or 6 inches in un-tilled soil. The plot was actually on a neighbor’s property and luckily they were not offended by my attempt at planting a garden. I soon forgot about the garden. The garden was uprotected, open to the sky, rabbits, dogs, coyotes, squirrels, deers. Walking on an early summer day I happened across the little garden plot and was surprised to see cabbages, carrots, lettuces, spinach, radishes and few other plants I did not recognize. I sampled the spinach, cabbage, the lettuce, radishes and a few carrots. That was it, I was a gardener from then on.
My family also had a mine, so I grew up in mining territory and we did some small turquoise mining since I was very young. It's an interesting shift away from mining to Permaculture however knowledge both earth and stone is something I take with me.
A as perpetual student I practice Permaculture and study as a regular part of life. Also a bit of tech nerd that fell out of the .com era but still kept up the skills for full web management and all that jazz.
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Recent posts by Canyon Cassidy

Food Grade Mylar, rather expensive to make yet so quickly discarded! One thing it can be used for is insulation from RF, face the reflective side towards the "noise", it can still can be covered with cloth so it isn't shiny. It will still attenuate frequencies, or reduce any vibrations coming through. One concept is to glue it into the wall panels of any yoga room or sleep space. An easy way to make a sheet is to simply use packing tape to glue all the pieces into a sheet. Some food grade mylar has texture, if it has texture it is not reflecting like a mirror then it will also work as reflective sheeting for a green house. One good thing about the food grade varieties is that they do not off gas like many plastics do. Strangely there is little to no recollection/recycling on this type of plastic, so it's on "us" the unsuspecting population to come up with a solution.



2 days ago
I like to find ways to convert them into compost. Since weedy pioneering plants are so good at mining minerals or accumulating them, using them in compost add colloidal forms of minerals to the mix. Sort of like adding rock dust suspended in the weeds. You can essentially grow your own compost if you plan it out.

Stake or fence a thick patch of weeds, nurture it a little, give it some contours and a good drenching once or twice, even add a little compost to get them boosted. Before the seeds mature, chop the whole patch and chop it all into a mash for compost processing. If it's seedy, use it for compost tea, if not as seedy add it to your Berkeley flip or long term pile.

Now there is an opportunity to smother the roots of the newly chopped weeds and the whole soil surface with card board and compost. You can add a no-till bed right on top of it! Just smash the stems down with the layers of wet cardboard then add a layer of finished compost and/or topsoil then seed it with your chosen cover crop. Some persistent weeds will get through, but if that is the situation manual removal is needed anyhow and doing this step this will knock the weeds back and fill the same space with a desired blend. By allowing the weedy patch to grow there you will have preset the subsurface of the soil for the no-till bed.


Get your daily didgeri right here:
1 month ago

Steve Thorn wrote:




Got weedy bushes or trees? Grow grapes on them!




Trellis in the weeds!
1 month ago
If you can, trap all run off into a sunken hugel/s that is on contour and then add another hugel down slope also on contour-not necessarily sunken. The goal is to ensure that no runoff every escapes down slope. If the grade coming into the area is steep you may need to slow it all down with stone, like contour bunds or one rock dams.

A great guide for the low profile stone structures is the Quivira Coalition Erosion Control Field Guide

Once the flow is slower it is much easier to control, Hugels can be incorporated with stone features like filters, situated down slope from the stone features where the water flow is slow.



1 month ago
Coconut milk has a ton of uses, you can cook your oats in them, like risotto oats. Or you can make a coconut curry. Basil, lime leaves, various peppers and a mix of spice is my usual goto. Coconut naturally mixes well with chocolate, so it goes well in baking anything chocolate in place of water or cow milk. Cooking polenta with coconut milk can be good as well. If on the sweet side date syrup, chocolate and coconut milk or cream is a pretty good mix.
1 month ago
Weeds! All those fast growing pioneers can be the best compost material you can find and it's local.
1 month ago
I had an accidental success with pumpkins using sheet mulch. In fall I started to revive an old garden by adding a large swath of card board over food scraps placed over the old dried out garden bed and added stick mulch over the top (3x30 ft or so). In Spring there were volunteer squash plants sprouting from the edge of the sheet mulch. The roots fanned out through the season while being protected by the sheet and stick mulch. That squash was so productive I ate squash about everyday into the next year. I took this on as an intended method the next season, placing pumpkins at the edge of sheet mulch. Very productive healthy plants that seem to need less watering!
1 month ago
Braided Canes:

In early Spring, or anytime cane shoots are soft and movable begin to weave them into a braid.
The braid of canes later shades the fruiting branches and as you braid through the seasons the fruit gets better and better. The whole weave becomes a structure so it can bear larger fruit in bigger numbers. Because you are pulling all the cane shoots into a controlled shaped it is also easier to maintenance and harvest. After a few seasons when the braid gets heavier it can slump, especially in snow country. The braid can be to pulled from the ends, allowing you to reshape the entire braid when needed. For example: after the fruit sets, in Spring when cane shoots get lanky, or in early Spring if the braid has been smushed by a snow load.

I wrote a blog post that describes Braided Canes in detail here =>  https://nomadgardens.com/wp/braided-canes/

*You will save yourself a lot of labor and plenty scratches if you use the right tools like a Japanese sickle(or something similar) and a rock rake to grab canes or vines. Japanese sickles are built to make precise cuts with ease, the serrated sickle curve does all the work. Hold onto a bunch of a canes/vines in one hand then pull then over the blade and hold pressure up against them with the blade hand. It makes easy work and you can sculpt and shape most woody plants and hedges etc. good tool to have on hand.


1 month ago