Growing in the Desert: Compost, Plants & Perfect Weather!

In this episode of Occupy the Land, Donna takes center stage on our Arizona desert homestead, layering lightweight rabbit compost—praised as “the bestest ever”—onto raised garden beds for a nutrient-rich, cold-compost boost that attracts fruit flies but promises quick results. With perfect 70s-80s daytime and 50s nighttime temps, she plants heirloom, non-GMO starters including lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, kale, broccoli, and peppers, aiming for seed-saving and fresh eats. We discuss past aquaponics experiments, shade cloth strategies, and the importance of daytime warmth with nighttime cool for growth. Meanwhile, Ernie wraps up workshop organization post-fire rebuild and plans dome progress, celebrating the greening desert and our off-grid journey toward food independence!

Transcript:

Welcome to occupy the land. Occupy the land, dawg. So today Ernie and I have been having our own separate projects. But for me, I’ve been working on my garden and I went and got some more rabbit, compost to put in the garden. And it’s supposed to be really good. It doesn’t. It’s a cold compost type of thing.

It doesn’t need to sit forever. It’s it’s very like by the time I get it, it’s very light. It’s very easy to use. But it does draw the fruit flies. So we have all flies buzzing around. But, I have just another couple of layers to put on the top there, water down. Then I’ve got, a bunch of my garden plants to put in and hopefully I can do that this evening.

The, compost, it’s already composted and it’s rabbit pellets. And you did a story you put on Freedom’s Phoenix today. That it’s like the bestest ever stuff in the whole planet. So that’s good. And we have more than enough of it available. But this is really a test. We’re going to go ahead and see how this goes. Is this a good time for planting now in Arizona?

Well yeah, I would think I mean, pretty much any time except the summertime is good. I mean, there’s certain things that don’t mind the heat so much, as long as you can keep them better and a little bit cooler than a lot of water. But, Yeah, I think now’s a good time anyway. I mean, maybe in the deep, like in January is probably the hardest time, but we can always cover this with a shade cloth or some type of covering.

But for the most part, it’s very nice. Outside, it’s in the 70s or 80s during the day, and then the 50s at night. And, so it’s really good. It’s good growing weather. You know, we had, the or the Covid called the Awkward Dome. It was an aquaponics setup that we had two 16ft domes that were connected together, and we had triangle shaded areas that we could move around and we experimented with.

And the shade cloth that we’ve used has really been the best, you know, that worked out the best. Yeah. We have those, you know, triangles we have for a bunch of them, you know, for doing different shading projects around. But now that it’s not summer, we’re not so worried about the shade. Do we like the sun? You know, it’s nice when it’s cool out and have the sun, but now not.

It’s almost 90 now. Yeah, I think it was like 89, 90 today. Which I mean for us that’s that’s nothing. It’s a little warm but but but yeah. No it’s it’s the plants are like it. I mean the biggest thing is, is not I don’t think it’s I mean, the temperature obviously is important, but they really need that change of temperature, the daytime warmth and the night time coolness to be able to stimulate their growth.

So any both well we’re doing a lot of things. I had a, I got a day or two with shows and work on the site, all that kind of stuff. I it would be like another couple of days before I can finish on the organization of the workshop in the, shipping container, and I got all the, the final stuff I ordered one more thing.

I need a job horse. And that is, it’s a really good holder, like Donna, you know, don’t like holding screwdrivers and the flashlight wanders or whatever. So I got George. You get the George? Yeah. It’s yours. So, And I have some attachments for that. We lost the other. We lost a lot of equipment in a fire we had back in May.

And, positive waves, you know, we haven’t gotten it wasn’t, you know, a major, major thing, but a lot of the little stuff that that finish out the workshop. So we could do a lot of the fine tuning and of different things that we’re doing on the dome build, and especially when you’re making the window frames and door frames and fashioning the struts for integrating the dome on to the pony wall, hyper Adobe walls and putting them in with the window frames and the door frames, you guys get just the right length.

And so, I mean, it’s a thing. And so it’s important I, I’ve been saying since we started this project all about the workshop, well, we lost the first workshop to a fire, charge controller that, was overtaxed. And we had a new one. We knew we were going to need to replace it. It was Mother’s Day, and we came back on a really nice day, and we were just not in the mood that.

