Family Growing 90% of Their Food on an Impressive Permaculture Homestead

[Music] we've been growing our food for the last 3 years on 2.3 acres and we've reached about 90% of all the food that we eat all year we grow maybe 150 different vegetables and fruits and you know maybe 60 or 70 of them grow like crazy and those are our Staples we grow our food using permaculture and essentially permaculture is growing your food within nature uh with biodiversity and we do this because it keeps us healthy and we keep the nature around us healthy the passion to grow our own food come from the fact that

we really like to eat but we like to eat good food and with different kind of vitamins different kind of elements for us so food it's Joy what what I love about the the homestead is that we create a kind of paradise and for me it's like transforming the sun in something good and after that you share it with your family and with the community and I feel more grounded and I think that my life has a purpose because I do that I retired but before coming here I was a vice principal in in schools

for about 11 years and before that I was a teacher for many many years and um one thing I loved to do with my students was gardening with them and showing them how to grow their own food and doing that since uh since the '90s I walk two days per week in schools and other days of the week I'm just working on the property because it's a lot of job to produce your food and uh before that I was a teacher and and I walked one year uh as a principal of school we met while

she was a a principal and um very quickly we realized that uh we both had very similar Visions we wanted to do permaculture we wanted to Garden Guided by nature and we wanted to produce all of our food that we eat all year for the whole family we were ready to go anywhere we looked basically everywhere in Southern Ontario south of the Canadian Shield for a place to to do our project and we found this place in 2019 and so we've been here for 3 and 1/2 years yeah so when we start it was a

nice green grass lawn and nothing on it but uh it was very challenging because the uh the forest was dying there was a lot of water everywhere it was like a nightmare so the the nightmare that mag refers to is the fact that much of the property uh was unnaturally underwater and so by installing a simple uh correctly done drainage you know we solved the problem but a lot of work and it was work by hand work with shovel work with wheel BS and so on in the meantime uh we we started right away where

in an area where we could Garden where we didn't have to do too much transformation where we could just lay down some cardboard and put some Earth on top and we realized that we were able to produce most of the food that we eat in a year in what we considered a small area in basically 400 square [Music] m so we are in the front yard of the property so we grow main of our food from the Sun Garden you can see it in the back so many fruits are here in the OR chart in

the beginning when we came here we think that we need more space than that to grow our our food for you know 12 months but we realize that only the sun Gardens can give us so much food and we have 15 other gardens around the [Applause] property so here's some of the stuff we got today this is some mint that we're just going to hang uh hang and dry use that later maybe make some mint jelly out of it this is some Malibar spinach which I'm going to put in water in a few minutes so

I'm going to keep it in here and some basil which I'm also going to put in water so I'm going to keep all of these in here and then some big cucumbers that got away from me very ripe so we're going to eat them quickly got three big ones here and uh some green cucumbers and we also got a whole bunch of these uh these Caribbean cucumbers these little ones they're prickly but you can eat them raw like this they're delicious whole bunch of uh uh Peppers some red ones too and this corn we're probably

going to eat it this afternoon these beets I'm going to cut them cut them off the leaves the leaves that are nice we're going to keep to eat and the beets I'm going to wash wrap them in a damp towel put them in the fridge they'll last a month at least in the fridge if we have too much for a month then we'll freeze the rest or make pickles out of the rest or something like that these are just going to go on the on the counter for now these squash we've also got some a

whole bunch of Elderberry which I'm going to um uh I'm going to freeze cuz I'm not ready to make jam out of it yet so when I got a whole bunch you only like probably two three buckets like this full that's when I'll make the jam out of it um some carrots which I'm going to do the same thing is the beets wash them wrap them in a towel put them in the fridge I put the potatoes one layer deep in the box and they can stay in the garage up up on the shelves all

winter yeah they'll last all year yeah you don't wash them it's just one layer thick and actually first they have to dry they just can't be exposed to sunlight because they'll turn green and then they won't be any good to eat if we harvested this much food every day all through the season we'd have way too much um now and sometimes we do have more than we need like for instance last fall we had tons of tomatoes thousands of them and so we gave a lot of them to the food bank and we gave also

