Gardening & Farming

Livestock Guardian Dogs: Deter Predators on Your Farm or Homestead

Livestock Guardian Dogs: Deter Predators on Your Farm or Homestead

by | Mar 9, 2024 | ,

Livestock guardian dogs protect homesteads and farms from predators with their loyal and protective nature. Image by Don DeBold, Flickr. Homesteads and farms face the constant challenge of protecting their livestock from predators like coyotes, wolves, bears, and other opportunistic creatures that threaten the well-being of their animals. Livestock guardian dogs (LGDs) offer a tried and tested solution, safeguarding herds with their protective instincts. For centuries, LGDs have stood as the ultimate farm watchdogs, their presence alone serving as a powerful deterrent to would-be attackers. Bred for their unwavering loyalty, keen instincts, and impressive size, these capable canines have become an increasingly popular choice among homesteaders seeking an eco-friendly, long-term solution to safeguarding their herds. LGDs actively protect livestock by patrolling the perimeter, marking territory, and fearlessly confronting intruders....

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The Permaculture Book of DIY

Curated Content From Around the Web

Here’s How to Make Free Liquid Fertilizer for Life

Share Post Pinterest reddit Email As someone who is constantly juggling various personal, professional, and homestead tasks, there’s one permaculture principle that’s proven to be incredibly important in my day-to-day life. It’s the principle of ‘the least effort for the most effect.’ Essentially it’s this idea that you want to work in a way where you get great results for a minimum investment of your resources (time, labor, money). I mean, who wouldn’t love that? Now, the problem with this is figuring out how exactly to do things in this ‘least effort for the most effect’ way. So today, I want to showcase the principle in action on my farm and give you at least one idea of what you could do, and as a byproduct, you’ll get an endless supply of free liquid fertilizer. In one of my earlier videos, I showed you my small permaculture nursery setup where…
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How to save money on plants – my simple plant propagation setup

Share Post Pinterest reddit Email From all the inputs you’ll need to establish your food forest, there is one that could break the bank more than any other. I’m talking about the sheer amount of plants you’ll need in order to grow your perennial permaculture paradise. The $$ numbers can be brutal when you do some math on the plants required. Let’s say you need to plant a few lemon balm patches as part of the guilds around your apple trees. You want to add some aromatic plants to confuse the pests. For each patch like that, you’ll need, let’s say, six lemon balm (trans)plants. I’m not sure how much a lemon balm plant costs in your neck of the woods, but let’s say it’s $5. That comes to $30 for one patch. And you need at least ten like this for your ten apple trees – $300. It turns…
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How to design a food forest or permaculture orchard (also: 3 spots open for DFY Food Forest Design service)

Share Post Pinterest reddit Email Here are the 5 steps you should go through when you design a food forest, so that you can grow 3-5X more food, with less maintenance, compared to conventional methods. By the way, if you’d like to hire me to do the entire design, I charge USD 2,000 for it and have 3 spots open. Apply by filling this application if you’re interested, and I’ll send over the next steps. (Note: If you’re a student of my Farm Design Course, do let me know! We’ll deduct what you paid for the course from the $2,000 service fee. Now let’s dive into the design process… STEP 1: What is the primary goal of your food forest? The most common goals are: Grow food for the family Regenerate the land Generate income Yes, a food forest will do all three. But you should lock in one PRIMARY…
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Here’s Your Plant Propagation Calendar (Free Download)

Share Post Pinterest reddit Email If you’ve seen my post about my simple plant propagation setup, you might have noticed that I have comfrey growing there. The thing is, I can’t get enough of this plant, no matter how much I produce it. I use it as a dynamic accumulator in my food forest guilds, as fertilizer for my garden, to accelerate my composting process, as biomass for mulching, and to attract beneficial insects. It’s a versatile plant with many uses, including medicinal ones. Luckily, propagating comfrey is pretty simple. You dig the plant’s root, cut it into individual pieces, and plant it. After some time, each root piece becomes a plant on its own. It’s that easy. However, it’s time-sensitive, meaning you can’t do that at any time of the year. I had to learn this the hard way. Before I had my nursery set up, I would go…
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How & When to Fertilize Hydrangeas for Vibrant Summer Blooms

Spring is in full glorious bloom in my garden which can only mean two things: The hammock is coming out of storage soon and  Not long now until we get flowers on the hydrangea shrubs.  Well, maybe a couple of months before we get full hydrangea blooms. But all the shrubs are certainly starting to leaf up. And if we want to (or need to) give them a bit of a boost this spring, now would be the perfect time to do it.  Hydrangeas are heavy feeders. If we want lots of blooms, we need to keep them nourished. Why is fertilizing hydrangeas so complicated? The problem with fertilizing hydrangeas, or any kind of perennial for that matter, is that it may sound a bit intimidating. What are those numbers on the fertilizer bottle? Should we choose granules or liquid? When is the best time to do it? Should we…
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Design Challenge: Where to put the house?

Share Post Pinterest reddit Email One of my clients recently bought 20 acres of land in the humid subtropics. As you can see, the land is beautiful, lush, and green, with diverse topography (i.e., not flat) and a lot of potential: He bought it primarily to establish his self-reliant homestead, where he could live off-grid, enjoy nature and the abundance he produces while spending his days in a workshop. The challenge? It’s bare land, and now he needs to design it from scratch, i.e.: -> determine where to place the infrastructure – house, driveway, workshop -> create a water system to provide enough water for his needs – ponds, tanks, water harvesting channels -> determine where to place his food growing systems – gardens, food forests, greenhouse… In this post, I wanted to workshop “live” one of his main challenges – where to locate the house and, in turn, the…
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Growing Beans Is So Easy, You’ll Drown In The Harvests 🫘

Tomato Container Quickie Hack: The Brick Riser

7 Reasons To Mulch With Wood Chip + 4 Ways to Get it for Free

Wood chip mulch is an attractive ground cover that enhances the health of your soil and the plants you grow. For many gardeners, carpeting the landscape with organic mulches becomes an indispensable part of building new planting beds and replenishing the older ones. The moisture conservation and weed suppression benefits alone make mulching well worth the effort. If you want to keep a low-maintenance garden, you really must mulch. 7 Reasons Wood Chips Make Great Mulch Organic mulches mimic the constant shedding of sticks, branches, bark, and leaves that occurs in forest ecosystems. Perennial plants evolved steeped in layers upon layers of plant litter and have adapted to all the benefits that come with nature’s mulching. Arborist wood chips are the closest to the natural mulching in forests and woodlands. Derived from the fresh branches and brush from trimmed trees run through a wood chipper, the wood chip pieces are…
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