The Sovereign Homestead Podcast

If you're seeing this in your podcast feed it means our first child has either arrived or is very nearly earthside! Sammy and I greatly appreciate your thoughts, prayers, and good vibes in this time. The podcast will be on an indefinite (though hopefully relatively short) break, while we welcome our first child into the world and find our feet as new parents. Thank you all for listening and keep s...

Floating wetlands are a "new" old technology that is well worth looking into if you are doing aquaculture at just about any scale - from small backyard tanks a few hundred gallons in size, on up to multi-acre ponds and lakes. Floating wetlands take the essential functions provided by wetlands and concentrated them into a smaller and more mobile footprint. Wetlands are the kidneys of the landscape,...

What do we mean when we say we want to "opt out" of the system? Firstly, it's the system(s) - the means of production, transport, communication, value transmission etc that we have to interface with to acquire the things we need to live in the modern world. In general, the further the distance a product or service must travel and the more technology involved means you will have less control over h...

Light is an essential human nutrient. So much of our modern built environment is built without regard to orienting and integrating natural light, and our health - physical, mental, spiritual, emotional and communal - suffers for it. The good news is that you can design your structures (or retrofit them) to bring natural light back into them and create buildings and places within them that support...

Join me today as we discuss designing functional kitchen spaces that people  want to be in. Lots of people are inheriting kitchens designed more for magazine covers than for function - and where there is a lack of function there is a concommitant increase in friction, which means more stress and less joy. Kitchens are the Zone 1 of Zone 0 - Zone 0 referring to the space inside the home. Kitchens a...

Today I interview Joshua Longbrook on real world applications of Private Membership Associations for creating systems of support - i.e. the parallel society - outside the jurisdiction of the public (State dominated) sphere. We'll cover what PMAs are, what protections they do and do not offer, how they are best utilized as extensions of a larger unincorporated Church, and the types of voluntary int...

Today's show is for those of you lucky enough to have a spring on your property. We will cover the basics of spring morphology and function - including the way I  really think they work vs. what the textbooks say - and then we'll go over basic spring assessment criteria, and the main components of spring water collection and distribution systems.   Show Resources Past Spring Projects Rivera Family...

How do we create a regenerative economy and all that entails when that work is arbitrarily outlawed, suppressed or actively disincentivized by the value systems that dominate our current culture? HINT: We have to step outside of the current imposed power structure - no permission required. My presupposition for this episode is this: Mainstream, state sponsored and enforced economic theory and prac...

Today's episode is a short primer on live staking - what it is, how it works, what its good for, what types of species you can use to do it, and how to harvest, prepare and plant your live stakes. If you have perennially moist soils in need of stabilization, or are able to irrigate certain areas to ensure adequate soil moisture for establishment, you can plant hundreds of trees for pennies per ste...

As within so without. If we want to see changes in our external world (i.e. regenerating landscapes and ecosystems), we have to first address our internal state. The older I get and the more I learn, the less I can say I know for sure. This, though, is one of those things that I've arrived at as being one of those "indivisible kernels of truth" - something solid and constant upon which I can build...

Adaptive Management: Observation-driven management for constantly increasing resilience and ecosystem function by employing planned, purposeful disruption. Prescriptive Management: Labeling your observations so that you can look up a prescription that fits that label. This is a much more myopic way of managing a landscape, as you're automatically confining yourself to pre-existing solutions for tr...

When we design holistic ecosystems, we start with mapping out desired and required functions THEN search for, select and/or design elements/systems that provide those functions in a way that aligns with the site-specific context. This is contrasted with how most people "design" systems - they see an ad or read an article and like the thing or the method/technique they see, and then say "I want thi...

If you are serious about food sovereignty, you're serious about building soil. In this episode I detail 4 methods for creating your own soil fertility inputs from what you are already growing, can source on your property or very close to home, or are already in the course of putting food on your table. They are: Vermicomposting ------------------> good biology Compost Tea Brewing --------------> a...

Today is an expose about one of America's dirty secrets - we're talking about the nation wide biosolids program. Supposedly its a great way to beneficially cycle a "renewable resource" to help fertilize crop fields, protect water sheds and keep people healthy. In reality, its anything but - and we know from first hand knowledge because we lived with it right across the street from us for months. ...

Today's show is all about the things you have to do to get yourself onto your land quickly without shooting yourself in the foot withe improperly located or oriented structures and roads. Vehicle access is basically an absolute necessity in today's world. By their very nature, roads are a break from the inherent landform, and thus ALL ROADS CAPTURE AND MOVE WATER. This is just part of what a road...

New Year's Evolution. This show is about doing the most important work first - your own internal visioning - an rooting that vision in your heart to create a WHY strong enough to bear any HOW. If you haven't done it yet, give yourself the gift of creating your Minimum Holistic Goal . It is the ONE THING that will make everything else that comes after easier, more fun and more effective. Creating a...

Duckweed is an amazingly productive floating aquatic plant that is highly palatable to a wide variety of small and large livestock (ruminants, pigs, poultry, fish etc). Duckweed is a tremendous ally for those of us looking to create independence from centralized commodity food systems. You may not want to eat duckweed (though you can) but what you eat is very likely to benefit from having duckweed...

In this episode I am sharing what I have come to call the 7th Generation Principle - a principle guide post of sorts that I've been refining for nearly 10 years now to help guide my design work (for my own life and for others) in the direction of inter-generational regeneration. Basically, it seems like throughout human history we've actually lived in a truly sustainable fasion - i.e. regenerative...

In today's show we discuss the idea of the Carnivore Homestead. For those of us that eat a mostly animal-based diet,  we want to produce mostly animal-based calories from our homestead production systems. I got news - just because we like to eat steak doesn't mean we aren't going to grow plants - in fact, we've got to grow them in greater quantity and quality in order to feed the animals that beco...

Today's episode came out of a Permies.com thread on Carnivore Homesteading. The seed questions for the thread was, for those of us enjoying the benefits of a carnivore lifestyle, how can we produce more high-quality animal-based calories for our own consumption from well designed and integrated systems at the homestead scale. Basically, there are three main focal points that need attention here: F...

Just a quick update on recent events here and announcement for taking a break until Novemeber 1st to visit family and dive into some design projects here in Tennessee and North Carolina. You can also follow Sovereign Homestead Design on YouTube. We've been having massive technical issues with our webhosting and emails this past month - basically incommunicado as far as our ability to reach out to...

Today we look at another Sovereign Food System - what I'm calling the Pantry Pond. Basically a homestead-scale aquaculture system designed to maximize your food sovereignty via independence from the centralized systems of supply and distribution for any of the inputs required to grow what you want to grow - fish, aquatic vegetables, crawfish, shrimp, water fowl etc. Well-designed homestead-scale a...

In today's show we are talking about creating Sovereign Food Systems. I think this will be a series, or at least a collection of episodes, each one focused on a different type of sovereign food system that can be applied at a variety of scales across a broad range of contexts. Basically, a sovereign food system is one that has eliminated any dependence on inputs from centralized production and dis...

Today we discuss permaculture design principle #12 - Collaborate With Succession. The more that we can align our designs, systems and management styles with the inherent successional trends already present in our landscapes, the greater our yields will be with fewer resource inputs required. This is all about energy efficiency, and it starts with OBSERVING AND INTERACTING (Principle #1) with your...

Today we take a deeper look at the 11th permaculture design principle: Make The Least Change For The Greatest Effect. This principle is about economy of effort. When designing a sovereign homestead, we need to make sure that our systems are providing us with not only the right types of yields, but also in sufficient quantity and at a reasonable return to make our continued tending of the system wo...