Yeah, you know, we took a test drive. Whatever. You know, we get new stuff. But, it was not really a setback, but it was an inconvenience and I really need to get this. So we did the shipping container because the dome worked great, but it was so windy. It just really beat the crap out of the covering and made it to start leaking.

So we needed it to be watertight and against the wind. So we just said we went ahead and did a shipping container. They work out so well, I think I’m going to get another one and we’ll put a covering over it. Now, in the video I did some drone footage to show you guys where things are in relation to each other, where the, lay down area we have back here by the storage and the shipping container for the workshop where Donna’s garden is in relation to the building pad that we’re doing, the sand pond that we’re digging out and using that soil for raising the pad for the main home, which has to

be brought up at least a couple of feet. So, and then the work area for the first test dome that we’re doing and where our solar panels are and everything. But you’ll see in the rectangle that is the square or the rectangle of the outside roads that mark our property, and then some of the roads that are inside.

Then you see the long diagonal. That’s a runway. So we’re going to be doing ultra lights and so on out here doing the exploring in time. But we knew that we needed that. Plus it’s a great parking lot where we have parties and so on or so many cars. You know I wonder where we do that stuff. So you have a place to park and not get stuck because we spent so much time on putting sand and gravel on the desert here where the roads are, or it would just sink and the moon dust, you just go and if it’s wet then it’s mud, and if not, it’s powder and you get stuck all the

time. But once we finally it took months to do that. But now we can travel around here and not have to worry about that. So I don’t have the winch and the the tractor out pulling everybody out all the time. So it is, now with the weather and so on, we can do a lot of things. But Donna wanted to get started on the growing we to start growing food.

The news is just damn, man, we we gotta get this food thing down. Well, one of the things that we, wanted to do, of course, is plant fruit trees. Well, that is important that we had the order, the holes that we have control the water and the low areas, the washes that we augmented with the tractor and everything drains to where we want it to go.

Now, certain areas we want it to back up. And if you look on the footage, you’ll make out some of the check dams, some of the washes and how we’re going to back it. But it’s already getting green. I you could you do this for just a couple of years, and all of a sudden you can see your land where you retain the water as a lot greener than places around you.

It’ll be to 2 or 3 years and you go, damn, what would you do, Ernie? Well, Ernie and Donna, we, well, familiar with the desert. And you have water. It freaking grows. So that’s what we’re doing now. The plants that you selected, are they just for making seeds? Are they for eating or are they both? Or. And you got what?

Everything I got is for planting. I mean, there’s just basic stuff, like. And then you gotta start somewhere. I have lettuce, tomato, cucumbers, onions, green onions, kale, collards, broccoli. I think cauliflower, some hot peppers, green peppers. I mean, just kind of a smattering of things. The lettuces. So these are all for planting. They’re not to eat.

I mean, obviously we can eat them, but they’re going to be able to produce more if I can save the seeds, like, I will do that because I’ve done that before as well. This is you know, we’ve been experimenting for got a decade on our property in northwest Phoenix. And it was we had the Aqua Dome. We had a whole set up that I still have.

You know, we have, yeah. That’s over at Bob’s. We built for our daughter that was made from horse tribes and, cattle trials for water that we put stuff in. And it it really worked. Well, we we enjoyed that. And the biggest benefit is because it used so much less water. The problem is it’s a constant experiment.

If something gets out of balance for even a couple of days, you can kill everything. You know where the raised garden beds. I think it was the most productive, you know, you didn’t have to bend over. Weeds weren’t as big a thing. It’s, So I’m. I’m comfortable with doing this, you know. Is this one of your favorite methods?

Well, I’ll let you know. It’s been a while. I’m not. I don’t know that I’ve ever done raised beds. Other than just the aquaponics. I mean, they were a type of raised bed where we had two, three little raised beds. Remember that? Yeah, I guess I don’t remember exactly. We’ve had so many gardens, and I garden when I was a kid, as well, but back then we just put everything in the ground and and fenced it in so the bunnies and stuff wouldn’t get it, but, so we’ll see.

I don’t know what kind of animals we’ll get out here. We’ll just do the best we can to, fence this in and make it a little bit of a challenge for the animals to get in, but. Well, well, well, well, see, I mean, I, I expect some bunnies and things like that, but we’ll see how destructive they can be.