a bunch of tomatoes to some families in need we like to be able to share the Harvest not share it only with nature but share it with other [Music] people we don't really need to buy any vegetables but I like milk and cheese and yogurt we don't have animals so we still buy that but anything that can be grown we grow and uh for instance we're growing our grains but we haven't completely transitioned over we do grow some wheat but the thing we grow a lot of is sorum and so what we're experimenting with this

year is we're going to start using 50% sorghum and 50% bought flour let's say in our the bread and cakes that we make but it's been sort of working up two out of the four people in our family don't even eat any meat and so we want to try and grow our protein and so we grow our beans and peas this year we started growing hemp for the seed uh we can make our milk out of that and also there's protein and Grains as well as we grow wheat barley oats sorghum rice and we also

eat wild Foods so I collect uh plantain seeds curly dock seed we collect mushrooms as well we have bolet growing on our property um and now as for vitamins and minerals and so on we have such a wide variety of plants we grow and we make sure that we go for all those really deep rich [Music] colors what is really important when you do promac culture it's how to deal with the abundance so you need to transform it so I made did a lot of research to know exactly what can I do so usually we

dry food and we dry food with a machine to dry food very fast with freezing with canning and with fermenting so all the different way sometimes when it's the huge period of harvest I can stay in the kitchen maybe 5 hours the kids help but sometimes it's so much and you have to transform it when I transform it I not everything I know what is in the freezer I can plan what we eat the meal etc etc and uh normally after that in the middle of November I say everything is full everything is organized and

we we stay like that until the next April or May so normally actually we have 90% of our food come from the garden and we go to the supermarket and sometimes it's $40 per week for a family of four in Canan so this drawing it's all the property from the world to the back here so I just draw that for people who wants to know exactly what's going on on this property the this is sort of like where the main Garden is it's very much a prairie habitat and then of course we have the stream

here and then we have Woodland Woodland and then this is a wet Forest back here and then of course we have the water all coming through here with ponds and so on so we have a lot of water on our property and we keep that water we use that water we don't use anything artificial it's all just planted and then we put our compost on that and we try and make the garden a little bit difficult for the animals to get in using different you know like with raspberries and rose bushes and stuff but we

plant extra that the things that the animals like outside easy access so that they go there first I'd like to talk a little bit about how we do our gardening these cabbages we put in as sort of as an afterthought we didn't put anything else with them there aren't any companion plants they're just all alone and so if you have a good look at them you'll see that um they're very much eaten up by bugs and so on but I mean they're still all right but the but really they they don't look very happy now

we're going to walk over to some other cabbage which basically have all the same conditions as those ones with one important difference as you can see these are very pristine the difference is these cabbages are surrounded by other plants this is millet this is a CO Abby um we have some carrots in behind here some yo this is a cherry tree so they all these plants help each other out it makes it more difficult for the the the bugs and so on to find them so this is how we Garden we use biodiversity and we

mix everything [Music] up the philosophy of sharing it's really important our goal is to share the knowledge of how you can produce your own food how you can after that share it and how you can just reduce the price of the grocery yeah so we've started a YouTube channel Willows green permaculture we also have our website uh Willows green permaculture uh.com and I like to share this knowledge because I believe that a lot of people think they don't have a green thumb but I think everybody's capable I think these skills are inside all of us

because you know we lived for Millennia like this everybody and so it's inside all of us when I'm out there um I feel like a 5-year-old kid uh who is just like surrounded by all their favorite toys so yes it's work but it's fun I'm basically out there every day am I out there to exhaustion every day maybe the first year but it's not necessarily a pace that you can keep forever and so every year now I'm simplifying things and it's working the most stressful things for me in the project was to manage how much

energy I can spend each day without having pain in my body because I was doing too much it depend of the season in March you have to clean up the land so maybe sometimes it will be six or seven hours per day and after that early spring approximately the same thing so it was a curve of learning so right now I know exactly what are my limits and when I have to ask for help for me the challenges you know at the beginning sometimes the animals would take a bit more than we hoped but it

was learn it's it's the learning curve and there really is a solution to all the problems that you can have and the best way is the simplest way challenges are opportunities and then when you've solved them it feels good life is full of wonder and it's living that Wonder every day it's something I always wanted to do and to see it succeed just very satisfying cuz I'd never done it on this scale and thinking wow we we did [Music] it subscribe to exploring Alternatives and check out our playlists for more stories like this you can

also follow Willows green permaculture on YouTube and on their website thanks for watching