Sharing Insights Podcast: Exploring Permaculture, Homesteads, and Community in Costa Rica

Nov 26, 2021

018 Regenerative Land Management (Season 1 Recap, Part 4)

Regenerative Land Management * This blog contains a few links to products on Amazon.com I’ve found useful. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from any purchases you make through these links. It’s a great way to support the show while greening up your lifestyle. Our earned commissions won’t cost you a dime! Hello and welcome to Part 4 of a 6-part recap series. It’s been a humbling exercise to keep up with all the fun stuff that comes with producing a podcast. Creating new episodes is only one of them. Interviewing a bunch of rebel back-to-the-landers was a pretty attractive introduction to the idea of starting a podcast and getting good ideas out in the open. I’ve loved it and am excited to release the other episodes that I have edited and waiting for you. Doing these recap episodes, however, has been another kind of adventure. Don’t get me wrong; it’s been an invaluable practice for me to do these reviews. I feel like I’m getting out of this podcasting adventure the education that I was looking for. All the same, creating audio content from a screen full of notes that you’ve taken from what other people have said is a lot more difficult than just speaking off the cuff. We humans are intrinsically a part of the planet we live on, and we're as inseparable from it as we are intertwined with its other expressions of lifeforms we co-exist with. We are all composed of recycled molecules that we cyclically share with bacteria, viruses, other creatures, and the soil itself. There are plenty of religions that tell the story of how we came from the soil, and to the soil, we return. Yet we continue to tell ourselves and teach our children, the egoic myths that lead most people to think that we can somehow live healthfully, independent from healthy soil, not to mention the life-enriching variety of other earth dwellers that we share it with. It’s imperative for us to weave our inherent interconnection with the rest of our planet's existence back into our culture. We’re all part of an organic planet. Like the unimaginable number of different cells that we need for our bodies to function properly, our planet (our larger self) needs its cellular diversity to remain intact and cared for. Like us, when the planet loses significant parts of its functioning body, imbalances occur that can be much more difficult to return from than if things were already in a more relative state of balance. This episode is all about land management and what we’ve learned from those who’ve been doing the work and measuring their results. Building healthy soil is one of the most important things that any of us could be doing right now. I’m going to say it again; a healthy humanity depends on healthy soil. I’m going to be a little honest with you. I’m not the plant guy of the family. I enjoy planting things here and there, and I love preparing food with fresh harvest from the garden, but I’m generally not the guy you can rely on to keep a seedling alive long enough to transplant it or make sure the fertilization schedule stays current. This episode was a bit of a challenge for me to get into. I’ve had to shed a bit of my imposter syndrome to be talking to a bunch of plant-enthusiasts about something that I know very little about, compared to them. At the same time, that’s the theme of this entire podcast. While I certainly have a fair share of things I’ve learned and can teach newcomers to the farm, this has been my season to humble down, take notes and be a student. Let’s see what that’s looked like. I’ve divided this episode into three sections. First, we’ll talk about the planning stages of land management, followed by a recap of some of our guests’ soil-building tips. Lastly, we’ll wrap it up with some insights they’ve learned from working with the plants themselves. Let’s jump in... It all starts with a good design. Justin Dolan learned a valuable lesson about doing your due diligence and having your land surveyed. While he strongly recommends doing so before buying your property, it worked out to his advantage when he disputed his neighbor’s practice of spraying herbicides too close to his gardens. A little investigation taught him that what they both thought was the neighboring golf course’s road, was actually on his side of the property line. The circumstance drove the golf-course developer toward unexpected production costs, leading them to sell the property to Justin at a low-enough price that Justin was able to take it on and turn it into what’s become the country club’s 18-hole permaculture disk-golf course. In telling his story, Justin recommends that when negotiating your land purchase, you can often get the seller of your new property to share the costs of that assessment. Justin also recommends hiring someone to do a biodiversity study, upon buying it, to educate yourself on what you have living on your property. How cool would it be to have a customized bird-watching laminate card for you and your visitors to relate to your neighboring critters with!? He says that “real” country clubs should be taking care of the countryside. What a concept! Water management is a crucial element to focus on, for any land project. Amidst that is to give sufficient focus on how we manage our wastewater. Justin’s greywater and blackwater systems are built to bioremediate toxins. Bioremediation is a process where certain plants break down the molecular structure of certain toxins, transforming them into inert matter. The methods he uses make both economic and ecological sense. Some of the plants he uses include planting lana, hemp, fungus, and oysters to filter the water. He says that hemp is an ideal product to feed with these wastewaters. He also uses plastic bottles filled with biochar to further filter out pathogens. Esteban Acosta was another guest who's put some significant thought into optimizing greywater and blackwater. His biodigester systems have been refined to a point where they produce cooking gas, by fermenting the kitchen and bathroom wastes produced from a small residential home! The price of gas keeps going up, folks. Investing in a design that can give you free fuel while creating garden fertilizer is an investment seriously worth considering, especially if you’re still in the process of building or designing a new home. One thing that Justin expressed that stuck with me was that if you design your communal spaces to be beautiful, people will want to protect and contribute to them. Justin has an infectious enthusiasm for using his property as a living seed bank. He encourages us to share and propagate as many different seeds as we can find. Like Nico Botefur from Essence Arenal, Justin encourages us to plant our houses by putting bamboo in the ground as early as possible. He boasts that it’s like printing your own money. Seeing the price you can pay for prepared bamboo canes in some places, I’d say he’s right. Nico further reminds us to plant plenty of it and use it liberally in ways that the bamboo poles can be replaced easily. It’s a renewable resource that can be fun to work with once you get the hang of it. At Finca La Isla, Peter Kring has designed his food forests in an impressively systematic way. His property is designed as a network of crisscrossing rainforest corridors that frame out a series of 1-3 acre lots. Each of these lots has a themed collection of fruit trees and exotic palms planted within them. That way, the wildlife can pass through his property freely, and while he loses some quantity of food to these neighboring critters, they contribute to the health of the soil, and therefore trees, in very beneficial ways. The key's just to plant more trees! His neighbor, Terry Lillian Newton, invites us to try and let go of our attachments to what we think the property should be and learn to appreciate its innate essence. Terry reminds us that if you want t…

17 min