Well, this is, where we’re at now. It’s just so many things to do, and it’s hard to, relate everything and do video. I mean, video cuts into, you know, productive, get it done time. So a lot of times we’re we’re doing it. We’ll show you a little bit of the start in the material, then the end result.

And when we start getting into more of the experimental building materials and methods, we’ll start detailing that more. One of the things I’m looking forward to is we got a domain, dirty science, you know, or dirty sciences or something like that. I got the reason. It’s just because we need to do a microscopic. Literally. I got digital microscopes so that we can look at the soil and how we’re using that to its maximum potential.

Because the combination of clay, sand, gravel makes great Adobe. That’s one of the reasons why we picked this place. You just shovel it up, wet it, put it in the bat, boom. And you’re done. Now on the lower parts, up to about a foot above, grade. We had like, 4 or 5 levels of the hyper Adobe bags that were structured Adobe, which means we added Portland.

Now, a lot of it didn’t even have clay. We just had sand and gravel. And so now it’s really concrete. So we did that just out of, I don’t know, extra caution, but I don’t think we really need to do it as much as we did before. But we need to experiment. So we have some areas that have a much deeper footer, some that don’t.

So, they have different materials and I know it’s going to come out great and awesome. We’ll spend the time and, you know, make it cool. But, we need to test a lot of different things before we get deep in to the home build, because we don’t want to over engineered any more than we have to.

But you want it to last for century, you know, for generations of our kids, grandkids and great grandkids. So we got that in mind. And that’s one reason why we had it suggested that we should do, soil analysis, what we’ve been growing in the Sonoran Desert, heck, since I was a, you know, a pre-teen. And I did add water and it’s fine, but, a lot of times it’s good to have a baseline.

You just want to know what you started with. And if you start having problems, you can, you know, use that analysis to add or subtract stuff. But mainly it’s just wood chips and manure. You do woodchips, manure or hoover mounds or with a lot of our biomass. That’s that’s all you need. That’s all my experience has ever been.

But if there’s going to be all kinds of pollution, keep putting stuff into the water, the soil, the air, the food, whatever, it’s good to have a baseline in the future, 20 years to see what’s changed. So that’s the only reason that we’re, you know, probably going to do the soil analysis. And then the water that we’re getting from the agriculture now, you know, we’re drinking it.

I mean, you’re know, I like it. Well, we’re filtering it. But getting it, you know, we had. Yeah. One thing. We saw this, filter. What’s the company that makes that’s called Cove Pier over here. Cove pier. It is a. Well, tell them what it is. It it’s an oral system as well as a filtration system. It’s a it’s it has several different layers and iteration, and I use a and then it also is the oil.

So it can alkalis the water as well. So it takes out all the, the funny flavors and the sediment and stuff. And then it also adds back in some of the minerals, the minerals before it’s how much was it thing. It wasn’t. I was not free. It was with a discount. I think it was normally like 650 or something.

We, we bought it for 450. Well that we were spend a lot of time and effort on getting bottled water, having the five gallon thing here we go to the town and do that. Donna made sure we were only clean drinking, clean drinking water. But I’m going, look, I needed the what that cost and fuel and hassle. You know, here’s this thing I saw on the internet, you know, doing searches on whatever.

And I go, oh, this is cool. It does everything. And you just put in five liters and comes out and makes great water ice, for coffee, you know, and it pretty fast. So I’m going. All right, well, that dispenses cold water, room temperature water and hot water. So it’s all, you know, it’s all three of them.

Well, it does draw power, but with the solar, not that much. Well, we got plenty of power. That’s one thing. Make sure you get power. That was one thing. We with power. Power. But, we need to have power. So, that is much less of a concern now. I think people paying a bill will pay a bill, but the, it takes up about two square feet.

It’s, It’s not small. It’s about, you know, a foot wide and by 18in deep and probably about 20in tall. So it’s pretty small, but it’s, manageable to where we have a place on the bus for it. So our drinking water is taken care of, and we don’t have to go out anywhere. And we got quality water that we get, but then it has a sensor on it.

How much particulate is in your water and you’re going to die if you didn’t have it and it maxes out and what? Whatever. You know. So we got that water taken care of. Now the, it’s going to take probably. Well, whenever it has monsoon. We haven’t had a really good rain yet. We have one really big rain.

Our sampan fills up well. All the water that we need, we all have to, you know, settle it, get the sediment out, filter it and so on. But, primarily that is for agriculture. We didn’t plan on doing any agriculture until the spring, but, yeah, we just we need time to do things are, looking like this.

To plan a garden, we need to. We need to start producing food just so we feel better. Yeah. Stand up and you get quality food. And Donna made the effort to make sure we didn’t get GMO and heirloom seeds and, you know, a good quality product to start off with. So that’s what we’re doing. So probably this will be, the videos that we have ready now.

And along with the arrow, the drone view, you kind of get where we’re at, how remote we are. We have one neighbor, you might see one. Now, some of the buildings you see out here have been vacant for decades. This has just been, you know, the the roundup, the cowboys in the winter, you know, decades ago in the 30s, 40s, 50s, we see stuff dated from the 50s out here that, they were out here on the land, you know, wrangling cattle and the cattle is about a mile down that way where they have a roundup.

And so that’s interesting when you see cows out here mooing every now and then, but they haven’t bothered us hardly at all. You can see they come across the land and we have the fencing that we can do. And one of the big motivations for that is probably getting a dog, you know, and I really miss having a dog.

It’s just that when any offense, you know, we need a fence. So we’ll go ahead and get that done before spring. While it’s cool, whether it’s fence time, not in the summer under 20 degree weather. But, now we’re going to be focusing on the build and it’s, if we can just get one layer a week, two layers a week, that’ll be fine.

You know, just we we did a layer just a few days ago and, we got a lot of the work where we put the electrical outlets in, but then we got to get, you know, we start incorporating the window frames. Then we have the higher light switches, you know, we get up to that height. Then we got to start thinking about putting the dome on the wall, probably this next layer.

We’ll have to put the hurricane straps on, because you need at least three layers or something of that underneath that. And that will hold whatever your roofing is, it will, it will anchor it, in. So we’re going to do a bond beam around the top and, and cement the bottom of the dome into that cement on top of the bags.

But, well, the hurricane cane straps are these straps you put and you have at least 3 to 5 layers of those bags, and it goes over the bottom of the dome and you cinch it down. And our hurricane straps attach it no matter what the wind is. No, I know it’s like real tape. It’s really strong. Yeah, but it’s not going.

It is mule tape. Yeah. You know, it’s not going anywhere. So there’s a lot of these things that we’ve learned from other, homesteaders doing different things, but usually the, so they use one method and that’s our method. Then the next one, we’ll do something else, and next one to do something else. And I’m, I can see combining some of them and having a really high quality, sealed, insulated, structure.

But not any one thing. So that’s why we’re experimenting on this one. And we’ll incorporate a lot of stuff that we may not use in our home. And, but there’s some architectural features that I wanted to make it look cool. You know, it’s inviting, it’s functional. We have porches and shades and patios. We have a hot tub. We have a raised area, where we’re not have to worry about flood water, that we have the views of the sun sets.

It’s about ready to happen. Now, this is, It’s fun. You know, we’re we’re enjoying this. I mean, every morning we get. We got to do work on the side. We don’t really get out until nine, 10:00 at the earliest to speak for yourself. I’m out early every day. She gets up and goes out five six, then comes back, does some work.

But, yeah, once I get on the computer, I’m there for a few hours. I know she’s in there for a while, but then I work later and dinner and I’m, you know, in the dark at night, you know, and doing a lot of stuff. But, we overlap. And when we work together is when we are working on the domain themselves.

Yes. And we’ve got it down to where we know what each other’s jobs and limitations are and we can get stuff done. So this is going to be our life for the next months, you know, doing this I’m man, I didn’t. Things go so slow and, you know, some things go quickly. You get different things done, you get start checking off things off your list, and then, you know, the build starts going a lot faster.

So we have to concentrate on getting back to the build at least once a week to make progress on that. But everything’s progress. All of a sudden it’s parallel and then it converges. Boom, you’re done. So that’s what we’re working on. We’re enjoying it I feel healthier, we’re having fun I mean, still kind of chubby, but you know it’s getting loose.

I’ve lost probably 30 pounds while we’ve been out here and, starting to buy smaller pants, you know, but that has always been good shape. So that’s what we’re doing, you know, just want to give you guys an update. Hey, sis.

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